When Passion Meets Standards

An Unlikely Advocate

I have never considered myself a gamer.

I enjoy games such as Mario Kart and GoldenEye, but mostly as something to do with friends or family. I played them with friends when I was younger, and now I play them with my children. Gaming has never been an activity I pursued regularly on my own.

That makes Minecraft an unlikely thread running through more than a decade of my work in educational technology.

When I became a Learning Technology Integrator in Albemarle County Public Schools, one of my colleagues was already a passionate advocate for using Minecraft Education in schools. Although I could see its potential—particularly for students who already enjoyed the platform—I was reluctant to join him. I simply did not enjoy playing it enough to invest the time necessary to become comfortable using it.

My wife, who was also teaching in the division, occasionally allowed students to use Minecraft as an option for completing assignments. Her students became so invested in those projects that they sometimes continued working on them during other classes. Although that created understandable classroom-management concerns for their teachers, it also demonstrated something important: students were voluntarily returning to academic work because the format made the learning meaningful to them.

Still, I did not become a Minecraft enthusiast.

My colleague and I looked somewhat alike, however, and educators occasionally confused me with “the Minecraft guy.” We joked about it often, sometimes greeting each other by chanting, “Minecraft! Minecraft! Minecraft!”

At the time, I did not realize how closely the platform would eventually become associated with my own work.

From Distraction to Opportunity

Years later, I returned to Fredericksburg as an Instructional Technology Coach at Hugh Mercer Elementary School.

Teachers were facing significant classroom-management challenges as students returned to school following the COVID-19 pandemic. After spending months completing schoolwork online, many students struggled to disengage from their screens once they were back in classrooms. Minecraft was a frequent source of frustration.

Teachers repeatedly asked me the same question:

My response became:

That answer was easier to give than it was to act upon.

Because I still did not enjoy playing Minecraft myself, I had never developed the fluency that comes naturally to someone who uses the platform recreationally. At the same time, Minecraft Education had evolved considerably since I first encountered it. Microsoft and a growing community of educators had developed lessons and resources connected to academic standards, coding, design, collaboration, and other areas of instruction.

Teachers did not necessarily need to become expert players. They needed an instructional purpose, a manageable entry point, and the confidence to try something unfamiliar.

I could provide the patience and support. Finding the opportunity was more difficult.

At Hugh Mercer, most opportunities were limited to special events such as the annual Hour of Code. I could introduce teachers and students to the platform, but it was harder to move Minecraft from an occasional enrichment experience into regular classroom instruction.

That changed when I began working at Walker-Grant Middle School.

Finding the Instructional Opening

During one of my first conversations with the principal, I asked what he thought about Minecraft.

He told me he hated it.

From his perspective, it was primarily a distraction—something students opened when they were supposed to be working. He did not understand why it had not simply been blocked.

Once again, I offered an alternative: What if we taught educators how to use it?

He was open to the idea, although understandably skeptical.

As I built relationships with teachers and learned where technology could support their instructional goals, I began attending planning meetings with the social studies department. During one meeting, the World Geography teachers discussed an upcoming landform assessment.

For years, students had completed a multiple-choice assessment that asked them to identify characteristics of geographic features such as plateaus, islands, peninsulas, mountains, valleys, straits, and deltas. These concepts would become important in later units as students examined how physical geography influenced societies around the world.

The teachers were dissatisfied with the assessment. Students could select definitions or identify answers from a list, but the results did not necessarily demonstrate whether they truly understood the distinguishing characteristics of each landform.

I saw an opening.

I could have searched for an existing Minecraft lesson about landforms. There were undoubtedly many resources available, but finding or creating another activity was not the real challenge.

The teachers did not need another activity imported from somewhere else. They needed an assessment built around their standards, their students, and the evidence of learning they wanted to see.

I proposed that students demonstrate their understanding by constructing the landforms in Minecraft.

The reaction was close to what I expected.

One teacher, a veteran who had taught the course for nearly twenty years, was cautious. She knew her curriculum, understood her students, and was not immediately persuaded that a game would improve the assessment.

Her colleague, who was in her second year of teaching, was more receptive. She was already familiar with Minecraft and played it at home with her elementary-aged son.

Rather than asking both teachers to commit immediately, we decided to begin with a small pilot.

Designing a Low-Risk Pilot

The teacher who was comfortable with Minecraft and I divided the work according to our strengths.

She developed the instructional directions: which landforms students needed to include, what characteristics had to be visible, and what evidence would demonstrate understanding.

I developed the technical directions: how students would create their worlds, work together in small groups, share access, and use the platform successfully.

This division of responsibility was important. The teacher remained the expert in the curriculum and assessment. My role was not to replace her instructional judgment, but to remove the technical barriers that could prevent her idea from succeeding.

On the day she introduced the assessment, I joined the class to help students create and share their worlds. Because Minecraft was familiar to many of them, they required relatively little encouragement to begin. My support focused on the logistics of collaboration and troubleshooting problems as they emerged.

The experience was an immediate success.

Students constructed detailed worlds containing mountains, valleys, islands, peninsulas, straits, deltas, and other physical features. To build each landform convincingly, they had to think about its defining characteristics, its relationship to water and surrounding terrain, and how it differed from similar features.

They were no longer choosing an answer from a word bank or recognizing a definition on a multiple-choice test.

Letting the Learning Speak for Itself

Rather than trying to persuade the more cautious teacher through another conversation, I offered to cover her class while she visited the classroom next door.

She could see the assessment for herself.

What she observed was enough to convince her to offer the same opportunity to her students.

Because she had less experience with Minecraft, I provided more support during her implementation. We worked through the nuances of the platform together, and I remained available as students began creating their worlds.

Once the students were working, however, the technology receded into the background. They collaborated, solved problems, revised their designs, and constructed geographic features that demonstrated what they understood.

This time, when I stepped out of the classroom, it was to find the principal.

He needed to see what Minecraft looked like when it was not being used as an escape from learning, but as a tool for learning.

The students’ work made the argument more effectively than I could have.

The same platform that had been viewed primarily as a classroom distraction was now helping students complete a rigorous, standards-aligned assessment. The difference was not the software.

Lasting Impact

This experience reinforced several lessons about instructional leadership.

Innovation does not begin with a tool. It begins with a genuine instructional need.

The World Geography teachers were not looking for a way to use Minecraft. They were looking for a better way to determine whether students understood landforms. Minecraft became valuable only because it offered students a more authentic way to demonstrate that understanding.

The project also reminded me that educators do not all need the same level of support.

One teacher needed a partner who could help turn an idea into a workable classroom experience. The other needed an opportunity to observe the learning, assess the risk for herself, and receive additional support when she decided to try it.

The principal did not need another explanation of Minecraft’s potential. He needed to see students using it purposefully.

In each case, the work moved forward because the next step was appropriate for the person taking it.

I still do not consider myself a gamer, and I still would not choose to spend an afternoon building a Minecraft world on my own. But instructional leadership is not about asking educators and students to share my interests. It is about recognizing the value in theirs and helping connect those interests to meaningful learning.

The question teachers originally asked was:

The better question became: