Even the Sun Stands Still

I've been awaking to darkness for the last few weeks. I’d have to say that the short winter days are one of the most challenging aspects of life in the northern tier, but things are turning around. The Winter Solstice occurred on the west coast of the US Saturday at 1:20 a.m., marking the end of our ever-longer nights and the return of light.

Not to lessen the significance of Christmas, Hanukkah or any of the other festivals of lights, but this astrological event is the original reason for the season. The Earth is tilted on its axis at, on average, a 23.5-degree angle and today is when the North Pole was farthest from the sun, causing it to appear to rise and set in the same place. We call it the first day of winter, and while the days will now grow longer by increments until the Summer Solstice in June, the average temperature of the “top” part of the globe will continue to drop as the oceans slowly lose the heat they still store from the warm summer months.

Humans can hardly think without resorting to metaphor and there is none more profound than this. It’s not an accident that this is a time for reflection as well as celebrating new beginnings. It’s not an accident that we seek out the people who mean the most to us, family and friends, those we love and without whom we live in perpetual winter. It’s not an accident that Christians retell the story of the birth of a child, the son of God, the light of hope in a darkened world. It’s not an accident that we give one another gifts and wish each other merriness, happiness and cheer – the darkness is passing, buck up, light is returning, have hope.

Winter is often used as a metaphor for death, but the comparison is superficial. The trees may not have leaves, the forests may have been temporarily emptied by hibernation and migration, there may be fewer children on the play grounds and at the beaches, and it may stay that way for some months to come, but we shouldn't mistake stillness for death.

The word “Solstice” comes from the Latin phrase for “sun stands still.” We spend the rest of the year in motion, moving forward, making progress. But if we can hold still long enough to listen, we hear winter whispering to slow down, take stock, cut back, rest, tend to the core of what makes life worthy of its name. All is calm. All is bright.

Even the sun stands still.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

"Gross National Happiness"

The small, landlocked South Asian Kingdom of Bhutan uses an index called "Gross National Happiness" to guide all of it's economic and development plans. They take it very seriously and the success or failure of every governmental policy is measured according to this index. One must even submit a GNH impact statement for review before undertaking any new endeavor, public or private, that may impact on the general well-being of the nation.

I just mention that by way of pointing out that there are ways other than money, perhaps even better ways, to assess the real value of an economic activity, just as there are ways other than test scores and grades, perhaps better ways, to assess the real value of education.

For instance, I've never come across a standardized test that measures the ability and willingness to take turns, but everyone knows that it's one of a happy life's most essential skills.

And you're sure not going to get very far if you don't work well with others, but you don't see that on any of the corporate academic assessment matrixes.

Or how about curiosity? I'll take curiosity over knowing the capital of Bhutan any day. (It's Thimphu. I was curious and looked it up.)

And anyone who has studied what it takes get what you want out of life knows that boldness . . .

. . . and the willingness to take risks . . .

. . . and the ability to fall down . . .

. . . and get back up is far more important than the ability to diagram a sentence or deduce that the answer is "none of the above." What meager things we've come to expect from our schools.

A well educated person is skeptical and often full of doubt.

The look at things closely and doesn't necessarily take my word for it.

An educated person tries new things . . .

. . . and plays dramatically with their friends, practicing the complex interpersonal skills that will ultimately get them through life.

When I'm assessing students, I want them to be able to stand on their own two feet.

And to invent new things (at least things that are new to them) . . .

. . . and to feel proud of their accomplishments.

I'm looking for kids who help others . . .

. . . and can work well on their own . . .

. . . concentrating . . .

. . . and persevering . . .

. . . and just being silly.

I want to see that they are full of awe and wonder.

And ultimately, like the King of Bhutan, I'm always looking out for our Gross National Happiness.

Because in this world if we are to be truly happy, we are to be happy together. No one can call themself educated unless they understand this. And therein lies the most important academic skill of all -- the capacity for unmitigated . . .

. . . unbridled joy.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Who's Got the Monkey?

Imagine a colleague coming up to you as you're heading into a meeting. They say, "We've got a little problem," then proceed to give you the details. You know enough to be involved, but not enough to make decisions or offer any advice on the fly, so you reply, "I've got to be somewhere right now, but let me think about it."

Common enough scenario, right? But let's take a closer look at what just happened. Your colleague had a problem. Now you have the problem.

Back in the 1980's, I was the communications manager for the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. I was one of a dozen of us managers, all young, all on this lowly, but respectable rung of our career ladders. One day, the big boss presented us all with copies of "Honkin'" Bill Onken's classic book on business management Managing Management Time, and it changed my life.

At the center of the book was Onken's famous monkey-on-the-back analogy. As managers, he asserted, we were hired primarily to develop and implement new ideas and initiatives. This is what would determine whether or not a promotion was in our future. The challenge was finding the "discretionary" time to do this. Most managers spend their days dealing with overflowing inboxes (in those days, we literally had inboxes on our desks). The secret was delegating. He advised managers to consider each item in our inbox as a monkey that someone was attempting to put on our back and a good manager's first thought should be to figure out how to get that monkey onto someone else's back. And that happened by delegating.

The classic way to delegate your monkey is to a subordinate, say, an assistant manager or secretary. You could also delegate to a peer as happened in the example at the top of this post. Skilled delegators could even delegate monkeys upward to their superiors. What you had left was the stuff that you had to do yourself, which was always a fraction of what had started off in your inbox. And that, ideally, left you that precious discretionary time for developing and implementing new ideas and initiatives.

As educators, our role obviously differs from that of a business manager, but as people who are often overwhelmed by our "inboxes" the lesson about monkeys still applies. If you work in a larger institution, you may have subordinates, peers, and superiors. You might want to consider if you have any monkeys to pass along. I've found that sometimes I can delegate to parents, although most of the time, I use Onken's advice to avoid taking on their monkeys in the first place. Parent complaints are usually something I have to deal with, but when a parent comes to me with a "suggestion" or "idea" for the school, my first thought, without any consideration of its merits, is to say something like, "That's great. Keep me in the loop!" I like to think Bill Onken would be proud. In two short sentences, I keep that monkey where it belongs, on their back. Either they take that monkey and run with it, or, it dies because they stopped feeding it. Our school's magnificent greenhouse became reality through this very process.

But the reality is that most of us, most of the time, have no one to whom we can delegate. Or do we?

What about the children?

Obviously, there are many monkeys that aren't appropriate for them to carry, but quite often they don't even see our monkeys as monkeys at all, but rather the opportunity to engage with life itself. For instance, some of my best moments as a teacher result from me saying to the room something like, "She wants the red ball and he wants the red ball, but we only have one red ball. I don't know what to do." Someone, usually everyone, always takes up that monkey. 

"They could share it."

"They could take turns."

"He can have it for four bounces, then she can have it for four bounces."

I've written before about how it would often be weeks between the arrival of boxes of school supplies and finding the time to unpack it all and store it away. That is, until I had the epiphany that I could delegate it to the kids, who didn't see it as a monkey at all, but rather a meaningful real world project. And as they unpacked, they not only sorted, but did much of my curriculum planning for the weeks ahead. "Teacher Tom, I want to paint with these new brushes tomorrow."

We once received unassembled playground furniture that would have required me to sacrifice at least a weekend morning. That is, until I realized that I could just put the boxes on the work bench for the children to assemble over the course of a week. All the adults had to do was keep track of all the little pieces and give each screw an extra turn at the end to make sure it was tight.

I don't plan circle time. I just turn that monkey over to the kids by saying, "What do we need to talk about?"

I leave much of the planning for the last day of school, or really any other community celebration, to the kids.

I've even sometimes turned "assessments" over the children, letting them tell me what they're good and what they want to get better at.

Indeed, in a play-based setting, the entire "curriculum" is a troop of monkeys that has been turned over to the children. And let me tell you, they know the difference between a real monkey and some make-work toy monkey.

Once you get in the habit of thinking about monkeys, you see them everywhere. You find yourself asking, "Who's got the monkey?" Some monkeys are always going to be yours to feed and care for, but at any given moment, we're all carrying around monkeys that would be better served elsewhere. It's time to move them along.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Delayed Gratification

"Good things come to those who wait." This was one of my mother's mantras. I think most of us, at some level, believe in the power of delayed gratification. If I forego my pleasures now, I'll enjoy even more pleasures in the future. For some it's even a moral value, one grounded in common sense. After all, even science has concluded that the ability and willingness to delay gratification is a boon to those who learn its lessons.

Many of us are familiar with the famous marshmallow experiment on delayed gratification, first performed in 1970 at Stanford University in which young children were left alone in a room with a marshmallow. They were told they could eat the marshmallow, but if they waited 15 minutes they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. Perhaps you've seen videos of similar experiments. It's cute, and so incredibly human, to watch the children squirm as they try to resist temptation and earn their reward. They look away, they touch the marshmallow, play with it, some even lick it, but many, after what appear to be heroic efforts, give in and eat the marshmallow before the experimenter returns. 

The researchers kept track of the participants over the next couple decades and concluded that the ability to delay gratification was predictive of better outcomes later in life, like higher SAT scores, better educational attainment, healthier body weight, and increased future income. This experiment and its conclusions are regularly cited in education and parenting advice right up to this today . . . despite the fact that they have been decisively debunked.

A much larger follow up study, for instance, found the predictive power to be, at best, half of what Stanford researchers concluded and that the children's social and economic backgrounds played a much stronger predictive role than willpower. A 2020 UCLA study of the original marshmallow test subjects (now in their mid-40's) found that childhood delay times forecast nothing about future adult behaviors and outcomes. Subsequent studies have likewise disproved all or part the original marshmallow experiment conclusions.

We now know much more about how brains work than the Stanford researchers did. For instance, we know that immediate gratification provides a dopamine hit, which, in turn, makes us crave another. This suggests that, contrary to "common sense," not only have we evolved for immediate gratification, self-denial is a rebellion against Mother Nature. 

Okay, so delayed gratification is not favored by human biology, but certainly, common sense tells us, it matters elsewhere. Our economic theories assert, for instance, that today's pinched pennies will be rewarded with a tomorrow's prosperity. But as writer Marina Benjamin asserts, "Deferring reward only makes rational sense if you believe that our economies will boom for decades to come and the planet will miraculously heal itself and continue to support us -- beliefs that, in this current climate, seem naïve . . . The marshmallow, it turns out, does not hold the key to our destiny."

Our religions tell us that today's suffering will be rewarded in heaven. I can't speak directly to this because faith is a personal thing, but I find it hard to swallow when certain of my religious friends insist that their god has filled this world with things that feel good, but only as temptations. Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as having said, "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Insert "marshmallows" for beer and it makes the same point. To my mind, it's far more likely that the deities and Mother Nature are allies when it comes to delayed gratification. Indeed, it seems incredibly ungrateful of us to not enjoy the pleasures and balms this world provides. 

Science, as a process, has moved on from the marshmallow experiment conclusions about delayed gratification, but "common sense" continues to cling to it at least in part because our economic theories and religious doctrines support it, but mostly, I think, out of the inertia of habit.

I'm not here to tell you what to think. I'm sure there are plenty of arguments in favor to delayed gratification that I've not considered here, but my point is that perhaps we should consider that this remains an unsettled question and not judge others, especially our children, when they make the choice we would not. It's likely that, as with most things, it's a question of balance and specific circumstances. Perhaps there simply is no "rule" that we can, across the board, apply to whether we choose immediate or delayed gratification. 

If I found myself participating in the marshmallow experiment, let me assure you, I'd eat that thing before the researcher had left the room, mostly because I've learned that more than one tends to make me queasy so why wait? But more to the point, I've lived long enough to know that sometimes good things do come to those who wait, but just as often they don't, and then I've missed out on the happiness that was right there in front of me. As the saying goes, "Life is uncertain. Eat desert first."

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Surprise!

Psychologist Paul Ekman theorizes that all humans experience what he calls six "basic emotions": happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise.

We can quibble over Ekman's list. For instance, many suggest that anger is most often a product of sadness or fear. Others are sure that happiness and disgust are likewise a product of something else. And what about curiosity? Where does that fit in? Is it even an emotion? I have a friend who rejects this sort of list as an anti-human simplification, asserting that there "thousands of basic emotions," some of which we haven't even named yet. And, of course, human emotion is not this simple. Just look at the libraries full of books, fiction and nonfiction, about happiness and how to get it, or sadness and how to get rid of it, or anger and how to manage it, or fear or disgust and how to overcome it. 

But what about surprise? I don't recall reading much about surprise. And that's perhaps not surprising.

One of the most important recent discoveries about the human brain is that it is not, as we long believed, a kind of logic, or at least reasoning, machine. It does not passively take in information from our senses in an orderly way, then react according to the data it receives. No,  we now know that brains function as predictive systems. Most of what we think we perceive is actually our brain filling in the blanks based on experience. Indeed, it's estimated that what we perceive is actually 90 percent self-deception. It makes sense, both mechanically and from the perspective of evolution. After all, there is that tiny lag between when we sense something and when we actually perceive it. This means that we are forever living slightly in the past. If we don't anticipate, if we don't predict, say, that the crouching tiger is liable to pounce, we're lunch.

Surprise, however, is the emotion we feel when something is so out-of-the-ordinary that it cuts through our self-deception to defy our predictions. Surprise, as we often think of it, can be a startling heart-thumping experience, like when someone shouts, "Boo!" as they jump out from behind a door. I would assert that this is a kind of lower-level surprise, a mechanical reaction. At a higher level, however, surprise is the emotion associated with awe and inspiration, like when we round a bend on a hiking trail to find ourselves suddenly face-to-face with the beauty of the vista. Surprise is often an aspect of epiphany, those moments when it all suddenly becomes clear, when we discover something new about ourselves or the world. Surprise and awe leads to wonder and curiosity and learning.

By definition, surprise is not something we can predict which is why it confounds the predictive system in our heads. You can't go out with the intention of being surprised. We might hope to be surprised. But we can never know when or what because if we did, it wouldn't be a surprise. 

Our brains must predict. It's necessary for survival. But when surprise is scarce, life has a tendency to become dulled by habit and routine as our brains try to make everything predictable. Our brains can even blind us to those things that really ought to surprise us because they have already, in advance, fit whatever it is neatly into the hum-drum. I think this is what Henry David Thoreau was contemplating when he wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." That, it seems to me, is the inevitable fate of a person living a life bereft of surprise. And it's a real danger in this world increasingly controlled by lawyers, insurance companies, and risk-avoidance managers.

We may not be able to force surprise, but there are things we can do to increase the odds that we will experience the life-affirming emotion of surprise. Engaging with the risk of trying something, anything, new, is a classic way to open the door to surprise. Another is to spend more time in nature. Yet another is to engage with art, poetry, or (especially) comedy. And, of course, travel is always full of surprises. But perhaps the best way to court surprise is to do what those of us who work in early childhood know so well: spend time with young children.

Being new humans, our children are much more readily surprised than us. Their brains are still learning to predict. For a baby, even a light breeze can spark amazement. For us seasoned veterans of life, that same gust might show up as a hair mussing annoyance, if we notice it at all, but in the company of a child, we experience for the first time as the awesome, surprising thing it is.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Doing Good Feels Good

One of the single most depressing days of my life was when the professor in a university course I was taking called The Art of Rhetoric argued the case against altruism. He made his claim, then invited a classroom full of idealistic youths to try to prove him wrong. 

"What about the hero who runs into a burning building?" we asked.

"He knew he wouldn't be able to live with himself otherwise. Or maybe he knew it would be unbearable to lose a loved one. Or maybe he was thinking about the kudos and rewards."

"What about a mother who cares for her baby?"

"She will be arrested if she neglects it. She'll be a social outcast if she behaves otherwise. She loves the praise of being a good mother."

It went on for some time, but in the end I walked away with new doubts and cynical thoughts about humanity, myself included. After all, I'd done good deeds in my life, things that I considered altruistic. I had once painted the mud room of an elderly neighbor, but now I suspected how joyful the act had made me feel for days afterwards. I had volunteered at a community recycling center (back then there was no such thing as curbside recycling) but now I wondered if the pretty girl I'd met was really what kept me coming back. I thought of all the bugs I'd not squashed, the gifts I'd given, and the supportive words I'd offered in a new, harsh light. Is this the way the world worked? Was there really no room for just doing things to help others? Was everything ultimately a selfish act?

This thought process took me down some dark tunnels in the end. I continued to do kindnesses, to behave in ways we associate with altruism, and I still felt good about it, but now I wondered if I wasn't really being somehow selfish. I certainly wouldn't, as my rhetoric professor argued, be doing these things if they made me feel bad, if they hurt me, if doing them caused feelings of depression and anxiety. I really didn't want this to be true. I want altruism to be untainted, but no matter however much I turned it over I could no longer find good deeds to be the pure acts I'd once imagined them.

My professor didn't use scientific arguments to make his case. He simply used thought experiments to box us into corners, but had he done so he would have found support for his position there as well. Researchers talk about the "helper's high," that measurable dopamine-mediated euphoria that we feel after doing something for another person. Kinder people live longer and suffer from fewer aches and pains. The impact of kindness on overall health is greater than exercising four times week or going to church. This isn't mere correlation: acts of altruism cause these things to happen. So, it appears, my college professor was right, perhaps more than he knew.

I've often written about the kindness I've witnessed young children show towards one another, especially when adults back away, and drop the fiction that children must be taught or tricked or scolded into being kind to others. Almost every day, a child will arrive in class with a gift for me or a friend -- a personalized piece of artwork, a flower picked along the way to school, a special pebble or pinecone. Whenever a child proclaims that something is "too heavy" they can be certain to find others willing to lend their own muscles to the task. When we adults trust children to be kind, they generally are, and when they are not it is almost always because we have created an environment that encourages the opposite: too few resources or space, competitive games, overwhelming sights and sounds. This isn't to say that children don't need our support when they, naturally, explore the dark side through exclusion or mockery or even violence, but when we trust them, and they know they are trusted, they all discover that helping others is the best feeling of all. They don't care if it's selfish or not.

It no longer depresses me to think about altruism as selfish, although I no longer use that word, preferring to think of it as an aspect of "self care." It's adaptive to help one another. Why shouldn't it feel good to do good? I don't need praise or other rewards for my kind acts, because the reward is built into the act itself, unless, of course, someone is compelling me toward it with the tools of manipulation or the threat of punishment. Then I do it for the "wrong" reasons or, worse, fight against it because another of our adaptive traits is to push back against those who would try to bend us to their will, even if their goal is kindness.

I spent a great deal of my life laboring under illusions about human nature. I once believed that we were capable of voluntarily doing things that caused us to suffer at the expense of others, in the name of altruism. In other words, goodness was sacrifice. Goodness was pain. Goodness was suffering in the name of upholding a higher ideal. That professor did me a favor when he showed me that altruism is as natural to humans as talking or walking, even if that wasn't his point. 

We talk about "teaching" kindness or empathy or compassion, but most of our efforts come from this mistaken notion of goodness coming at a personal price. What if we can't teach it? What if the very act of trying to teach it, robs children of their helper's high? This is something that we each must discover for ourselves and that doesn't easily happen in top-down, competitive, carrot-and-stick, rank-and-rate models of schooling. It can only be found in environments of respect, freedom, and trust, where acts of altruism emerge from the children in their proper moments, and without the moralistic chirping of elders. We might want it to mean more. We might, as we did in the rhetoric class, want to elevate acts of kindness with mystical notions, but the very fact that it feels good to do good is Mother Nature at her finest. We can't improve on that.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

A Theory About Freedom

Anthony James

The two-year-old stood at the bottom of the stairway. From her perspective it must have looked massive, probably unlike any stairway she had ever seen, wide enough for a dozen people to ascend shoulder to shoulder. We were in the multi-storied atrium of an art museum and these stairs wound their way to galleries on the top floor.

She stood there for a moment, then took her mother's hand. "I want to go up these stairs," she said. "I want to go up them until they stop." When she lifted her short, chubby leg to step onto the first of the stairs her entire body tipped with the effort. Step-over-step, hand-in-hand she set off on her self-selected journey.

Over her head, her mother signaled silently to the other adults in their party, a father perhaps and grandparents, to go on about their own art museum business.

I've taken hundreds of children to art museums over the years, including my own daughter when she was even younger than this girl. And almost always, it's not the art on the walls, but rather the architecture that draws them in. They want to climb the stairs, to swing on the railings, to get lost in the maze of galleries. They want to scale the statues, press their noses to the windows, test the sound of their voices within these walls, and, of course, check out the restrooms.

Adults know why they are here: to see the artwork. I myself was there to see a certain special exhibit. We tend to utilize the architecture functionally, employing the stairs and hallways to get somewhere, the windows for lighting, the railings as something to stand behind, the walls as backdrops for paintings.

This girl was making a quest of the stairs. Later I found her in the top floor galleries stretching out on one of the benches that only very old or very tired adults tend to make use of. Her mother was standing beside her. "I want you to sit with me," she said, "And I want Daddy to sit here too. I want to be in the middle."

Her mother went to the railing to look down through the vertical space of the atrium, presumedly to locate Daddy. The girl followed her, leaning her full body against the glass to see all the way to the bottom. "I see the stairs mommy. I see the stairs where we started. When we go down that's where we go."

This is what so many children are driven to do in new places, to map them in their heads, to understand them. They want to go up the stairs until they stop, they want to discover where this or that passageway goes, they want to explore the unfamiliar space. At least that has been my experience in taking children to art museums, libraries, fire stations, or anywhere for that matter.

Architecture speaks to young children in ways it perhaps no longer speaks to adults. They feel it in ways we don't feel it. It calls to them to run in its long narrow spaces or shout in its echoey chambers. It says climb with its half walls and jump when something hangs from above. Naturally, because of this, when you bring groups of children to public spaces, the security details go into high alert, shadowing the enthused explorers who are not typically behaving with hushed decorum, who are not fixing their gaze on paintings or sculptures. This little girl on her own can be tolerated perhaps, but more than one or two, or older children with bigger bodies and bigger voices, children who behave like children, are frowned upon.

This is exactly what architect Simon Nicholson was writing about in his manifesto that appeared in a 1971 issue of Landscape Architecture entitled "How Not to Treat Children: The Theory of Loose Parts Play." His big idea was that we are most inventive and creative when allowed to construct, manipulate, and otherwise play with our environments. He argued that when we leave the design of spaces to professionals, we are, in effect, excluding children (and adults) from the most important, and fun, part of the process. We are, in his words, "stealing" it from the children.

That the theory of loose parts emerged from architecture is fascinating to think about. It echoes, in a way, the work of Reggio Emilia founder Loris Malaguzzi who was at about the same time postulating that children had three teachers: adults, other children, and the environment, the environment being the primary purview of architecture. Nicholson’s theory, as he phrased it in that original article:

In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.

Nicholson was not talking exclusively about early childhood, but about educational environments in general. He included playgrounds and classrooms in his discussion, but also places for all ages, like museums and libraries. 

Even if we haven’t consciously adopted the theory of loose parts play, every early childhood professional, even those working in otherwise highly structured environments, knows this to be true. None of us would, for instance, build a block structure for the children, then expect them to learn anything by merely looking at it and listening to us lecture. We know that the children must take those blocks in hand, must both construct and deconstruct, must experiment, test, and manipulate. We also know that their play, and therefore their learning is expanded as we add more and varied materials to their environment.

The theory of loose parts applies the principles of the “block area” to the entire environment, encouraging us to let go of our ideas of how a learning environment is supposed to be and to instead fill it with variables, things that can be moved, manipulated, and transported. This, as Nicholson points out, is where creativity and inventiveness live. It’s important to remember that his theory continues to be a radical one, even as aspects of it are becoming more mainstream. This is about more than tree cookies and toilet paper tubes and clothes pins. It’s about more than old tires, shipping pallets, and planks of wood. At its core, the theory of loose parts is a theory about freedom, democracy, self-governance, and the rights and responsibilities of both individuals and groups to come together to shape their world according to their own vision.

The world is always ours to shape and when we are not shaping it, it is shaping us. Nicholson’s insight was that our environment is too often a kind of dictator, one that is restricting rather than expanding our possibilities. As we work with our “third teacher” it’s important that we keep this in mind and always ask ourselves, “Is this stealing the fun from the children?”

I saw the girl and her family one more time before I left the museum. They were all now again on the ground floor, the girl presumedly having experienced the long, wide stairway once more. She had found another bench and was directing her mother and father where to sit, then she took her place between them, the space within the space that she had envisioned earlier. 

She wiggled around, however, seeming dissatisfied. "I want us all to be in the middle," she said, jumping to her feet. "Everybody stand up." Her parents good naturally stood, then she instructed her father to sit in the middle of the bench. "Now mommy you sit on daddy's lap and I'll sit on your lap. Then we will all be in the middle."

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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