The Role of PLAY in Learning

I just got back from a conference on the role of "play" in learning, hosted by the Progressive Education Network. While most of the attendees were K-5 educators, there were a handful of us who wanted to explore this topic in our work with grades 6-12. I'll start by admitting that I am not exactly the most "playful" adult, and so I knew going into this that I might need help bringing play into my classroom.

Beyond the minor tips and tricks that I acquired from attending, the real take-away message for me was the basic premise of the conference itself: play produces meaningful learning. The things we do when we "play" teach us a lot about life. Playing any game begins with a shared premise and mutually accepted "ground rules," which make it possible for us to feel safe, jump in, take risks, and commit to a common goal. Through simple games like four-square, children learn the roles of leaders and followers, participants and spectators. They learn values like fairness, teamwork, trust, humility.

One of the keynote speakers at the conference was Dr. Jill Steinberg, professor in the UW-Madison Department of Human Development and Family Studies. She talked a lot about the research that's been done on the cognitive and social-emotional affects of play. She said that "real" play has a lot of qualities that make it developmentally powerful. First, it actively engages the executive functions of the brain, such as abstract thought, planning, and rule acquisition. Second, it is safely chaotic, which increases children's tolerance for unpredictability in later life experiences. Third, it is voluntary and self-governed, which leads to a greater sense of self-efficacy.

I came away with a number of burning questions:

• How can I create a classroom environment at the high school level that implicitly and explicitly promotes play?
• How can I do a better job of communicating the value of play to my high school peers and superiors?
• How can this idea fit into a school culture where curriculum is pre-ordained and relatively static? How can I "make room" for it in the lesson plans?

I also came away with a number of resources I need to explore to understand some of this further. I'll list some of them here.

Brown, Stuart. Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Elkind, David. The Power of Play: How Spontaneous, Imaginative Activities Lead to Happier, Healthier Children. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2007.

Leave No Child Inside: http://www.kidsoutside.info

Meier, Deborah, Brenda S. Engel, and Beth Taylor. Playing for Keeps: Life and Learning on a Public School Playground. New York: Teachers College Press, 2010.

National Institute for Play: http://www.nifplay.org

Singer, Dorothy. Play = Learning: How Play Motivates and Enhances Children's Cognitive and Social-Emotional Growth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

New Publication!

I recently had an article published in Unboxed, the ed. journal of the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. It's called "Race and Ethnicity in an Integrated School," based on the action research project I did for my graduate thesis.

http://www.hightechhigh.org/unboxed/issue5/race_and_ethnicity/

There are some other great articles in the issue, too. My favorites are one about "Family Math" and another about students building autobots. Check it out!

Habits of Mind

As I continue to work my way through Deborah Meier's The Power of Their Ideas, I'm particularly struck by one of the key organizing structures around which the intellectual work done at CPESS revolves: their "Habits of Mind."

From my work at High Tech High, I was already familiar with such ideas, but they were sort of an endangered species in the years when I worked there. Now that I'm seeing them described in Meier's book, I'm reminded how much they resonate with my own values about what defines work worth doing. The six habits that they emphasized at CPESS were:

Evidence: "How do we know what we know?"
Viewpoint: "Who's speaking?"
Connections: "What causes what?"
Supposition: "How might things have been different?"
Relevance: "Who cares?" "So what?"

Once upon a time, HTH had adopted this same set of habits (although they preferred the term "perspective" over "viewpoint"). I think they should bring them back.

I realize now, as I don't think I have done before, that I imply a lot of these habits in the work I do with my students, particularly the first three, although I rarely make explicit the manner in which these habits can be learned and cultivated. The fourth - supposition - is the one I practice least in my own life, and so is not surprisingly the one I promote least in my own classroom.

The fifth - relevance - is the one I think we as teachers do the worst job of addressing with our students. What I mean is that we too rarely have a good answer to the questions, "Why are we learning this?" or "When am I ever going to use this in my life?" Although the relevance of our curricular content is usually (hopefully) clear to us, it's not made clear to students. It's not surprising, then, when students have a hard time applying it to their own work.

References:
Meier, D. (1995). The Power of Their Ideas, (50). Boston: Beacon Press.

Excerpt: The Power of Their Ideas

Lately I've been reading The Power of Their Ideas by Deborah Meier. One might point out here that my reading selection is about a decade behind a lot of thoughtful educators of a certain ilk, to which I would reply that I was also born at least a decade behind many of those educators. I'm still playing catch-up, so bear with me.

Most of this book resonates with my former work in a progressive school environment, and a lot of it flies in the face of my experience in a traditional comprehensive high school. Here is an excerpt that succinctly summarizes some of the key ideas this book presents:

1. Schools should be small and highly personal. Where schools are large they should be broken into interdisciplinary houses.
2. Cooperative learning is a key to successful learning.
3. There should be integration of curriculum: history and literature, math and science, etc.
4. Academic periods should be longer in high schools--at least an hour, ideally two hours.
5. High school homerooms should be full-length periods and serve as serious advisory places, and teachers should stay with the same homeroom for two years or more.
6. Fewer subjects, taught thoroughly, are better than lots of courses taught superficially.
7. Decisions about curriculum, pedagogy and scheduling should be made by on-site professionals.
8. Parents should be informed and involved in their children's education.
9. Students should be expected to demonstrate their abilities directly--to "show" what they know and can do. Multiple-choice tests are not a substitute for the real performance.
10. Students should be expected to engage in socially useful work, and should learn about the world-of-work through school-directed work experiences. (Meier 1995)
    

References:
Meier, D. (1995). The Power of Their Ideas, (65). Boston: Beacon Press.