The 5-Room Dungeon Approach to Lesson Planning

Are your lessons stuck in a rut? Do you feel like you are “rinsing and repeating” two-to-three times per week? Does your content change, but the structure of your lesson always remain the same?  If so, you or your students may be getting a bit bored in class. Perhaps you can take a page from the tabletop roleplaying game community to freshen up your approach.

The Five-Room Dungeon is a method Gamemasters can use to keep their adventures new and exciting without having to put in a lot of extra work for each session. You don’t need to know anything about these games to understand the approach: a good adventure has a limited number of core elements, and by identifying the core elements of each adventure, and maybe altering the order in which they appear, you’ll end up with a unique adventure every time without wasting much time and effort in the planning stage.

In this workshop, we'll apply a similar strategy to identify the core components of a good lesson, and see how different arrangements of core components can create new and interesting lessons.

This workshop counts towards the Graduate Teacher Certificate or the Certificate in Foundations of Teaching.