The Global Mentor Program - One Mans Opinion

This post was initially written directly after my previous post, in a very negative frame of mind, but it highlights my feelings about the current mentor program. Please bear in mind, the whole mentor program is a work in progress from the M:EE team perspective, so what I have experienced this year, will not continue (I hope) into next year, and they do have changes coming that I think will improve it, but I still think there is plenty of room for more edu-focused teachers to get involved, and I know this is something that is actually wanted by the M:EE team.

I mentioned in my last post why I initially joined the global mentor program; it was to help shape the way Minecraft: Education Edition developed, and from a desire to help others on their journey wherever they may be. This again, is a fairly negative post, so fair warning. Just my opinions and feelings right now.

Instead of being part of a community that is consulted on changes, or asked for suggestions on the next ‘iteration’ I have been helping 'brand new to Minecraft "Trainers"' skill themselves up by asking those in the community who learnt through trial and error, searching YouTube or just plain playing the game, using their own time to do so. These "trainers" are using the freely shared skills and knowledge of the community to bolster their training, and their paycheck. Look back at my previous post, where I talk about the time I am going to have to spend trialing multiple circumstances to determine what impact the global /wb change has on maps. This is a perfect example of the time I will freely give, and they will gladly benefit from. I am not sure how I feel about this if I am being honest, I want to help teachers use this in their classrooms, and at its most basic level, helping trainers, is in fact helping teachers, but it does feel like the community is being 'used' by these trainers, as they seem to give little back in return for the knowledge they are given.

We are not a consulted community, changes happen without any indication they are coming. We may, or may not get access to early betas to explore, of which I cannot normally partake in, because I work with too many schools and teachers running the current version, and normally they are not backwards compatible, and they are certainly not able to be installed side by side.

One of my biggest issues with the community as it stands, is any attempts to push people in the community to think deeper about the pedagogy instead of the 'shiny' and 'new' and 'engaging' aspects of Minecraft: Education Edition has fallen on mostly deaf ears. I think this is because a fairly large portion of the members are not teachers, but are trainers instead, but this is only a guess. I have been continuing to push my own thinking, sharing it as I go, and there is beginning to be a community of teachers who are exploring deeper, so this can only get better.

I spoke to Meenoo Rami, manager of the program about my feelings when she was in Melbourne a few weeks ago, I said "The mentor community is broken." her response, and rightfully so, was "No, it isn't, it just isn't providing you what you need." So, fair call, what do I need from the global mentor community?

At this point, what I need, most of all, is to be a part of a community of practitioners with whom I can push boundaries, discuss options, create amazing content and share the knowledge and resources freely. What I want from the community aligns, but is also a bit separate from that. I want to be part of a community that shapes Minecraft: Education Edition, a part of a community that pushes it beyond the current boundaries, a part of a community that supports one another freely and openly to grow the great possibilities I see Minecraft in classrooms creating. But instead, currently I get very little, I gain the relationships with other teachers willing to engage with me, but overall I feel a bit 'underutilized'. I give everything for free to the community, and instead of utilizing that skill and knowledge, I feel it is ignored, and they promote 'mentors' that are not actually part of the community at all.

They shone shining lights on two alleged mentors at Minecon Earth, neither of which has ever answered a question in the mentor Teams space, never engaged in a discussion and not been a part of the mentor community these last 12 months (and possibly longer). If you are going to promote the mentor program, at least choose some active mentors, not those who have taken the ‘badge’ and run away with it to promote themselves.

One of the maps demonstrated at Minecon Earth, is not available for anyone to use at the moment, and if history is anything to go by, it will not be made available for the good of the community, but will instead have a price tag attached, whether Microsoft pays this price tag or not is kind of irrelevant. I think the mentors should be producing content for the community, it is a volunteer program after all, if you don't have time, or the desire to share freely, don't join the mentor program.

In fact, one of these same ‘mentors’ told me I was ‘mistaken’ on social media when I made mention that the resources they have created are not freely available. I was happy to be proven wrong, but unfortunately I wasn't. Two weeks later, after I finally managed to get around the ducking and weaving and get a final answer on the question, I was told, in private, that those resources were not available for me to use.

Microsoft continue to promote the 'pretty' and the 'catchy' instead of the deep and meaningful learning that they should be. It appears that the focus is on new teachers, but it is not just new teachers out there, and new teachers at some stage stop being new teachers. It is not going to be long, before school administrators ask teachers using this in their classroom for evidence that it is supporting students to reach curriculum outcomes. If teachers cannot back up their use with solid evidence, they are going to get told they are no longer able to use it.

In my opinion promoting things like social and emotional learning is great, but it needs to be alongside curriculum linked, solid learning outcomes. Minecraft, in my classroom, was never, and in my opinion probably should never be, about ‘only’ the extras. I expect the same all of the teachers I work with, it is always about the learning outcomes, and the ‘other stuff’ is a solid bonus and make no mistake, those bonuses are amazing and well and truly worth it.

All the 4C’s, the social emotional learning, #SDGs and #TeachingTheToughStuff, awesome, and definitely something that that has value, but until the curriculum is shaped differently (a hope and dream at the moment) we are still, as teachers, accountable for the outcomes, and reporting of our local educational systems, and as such, I think we should put our focus there and use Minecraft to make the learning more valuable for students as best we can, within the curriculum we are bound to.

So, what am I saying? I don't know, if I am honest. I don't know what the future holds for Minecraft in education, but I can tell you, that if this debacle continues to grow at the scale and rate it has, I fear we will have lost the greatest opportunity to shift the educational paradigm away from what has been 'traditional' teaching for a world that it is no longer relevant to. There will be a saturation of 'shiny' and 'pretty' surface activities, with no real learning outcomes, and the deep learning lessons will be too hard to find, and even harder to get implemented in classrooms. Or, one of my biggest fears, the valuable, deep learning content will be behind pay walls, making it harder to fund in schools, harder to run, and more difficult for teachers to prove the worth of Minecraft in their classroom early on so they get the flexibility later to push a bit outside the 'norm' and start the change at the ground level.

Information is no longer the key, the ability to decode, decipher, and look at the massive amounts of information available to us and use it in unique ways to solve problems is the key to unlocking potential futures for our students. At this point we are still accountable to outcomes, and in the future I hope that we will be able to be much more flexible in the ‘what’ we teach and assess. Until we actually get there though, using Minecraft to cover only ‘non-curricular’ learning is a very dangerous place to be, and is risking the platform becoming useless in the eyes of administrators before it has a chance to shine.

I will remain a part of the global mentor program, if they continue to let me do so after these last two posts, as I still think I have a lot to offer the community, the community could also offer a lot for me, and I would still like the opportunity to share and shape the product as it develops. However my disappointment in what it has become this last 12 months remains. The mentor program, from my perspective right now is mostly a ‘publicity machine’ for Microsoft, and an ‘echo chamber’ of ‘pretty’ and ‘shiny’ activities that are not curriculum based. There is little discussion about the pedagogy, there is little discussion that takes Minecraft beyond its most basic of uses as a replacement of a worksheet, and I find this a massive missed opportunity, and one of the things I wanted the most out of the program, a community of like minded individuals, all supporting one another to better their practice.

So, if you are a teacher that is interested in growing your own, or others practice in this space, please consider joining, and making the community one that is focused on practice, pedagogy and curriculum alignment as well as pushing the educational uses of Minecraft (and games generally) in education. Leave a comment below, or reach out on Twitter @EduElfie and I will make sure to let you know what the process for application is once they make that information public. Thanks as always for reading, hopefully some more success stories coming up soon, I do have a lot despite my recent negativity, and a few draft posts that are much more positive than this, so stay tuned!