Professional learning for Educators

A teacher or faculty member who receives training on Minecraft Education will be able to navigate the platform with ease, understand the features available, and provide students with guidance and support. Training can help teachers and faculty understand how to design tasks, set objectives, and assess learning outcomes effectively. A trained teacher or faculty member can also manage student behavior, set guidelines for appropriate use, and ensure that students stay on task.

If you are just starting out, you'll want to begin with our Minecraft 101 course and then add on what feels best for your teaching audience. We recommend having a group of teachers go through the Minecraft Teacher Academy together, either asynchronously or through a virtual cohort. This will be a great way to build community and support internally.

If you have more advanced users, you might want to explore our 201 training to add on multiplayer and more advanced methods of assessment, or even explore our esports and coding courses.

Don't worry – we all have felt this way at some point! Harness that excitement from your students to your advantage – it's one of the best benefits of teaching with Minecraft!

Know that you do not have to be an expert gamer to teach with Minecraft – you simply have to do what you do best, which is design a learning experience. Minecraft 101 and its associated practice is designed to get you teaching your first lesson right away so you can sit back and reflect and design your next one to build more confidence.

You got this!

You are bound to have a few student experts in your class that can help! When introducing Minecraft for the first time to your class, ask students to raise their hand if they are Minecraft experts. Those students can be your class leaders and help other students if they get stuck or need guidance.

We also have 'How to Play' tutorials on Movement, Breaking and Placing Blocks, Assessment Features, and more in our 'How to Play' category in the in-game library. Guide students here and they can get confident playing with a keyboard and mouse or a touch-screen device.

Yes! Minecraft 101, 201 and 301 are a spiraling curriculum – they model a real-life classroom lesson that you can directly teach your students, and models a teach – release – reflect method of instruction.

In each course, you will demo how to build something, release students to build it, and then reflect with an assessment.

That assessment can be very simple – take a screenshot of your creation – to more advanced, such as a screen recording walk through of the creation, a method that many students are very familiar with.

Lucky you – the world is your oyster! Now you understand how your students can play and learn alone or with classmates, and that you have a variety of ways to manage lessons and assess. You may be ready to consider esports – designing a lesson where

students compete and build with and against each other for fun – or our entire Coding Progression, or perhaps you want to start a Minecraft Student Ambassador program at your school. You can also check out if there are any upcoming training cohorts on our events page.

We know that integrating a new technology can be daunting, especially when you are busy with just the basics of keeping your classroom running smoothly. Our Support Center has most issues documented so you can try to troubleshoot yourself, or drop a question in our Support Forums. If you can't find the answer you are looking for, submit a ticket at https://aka.ms/fileaticket.

Your students love Minecraft and are extremely knowledgeable – we know that new teachers using Minecraft can be apprehensive. Taking the excitement of your students and giving them a leadership opportunity with it is a great way to build community and team-building at your school site.

Our Student Ambassador course showcases the success of Atlanta Public Schools and details how you can recruit students, the activities they can do like being lesson helpers or throwing events at your school, and more.