Gamifying teacher professional development: an experience with collaborative learning design

Despite wide-scale uptake of gamification in professional training generally, application in Teacher Professional Development (TPD) is still in its infancy. The few experiences reported hitherto mainly concentrate on fostering participation and engagement in the training intervention itself. By contrast, we believe that gamification of TPD can and should have a broader scope, helping to enhance teachers’ motivation to apply newly acquired knowledge and approaches in their daily practice. Accordingly, we have sought to gamify an existing TPD environment called 4Ts, which encourages teachers to design collaborative learning activities for their students via a specific theoretic approach (4Ts). In this paper, we describe the selection and integration of gamification mechanics in 4Ts following an existing methodology that, while generic, has nonetheless proved useful for gamification in the education field. The paper illustrates both the methodology and the experience of gamifying 4Ts with a view to potential transferability to similar, educational contexts.