Teachers disengaging from Game-based Learning Professional Development: A scoping review

Game based Learning (GBL) in the last two decades has been studied as an approach to foster student engagement and motivation (Plass et al., 2020). Most recently Professional Development (PD) programmes have focused on fostering teachers’ competencies (Nousiainen et al., 2018) to facilitate game integration in their didactics. Some studies have also looked into teachers’ barriers, but focusing on the implementation of GBL in their classes (Kaimara et al., 2021). However, especially in the last 10 years, some scholars have looked into how some of these training programmes take place and teacher PD disengagement and abandonment dynamics (Ryan, 2019) are mentioned, but never thoroughly explored when the focus is on GBL. This scoping review (Cooke et al., 2012) looks into 25 selected works from 3 databases, which were analyzed and coded to conduct a content analysis. In conclusion, most of the works mention issues of disengagement more often than abandonment. The most recurrent reasons for partial or total PD withdrawal are that these training programmes are ineffectively designed, also due to the contextual limitations in which teachers get training. Moreover, the lack of previous training opportunities make these specific GBL PD programmes not engaging for teachers, as these educators don’t have the preliminary competencies to learn effectively.