Rituals, Protocols, and Planning for Playful Pedagogy in Higher Education

Are you having fun as you teach? This chapter explores ways to make undergraduate and graduate pedagogy playful and, ultimately, more effective. Playfulness positively impacts achievement for all ages (Proyer, 2011), and playful teaching makes learning more memorable with great potential to increase belonging, trust, ownership, willingness to risk, and drive. It also helps students build stamina to engage in classwork to learn, not just earn a grade. In this chapter, I provide a rationale for the ways that playful learning increases motivation, willingness to risk and learn, and strengthens achievement and retention, and I share playful stances and explore rituals and protocols all professors can apply to make their courses engaging, hands-on, and minds-on based on my experiences in teacher education at a small, public, liberal arts college in the northeastern United States.