On this episode of the Teacher-Gamer Podcast, Zach chats with Shawn Thomas O'Docharty, a globally recognized creative leader and cross-cultural producer. With an impressive career spanning over 25 years and numerous countries, Shawn shares his insights into creating transformative experiences through performance, design, education, and storytelling. Discover how playfulness and creativity can empower adolescents to build life skills, resilience, and confidence in their formative years through.

"This is the misunderstanding of acting: that you remove yourself to enter a role. As a real actor, you are always yourself. You need to be connected deeply to yourself." 

Shawn helps us understand how Stanislavski's "magic if" keeps us in ourselves as we play a role "to create a stable place for the work can happen. No one is able to take the risks and try new things or new characters or situations or scenarios if they feel unsafe, if they feel like that can't go into those deep parts of themself, and that is the place of the teacher ... The Dungeon Master is like the director on the set." 

Enjoy!

Get in touch to learn more and join Teacher-Gamer training.

Special thanks to:

-Sevan Reznichek for the intro music -YOU (band) for the “Little Man” song - with the duel saxophones - in the intro, check their album “Freedom from the Known” -John Schroeder for the “Switchfoot Slide” song - in the intro and outro, check his album “Surf the Solar Winds”

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We hope you’ve enjoyed the Teacher-Gamer Podcast. A Wild Mind Training production. Text and production copyright 2021-2025 by Wild Mind Training for Teacher-Gamer Revolution. All rights reserved.

The Teacher-Gamer Revolution is on! It's happening on TABLETOPS and in online meetups everywhere!

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Read papers at Academia: https://concordia.academia.edu/ZacharyReznichek

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Kicking the season off with a sneak peek of the Teacher-Gamer Handbook (TGHB) audio book. Zach reads the TGHB introduction and if you like what you’re hearing: join the upcoming Teacher-Gamer training sessions. 

Deep dive into using RPGs in schools as project based (PBL) and social emotional learning (SEL) through Zach’s 36 life-skills methodology and curriculum. Zach has been developing this approach over the last 12 years in state schools, home schools and international schools developing confidence, life-skills and adult readiness in hundreds of children, many who are now adults in their 20s leading thriving purpose-driven lives. There were no models or rules on how to do this, so Zach forged his own path with his masters in Educational studies, a lifetime of role-playing games and experimenting in the classroom.

If you join the training now, not only do you get a copy of the e-book in the introductory course, but If you sign up now you will also get the Teacher-Gamer Dungeon Master Screen (PDF) absolutely free. Join the training now: https://davincilifeskills.com/page18.html

Special thanks to:

-Sally Jenkins for her inspiring words in the intro -Joe Klymkiw for making the forthcoming Teacher Gamer documentary where I got the Sally Jenkins quote -Sevan Reznichek for the intro music -YOU (band) for the “Little Man” song - with the duel saxophones - in the intro, check their album “Freedom from the Known” -John Schroeder for the “Switchfoot Slide” song - in the intro and outro, check his album “Surf the Solar Winds”

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We hope you’ve enjoyed the Teacher-Gamer Podcast. A Wild Mind Training production. Text and production copyright 2021-2025 by Wild Mind Training for Teacher-Gamer Revolution. All rights reserved.

The Teacher-Gamer Revolution is on! It's happening on TABLETOPS and in online meetups everywhere!

Buy the Teacher-Gamer Handbook: https://teachergamer.com/shop

Read papers at Academia: https://concordia.academia.edu/ZacharyReznichek

Teacher-Gamer Revolution YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuefgI1D0nybe1Vn3Tm1MCg

Teacher-Gamers FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/587361488726775/

Like on FB: http://fb.me/TeacherGamerHandbook

Tweet it: https://twitter.com/TeacherGamerZ

InstaGram follow: https://www.instagram.com/teachergamerhandbook/  

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-distinct-self

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/TheTeacherGamer

Clap about it on Medium: https://medium.com/teachergamer

Hundred: https://hundred.org/en/innovations/teacher-gamer-revolution-using-role-playing-games-rpgs-and-world-building-in-education

High school teacher-gamers Kevin and Richard chat with me from Switzerland (Leysin American Boarding School) about using RPGs in history and social science classes, specifically "Creating History" RPGs like Pompeii 79AD, and Kevin's History's Mysteries game focusing around a rebellion in the Aztec empire and eventually the introduction of Hernán Cortés. 

Creating historical module adventures with simplified rules as a way to get students excited about History, Social Studies and Theory of Knowledge, the main premise is: creating a stripped-back adventure template to help students and teachers create immersive role playing experiences and narratives.

New musical intro by Zach and Sevan Reznichek.

Music courtesy of the band YOU, from the album "Freedom From The Known" and John Schroeder. 

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@TeacherGamerZ on X.

©2021-2023 Wild Mind Training Publishing

Welcoming REAL School Budapest kids to join the podcast and talk about their RPG "Spirits of Gaia" and Noan's "New States of Atlantis". This is how kids think and talk about games. Enjoy!

Music courtesy of the band YOU, from the album "Freedom From The Known" and John Schroeder. 

Follow @teachergamerhandbook on Insta.

@TeacherGamerZ on X.

©2021-2023 Wild Mind Training Publishing

Sam The Educational DM talks to Zach about his playful and academic past, his method(s), and brings great insight into their continued debate about whether RPGs will ever make it into the public school system. Can we imagine school beyond SATs and siloed academia?

Music courtesy of YOU, from the album "Freedom From The Known" and John Schroeder. 

©2021-2023 Wild Mind Training Publishing

The big themes of today’s podcast are “play”, “failure”, “improvisation”, “story” and “Eudaimonia”. How failure through play is not only creative, it creates story. Where dice meet improvisation in role-playing games we are both in first and third person at the same time.

“How do we unlock the vast universe of landscape in the imagination of each individual?”

Dr Olu Taiwo: Senior lecturer at the University of Winchester. Olu teaches in Street Arts, Visual Development and Contemporary Performance in a combination of real and virtual formats. He has a background in Fine Art, Street Dance, African percussion, physical theatre and the martial arts.

We talk about cycles, adapting through intuition, surviving through physical technology, differentiating the levels of University teachers, exploring the concept of “Kung Fu” as “flowing skill”, playing a chaotic good paladin, deciding between pro basketball and forming a theatre company. As we go deeper into what is play, we start nerding out over the randomization of dice rolling, variables, control, accidents and playing roles and how that leads to understanding our place in the world - either through the control of “editing change” or being open to how uncertainty facilitates play as a way to grow. We get into how putting masks in museums is insulting and are imprisoning them as they lie dormant. And we get philosophical about how the historical shift to writing sat the human being down to favor cognitive activities reducing our engagement with the environment with our bodies, the rhythms of the body and listening to the rhythms of nature. Fascinating stuff! Come along as we playfully explore teaching skills, applied learning approaches and share many cultural perspectives – modern, Western, African, ancient - such as “Players play with playwrights’ plays to make plays” and “I am because we are, since we are therefore I am.” And other coded fractals from the past. 

His book:

Taiwo, Olugbenja Olusola Elijah  (2021). The Return Beat - Interfacing with Our Interface: A Spiritual Approach to the Golden Triangle. Peter Lang, New York. 

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We hope you’ve enjoyed the Teacher-Gamer Podcast. A Wild Mind Training production. Text and production copyright 2021-2022 by Wild Mind Training for Teacher-Gamer Revolution. All rights reserved.

The Teacher-Gamer Revolution is on! It's happening at SCHOOL TABLETOPS everywhere!

Buy the Teacher-Gamer Handbook:

https://teachergamer.com/shop

GET INVOLVED!

Subscribe:

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Fascinating conversation with Sanford Teacher Award Winner Maryanne Cullinan (@culliope on Twitter) about her approach to RPGs in Schools - including and beyond DnD. “Middle School itself is like one giant role-playing game.” We talk strategies for large scale RPG groups, her thesis around building content for games in education and how to make RPGs in Schools safe, efficient and empowering.

What went right this year? What changed? What were the difficulties? And other questions such as How do you find other Teacher-Gamers in your school? How can we make schools into puzzles and play environments with either device-driven or non-virtual RPGs? And how do RPGs invite opportunities to reconcile failure? And we tackle the multiheaded hydra: Can RPGs move from afterschool programs, camps, SEL and Leadership classes into transdisciplinary learning in schools?

We talk about the past, present and future of RPGs with a thematic focus on Challenges and Accomplishments. Joining us Aaron Vanek, Mark Hoge and Peter Jung - three professional Teacher-Gamers who develop RPGs with great care to heighten empathy, expand social emotional life-skills and champion neural diversity in their thriving communities and beyond.

Our opening episode highlights different styles of teacher-gaming. 

We talk "Make Play", Mantic Games, cheap materials, MS hobby & craft time, TT vs digital culture, mini-war gaming, homebrewing

Music by John Schroeder (bandcamp) || Get the Teacher-Gamer Handbook