Overcoming GBL Teaching Barriers: The Preliminary Stages of a Teacher Action Research

Game-based learning (GBL) is a motivating and engaging approach to foster students’ learning . However, teachers complain that there are many social-organizational barriers to face when integrating games in didactics, which need to be overcome with training. Hence, Ricerca-Formazione (Teacher Action-Research) , is chosen as the methodological pathway to foster meaningful research and professional development processes. A community of primary school teachers in the Lecco province in Italy asked to be trained to help them use games in their teaching practice. Throughout 5 Professional development sessions in 2024 and early 2025, teachers practiced instructional design, game analysis, gaming, game modding, and had group discussions for debriefing. Thereby, these teachers defined lack of colleagues’ collaboration, due to their traditional teaching style, as the most common and challenging obstacle for game integration in their school contexts. To understand this issue’s dynamics, 3 in-training teachers played a theatre game, which consisted in the staging of a discussion among colleagues who disagree on game use. The scene was then analysed together with other in-training teachers to look into the portrayed issue, considering different perspectives. Thus, they devised solutions to overcome these challenges and they staged them as well to have a sense of their potential. The second performance was also analysed to get a sense of the actual impact of the designed changes. The overall thematic analysis of the transcribed scripts of the role-plays and of all the focus groups shows that colleagues’ resistance toward game classroom use shouldn’t be belittled but understood. In fact, teachers with a propensity for traditional didactics are often reluctant to game integration, because of their emotional and pedagogical insecurity. Therefore, teachers who want to promote GBL need to find an accommodating way to convince colleagues of the potential of game use, taking into account the issues all teachers bring forward. In conclusion, game-based teacher training strategies such as role-plays and theatre games allow for a better understanding of teachers’ issues and how to address them, as they highlight relational and organizational complexities.