Creating a Learning Environment for Creative Thinking and New Ideas

Jean Piaget in his office

The conventional wisdom is that an uncluttered classroom is best for young learners. I regularly see photos labeled as "classroom don'ts" with scads of posters and other art on the walls, things dangling from the ceilings, and materials stuffed willy-nilly on shelves. These busy, messy spaces, we're told, are full of distractions, making it difficult to concentrate. They are visually over-stimulating, whereas a cleaner, tidier space, with it's bare walls and organized shelves, calms children, which is, according to this theory, the proper mindset for learning. Indeed, research indicates that a tidy space may promote such desirable traits as healthy eating and generosity. People in tidy spaces are, likewise, more likely to follow rules, adhere to expectations, and to make "conventional" choices, which would, I presume, make them better at, say, passing a test.

"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?" ~Albert Einstein

Research also indicates that a messy space promotes creative thinking and stimulates new ideas. "Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights," according Kathleen Vohs, the University of Minnesota psychological researcher who studies these things. "Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe."

So I can understand why educators concerned with such things as "classroom management" and marching children through a curriculum would value a spit-spot classroom.

Steve Jobs' home office

I can also understand why educators might want the visual of a tidy space as a way to appeal to parents considering where to send their children to school: order is very appealing in the abstract.

But it seems that what we lose is creativity and independent thought. And, indeed, as we will be exploring in my 3-week, pre-holiday course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management -- that's a lot to lose in the name of arbitrary adult control.

I'm certain that some people are reading this with arguments in their heads one way or another, because, naturally, we all have our personal preferences. My own home tends to be very tidy ( . . . as far as you know, because I tidy up for company!) I suppose I consider my natural state, as far as space goes, as right on the edge. What I do with the next hour will often determine whether it's neat as a pin or a pig pen. I've seen a kind of ebb and flow. It almost feels like I need to occasionally clear the canvas, so to speak, before I can launch into my "real work." And then for weeks, the laundry situation is a mess, my counters are bestrewn, and my table tops are home to disorderly stacks.

Albert Einstein's desk. Ralph Morse/Time

The notion of space is a fascinating thing to consider. For most of human existence, we spent the bulk of our waking ours in unconfined space, with the sky as our ceiling, but we've always also created interior spaces in which to secure ourselves. Today, most of us spend most of our lives indoors and this goes for children as well. Indoor space is fundamentally different than outdoor space: one is finite, the other infinite. We feel we can control our indoor spaces, whereas, beyond the confines of our gardens, the outdoors is a place where we have no choice but to give up control: the sun rises on the evil and on the good; the rains fall on the just and the unjust. There is a feeling of freedom that one can attain outdoors that is more elusive when we're confined. We breath easier, we set aside our urge to control. We can't organize the trees or tidy the clouds. Being outdoors allows us to more easily just let go, which, is the best mental state for creativity.

Interior order is a more attainable thing, or so we think. We seek to control as much as we seek to be free. Both urges live within us. When someone sets themselves free indoors the way one might outdoors, we often talk about it as "giving up," a phrase that can be uttered in joy or in despair, and I suppose messiness can mean either of those things. Our interior spaces are like that. They often reveal our mental state. And changing the nature of our interior spaces can, quite often, trigger changes in our mental state and vice versa.

Is this really a good learning environment?

But these considerations are about spaces we can control. Piaget made his own office messy. I clutter up my own home. Classrooms, however, are shared spaces, much in the way that Mother Nature is a shared space. We release control outdoors, at least in part, because it's simply too vast to consider controlling, there are too many variables, too many agendas, so we "let go" which is a nicer way of saying "give up." When I see a tidy classroom, I see a single hand of a control and it doesn't belong to the children. I worry because I see space designed for and by "management." Not only that, but I know that the children who spend their days in that space are not free to manipulate the environment toward their own ends.

My goal is always creative thinking and new ideas. That is what learning is in my book. And toward that end, I've always preferred classrooms that are creations of all of us, not just "management." This means, "letting go" and embracing the notion of "tidy enough." This is the natural state of a world in which children have agency. It is the environment of creative thinking and new ideas.

It's tempting to fall back on the common wisdom of "finding a balance," but I think that's bunk. Balance is too often just a version of "both sider-ism," a dull compromise that leaves everyone dissatisfied. No, I think of my classroom space more in terms of ebb and flow in which the canvas is periodically cleaned. 

Our spaces shape us and we shape them in a back and forth between our urge to control and our need to be free.

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In this 3-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining this pre-holiday cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here. Registration closes soon!

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!

Classroom Management that Accommodates Our Natural Need to Move

Neuroscientist Patrick House asserts that "the entire purpose of the brain is to make efficient movement from experience."

Another prominent neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio claims that the thing we call consciousness (or mind) emerged from the so-called universal emotions like fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise which are the triggers for action, or movement, related to survival.

"Movement is so fundamental to life that its absence defines death," writes psychotherapist Christine Caldwell.

Young children move -- a lot. They run when adults feel that walking should suffice. They squirm when adults expect stillness. They jump and shout and swing and balance and shake their heads and giggle even when we threaten them with punishment. Indeed, the term "classroom management" is all about preventing or at least controlling the movement of children. Yet if the scientists are correct, movement is the fundamental principle behind everything that makes us human. 

Plants are intelligent. We can tell by their behavior, which is to say their movement: they know to sprout, to turn toward the light, to find water and minerals with their roots, to release noxious chemicals when attacked by pests. The reason we tend to dismiss their intelligence as inferior to human intelligence, however, is that we believe, perhaps rightly so, that plants do not share our capacity to know that they are intelligent. That is the blessing and curse of being human. We possess minds that allow us to at least approach the question of why we are doing the things we do. Our minds, which evolved from our emotions, which in turn evolved from the necessity to move in order to survive, are capable of knowing that what we are doing is intelligent . . . Or stupid, stupid, stupid as the case may be.

In school, we likewise judge the intelligence of children by their actions. Specifically, we judge them by their ability to provide pre-approved answers to our questions or to demonstrate proficiency in some pre-approved activity like reading or ciphering or recalling the dates of this or that historical event. In preschool we might judge their intelligence by how they grip a crayon or help themselves to a glass of water without spilling. And all of this judgement is undertaken within the confines of what we have arbitrarily determined to be the proper behavior, action, movement in our artificially created environments. And we correct, criticize, and punish when a child's behavior, actions, or movements do not fit our definition of proper.

In my brand 3-week, pre-holiday course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management -- we will be examining what school could be like if "classroom management" actually followed the science and accommodated our natural need to move.

At the end of the day, it's hard not to look at what we do to and with children in the name of education as adults attempting to manipulate and compel children to move or not move according to programs we've pre-set for them. If the scientists are correct, our minds have evolved as a way of determining how we should move or act according to experience. When a child has a tantrum or runs around the classroom or can't sit for circle time or hits a classmate, we are seeing evidence of their intelligence. And as intelligent adults perhaps our first instinct should not be to control their behavior, but rather to take their intelligence seriously. When we do, we ask ourselves: What is it about this place that causes this intelligent child to move in this way? And if we are to value that child's intelligence we will take action to change the environment or our expectations or our ideas about classroom management.

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In this 3-week, pre-holiday course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here. Registration closes soon!

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!

There is Never a Reason to Arrest a Child

Six-year-old Kaia was arrested because she got in a power struggle with a teacher over wearing sunglasses inside.

Eight-year-old Evelyn was arrested because she wanted to wear a cow hoodie in class.

Seven-year-old Malachi was arrested after a shoving match with another child who had teased him about one of his drawings.

The low-end estimate is that we arrest 130 children between 5 and 9 every year, although the number is probably much higher. Black children make up 43 percent of those arrested even though they only comprise 15 percent of kids in that age range. I don't have data on this, but I expect that autistic children, or children who are otherwise neuro-atypical, are also over-represented in those arrests.

There is never a reason to arrest a child. Ever. Even if they bring a gun to school. Even if they make threats. The criminal justice system will do nothing but harm. 

Kaia's grandmother says that since the arrest she has been watching her granddaughter die "bit by bit, day after day." All of these children have suffered from post-traumatic syndrome, been in therapy, and are fearful of both school and the police. 

I don't blame the teachers. I don't blame the police officers. I blame all of us, you and me included.

We live in a society that enshrines words like "freedom" and "liberty," but our institutions, like schools and the police, are focused, like lasers, on compliance, especially when it comes to children, especially when it comes to Black children. Especially when it comes to children who perceive the world differently. 

Who cares if a child wears sunglasses or a cow hoodie? But of course it wasn't about those things. It's about children who stood their ground, who opted for freedom or liberty over obedience. In other words, they behaved as our myths about ourselves as a nation would have them behave. And for that, the adults in their lives felt they must crush them. 

And I blame myself. I don't work in those schools. Indeed, I've spent more than a decade here as a critic. I'm not a cop. I have never called the cops, even when I arrived to find transients sleeping inside the school or on the playground. Even when one of them threatened me with a stick studded with rusty nails. I didn't call the cops because I feared what they would do in the name of compliance. I have marched in the streets against the excesses of the police. Yet I still blame myself because I live in a society that explicitly values obedience over freedom. 

We are so sick with this that we arrest five-year-old because they feel more comfortable wearing sunglasses indoors.

We are so sick that Kaia's teacher insists that she would never have a child arrested, yet her own student was arrested. We are so sick that the officer who handcuffed Kaia objected that she was a "baby," yet this baby was arrested.

French philosopher Voltaire once said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

Arresting young children, handcuffing them, forcing them into squad cars, booking them, taking mugshots -- all of it -- is an atrocity. And our culture of obedience, of compliance at all costs, even when it's just about sunglasses, cow hoodies, or even a shoving match, is the absurdity that we believe.

I'm certain that some people reading here have already manufactured, in their minds, a way to blame these children or their parents for the arrests. I'm sure that some have thought, "maybe they had it coming" or that sometimes the only thing that works is the companion absurdity of "tough love."

Most of us, I hope, are outraged by the idea of arresting "babies." It's an easy, extreme thing over which to be outraged, but we should be equally outraged over children being required to ask permission to use the toilet or compelled to walk in straight lines through the hallways or to sit quietly in their seats while a teacher drones on about irrelevant things. We should be equally outraged by the assembly line mechanisms by which we process our children, standardizing them through tests and ranking them by grades. We should be equally outraged by a culture that cuts down all the tall poppies, hammers down the nails that stick up, and values classroom management over anything else.

In my course Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management (see below) we will dive deeply into what we can do in our own classrooms to focus more on freedom and less on knee-jerk compliance.

But how will we ever teach the children if they don't first learn to obey? That is the absurd question that leads to atrocity. Arresting children is the fruit that grows from the soil of obedience.

Freedom, liberty, autonomy: that is what must come first. It must be the highest value if we are to ever become self-governing people. This is what history, science, and experience have to teach us. It will only be when we, as a society, can learn see children as free people that we will finally understand what it means to be free ourselves. Until then, I'm afraid, we will be doomed to commit atrocities in the name of absurdities.

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In this brand new 3-week, pre-holiday course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining this accelerated cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here. It will set you up for a truly empowering New Year.

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!

Play-Based Classroom Management is Based on Love, Not Power

"You need power only when you want to do something harmful, otherwise love is enough to get everything done." ~Charlie Chaplin

As a younger teacher, I spent a lot of time reading about the education of young children. That's how I came to learn about such child-centered models as Reggio Emilia, Montessori, Waldorf (Steiner), and democratic free schools. It's how I came to know the foundational ideas of Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky, and more contemporary thinkers like like Bev Bos, John Holt, and Mister Rogers. But to get to those ideas I had to reject most of what of passes in our profession as "best practices."

"The opposite of Love is not hate, but power." ~C.S. Lewis

What I've come to reject is the idea of adult-centered learning. What I've rejected is the idea that adults must somehow control children in order for them to learn. What I've rejected are approaches that place adult power over children at the center instead of love for children. 

"They fear love because it creates a world they can't control." ~George Orwell

Any model that starts with a curriculum devised by adults "for their own good" is about power over children, not love.

Any model that values tidiness and order under the rubric of "classroom management" is about power instead of love.

Any model that assumes that children will learn little of importance without "teaching" is about power.

"In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness, but with qualities which are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, and cruelty." ~Leo Tolstoy

You know you are reading about power when the sentences begin with "Have the children (do this or that) . . ." or "Get the children to . . ." or "Tell the children . . ." These are statements of command, the hallmark of every method that relies upon power.

"When love rules power disappears. When power rules love disappears." ~Paulo Coelho

Methods based upon power can be identified by their rigid schedules, both daily and developmental, in which everyone must constantly worry about "falling behind."

Power predominates in places where adults seek to prepare children for some future life rather than allowing them to live the life they are living.

"Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." ~Carl Jung

Love does not dictate; love does not manage; love does not need tricks and tips for manipulating children. Love is about connection. It is about relationships. It is about listening. It is about acceptance. It is about this unique and beautiful person. As Mister Rogers wrote, "To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now." That is where child-centered learning begins. Love does not prepare children for life because to love someone is to know that they are already, right here and now, living.

"Love is the opposite of power. That's why we fear it so much." ~Gregory David Roberts

In my 3-week course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management -- we will explore what happens when we place children at the center of their own learning, listening to them, understanding them, and loving them. When we do this, when classroom management is based on love, we are creating a bulwark against power. Through a curriculum based upon love we set children free to think, which is, in the end, the only place real learning happens and where, frankly, the spark of revolution is possible. In a world that values power over love, that can be a frightening thing.

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace." ~Jimi Hendrix

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In this accelerated 3-week course, we will explore how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

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!

Play is a Lily We are Too Ready to Gild

In his classic book A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, the man sometimes credited as the father of modern wildlife ecology, wrote, "It is the part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it."

He was writing specifically about natural places, but he could have been talking about just about any perfect thing with which we humans come into contract. In our efforts to improve upon Mother Nature, Leopold bemoaned our urge to build roads into perfect places in order to make them more accessible; to manage the plants and animals in order to create a more desirable "balance"; to construct facilities to make the experience of wilderness more convenient. We gild natural places with fences and signs and bear-proof trash cans only to find that our love is suffocating. We can't seem to resist the urge, as Shakespeare put it, "(t)o gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the rice, or add another hue unto the rainbow . . ."

Even the lilies we purchase to decorate our homes have been gilded in their way, cultivated to produce over-sized blooms that come in a gaudy rainbow of colors never seen in nature. Not long ago, I found myself among wild growing lilies, pure white with yellow-tipped stamen and instantly felt the difference. These were the flowers that have inspired culture, art, and literature before they were made tawdry in our efforts to one-up Mother Nature.

We've done the same with children's play, which is to say the natural urge to educate ourselves. For some 300,000 years or so, our species, Homo sapiens, has evolved an extraordinary intelligence through the processes of curiosity-driven exploration, discovery, experiment, cooperation, and invention. Play stands among the perfect things, yet alongside that has emerged this human urge to gild the lily.

We see this gilding in the advent of modern playgrounds and the proliferation of manufactured toys. We see it whenever someone touts an innovation by labelling it "play with a purpose" (which renders it not-play) or by asserting, "They won't even know they are learning" (as if children must be tricked into it). We see it in our classroom management methods which seek to replace the sacred urge to play with rules and curricula that require the application of external motivations like grades, punishments, and rewards. In my course Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management, we will explore alternatives that avoid the temptation to gild. (See below.)

Play is enough, especially in the early years. Everyone knows that this is when we are at our most capable as learners, when our brains and bodies are as facile as they will ever be. "They are like sponges" we enthuse and we are right, but it only works properly when self-motivation is the engine, which is to say, when we are playing. Play has evolved as a perfect mechanism for learning, yet sadly, too many of us cannot leave it alone: it's a lily we are too ready to gild.

When we build roads into a wilderness, we begin the process of rendering it less wild and therefore less perfect. Our intentions may be good, but a gilded lily will never live up to the ones that grow in natural places. Play is another perfection that is not improved by gilding.

When we resist the urge to gild and instead stand aside as our children play, we see a perfection in our imperfect world, and if we would keep it, we must resist the urge to gild it.

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In this accelerated 3-week course, we will explore how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining this year-end cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

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!

This, Of All Days, Is One to Be Human

Starlings are sometimes called "the mynah birds of the north" for their ability to mimic not just other bird songs, but other animals, including humans. They have even been known to re-create the sounds of telephones, squeaky hinges, sirens, doorbells, and other common sounds they pick up from their environment. No one really knows why they've developed this penchant, although it's been speculated that it allows them to deceive potential predators. I can imagine that a hawk, for instance, might have second thoughts when its intended lunch barks like a junkyard dog. 

Whatever the case, starlings and other birds that tend toward mimicry, are constantly adding to their repertoire from their environment as well as learning from other starlings, passing down certain sounds from generation to generation, often continuing to reproduce sounds from bygone eras long after that sound has disappeared from their habitat. This means that a population of starlings that has existed in a single place for generations has become a sort of data storage system for elements of sound, perhaps even entire soundscapes, from earlier centuries.

I'm thinking about this as we prepare to sit down with family and friends for our Thanksgiving feast. 

We tend to think of human language as simply a means of communication, but just as starlings can keep the past alive through their songs, we too, in a way, do the same, even when we are completely unaware of it. For instance, nearly every word we use, can be traced back to a metaphor. Today, someone sit at the "head" of the table. It isn't, of course, an actual head, but a metaphorical one that derives from a time when there was no other way to describe that seat of honor. It's "like" a head, we thought, and so it entered the language, subtly shaping generations of humans as we gather together for a repast. Likewise, the chair I'll sit in has "arms" and "legs." We gather together to be "in touch" with one another. Some of us will have to "handle" a difficult relative or conversation. 

But it's not just when we refer to physical objects that we reveal our linguistic DNA. Our verb "to be" comes from the ancient Sanskrit word blu, which means "to grow" while the English forms of "am" and "is" have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asme, which means "to breathe." Even our fundamental word to describe existence hearkens back to when we had no other word for it so we resorted to a metaphor that reminds us to grow and breathe.

Our language derives from our collective experience as a species and has evolved as more than mere birdsong, functioning as a kind of organ of perception, a creator of reality, and a record of our evolution as conscious animals.

As adults, most of us, however, use our language unconsciously and because of this, I think, we often have a tendency to re-create a familiar reality, especially at traditional gatherings like Thanksgiving. We do it without thinking. We do it because this is the way it's always been done. And even when we strive to break away from the old patterns the ancient metaphors steer us back to the familiar.

Our children, however, do not yet know the metaphors we know. They are still closer to the creative potential of language which is why, if we can remember to stop talking and listen, we find ourselves so delighted, often profoundly so, by the things they express as they seek to wrap language around experience and vice versa. 

In our current rush to make our children literate, however, we teach them at younger and younger ages that language is a dead thing, mere communication confined by immutable rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. We rob them of something essential when we compel them to, essentially, be seen and not heard. It's a robbery that impoverishes all of us. Children are there to make the familiar once more unfamiliar, but the only way this happens is if language precedes literacy. Literacy is a mere workman's plow that bends our backs toward utilitarian ends, while language is a growing, breathing thing, a restless sea of metaphor, a cacophony of birdsong, that is central to what it means to be human. 

And this, of all days, is one to be human. Happy Thanksgiving!

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In this accelerated 3-week course, we will explore how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

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!

What Does "Classroom Management" Mean in a Play-Based Setting?

The boy had shed his jacket onto the floor, leaving it in a heap right in the middle of the room. Under normal circumstances I would have said something like, "Your coat is on the floor; it belongs on a hook," then waited for him to think things through. But this was his first day and he was only two, so I instead picked it up with the intention of hanging it for him.

He rushed at me, screaming something that didn't sound like Nooooooo! but clearly meant it. He snatched his coat from my hands. "I do it!"

I said, "The hooks are over there." It took some doing, but he finally managed it. 

Later that morning, he was playing with a small wooden ball that escaped him and rolled under some shelves. I happened to be sitting right there so I automatically reached for the ball, but again he stopped me, "I do it!" And he did.

When he sat down for a snack, the adult who was there tried to help him wash his hands, but he refused. "I do it!" When she tried to serve him carrot sticks and grapes, he put them back on the serving platter one at a time, saying, yet again, "I do it!" This is what "classroom management" looks like in a play-based program. (If you're interested in learning more, see the link at the bottom of this post to my course, Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management).

He was firm with us, if a bit fussy, as if he was accustomed to adults putting up a fight. His mother had laughed that he was a "willful" child, rolling her eyes as if to say "Good luck!" Of course, she wasn't talking about his willfulness manifesting as it had so far at school, a boy clearly wanting to do it for himself. She was talking about those times when it resulted in digging in his heels about things like baths or leaving the playground.

But it's the same instinct. As unpleasant and annoying as it might be for us adults, willfulness in a child tells us that they are willing to take responsibility for their own lives. It's the kind of thing that we aren't always good at recognizing in young children. Indeed, standard classroom management systems and parenting books are full of tips and advice on how to motivate children to do exactly that: take responsibility for themselves, for cleaning their rooms, for learning their lessons, for controlling their emotions. Sadly, we've become so addicted to the behaviorist ideas of rewards and punishments that even the best of us, like a bad habit, resort to them, thwarting the development of self-motivation.

"If you get in the car, I'll give you a cookie." "If you don't get in the car, you won't get a cookie." 

The problem is that all the research done on these sorts of external motivators is that they simply don't work (see Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards). Oh sure, if the carrot is sweet enough or the stick painful enough, a child can be made to do almost anything, but if it is to work a second or third or fourth time, it will require increasingly sweet rewards and increasingly painful punishments. Not only that, but the entire process sucks any sense of joy or satisfaction right out of the activity itself until the only reason the child, or anyone, continues behaving in a certain way is to receive the reward or to avoid the punishment. 

This explains why so many older kids don't see a problem with cheating. If the goal is a good grade (external motivation), then copying a friend's homework makes sense, while if learning (intrinsic motivation) is the goal, then copying someone else's work is counterproductive. On the flip side, the consequence of getting caught cheating isn't a bad conscience (the natural consequence), but rather that the adults in your life will take away something about which you are intrinsically motivated, like recess or hanging out with your friends at the mall.

Study after study has shown that rewards and punishments have a negative effect on self-motivation. Even previously pleasurable things, things we do willingly, can be ruined by the introduction of rewards and punishments. 

Like with many things, our schools have it backwards. They tend to operate under the misguided theory that children need to first be extrinsically motivated, and only then, as time goes by will they develop intrinsic motivation. This is completely unsupported by any science. It is the same method Pavlov used to make his dogs salivate.

At the same time adults, both educators and parents, tend to set ourselves up as the arbiters of what a child should be doing or learning. Had I commanded that two-year-old boy, "Hang up your coat," I'm quite confident that he would have responded "willfully," perhaps reluctantly hanging up his coat because I was an authority figure, but more likely, knowing the boy, he would have refused altogether, whining, sulking, or shrieking.

So what are we to do? Well, first of all, we need to stop bossing kids around so much. Researchers have found that some 80 percent of the sentences adults say to children are commands and no one responds well to being told what to do, no matter what our age. 

Secondly, we can learn to trust a child's intrinsic motivations. This isn't an easy thing in standard schools because, obviously, each child is going to be motivated in different ways, about different things, and on different schedules, while teachers are expected to march all the kids through the same things on the same schedule. If we are going to do what the science tells us, however, we will create interesting and varied environments for children in which they have the freedom to manipulate, explore, discover, and invent, in the company of others or all alone, at their own pace.

We will drop grading and testing, those carrots and sticks that put so much focus deficits, and replace them with something like Learning Stories, in which educators observe the children, then write the story of what the child is doing and learning. These stories would be written to the children themselves, and their families, creating a record of the child's intrinsically motivated learning journey, a truly useful "permanent record" that is entirely focused on the strengths of each child. Because, as my friend and proponent of Learning Stories Wendy Lee told me, "What we focus on grows."

When would teachers have time to write these Learning Stories? Removing direct instruction, grading, lesson planning, and classroom management from an educator's responsibilities should leave plenty of time to focus on the actual learning.

None of this means a child will no longer be willful. Indeed, it frees all children to be powerfully, happily willful, which is to say, it frees them to take responsibility for their own lives, and that, in the end, is the purpose of all true education. And "I do it!" is the evidence.

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In this accelerated 3-week course, we will explore how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

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!

But Are They Well-Behaved?

The term "classroom management" has always set my teeth on edge. Most of the time when people use it, they're talking about adults who have "managed" to make their preschool classroom into a quiet place populated with well-mannered, attentive, motivated children, who raise their hands, walk in lines, and obey the teacher. 

More often than not, when people discuss "classroom management," what they're really talking about is some sort of system of behavioral mangement involving rules, schedules, punishments, and rewards: classic behaviorism. This is even true of many of the so-called "gentle" approaches. The adult's role is that of a benevolent dictator. As an educator once put it to me, "I'm their best friend until they cross the line, then I come down like a house of bricks." 

As an approach to both behavior and learning, behaviorism is an archaic oversimplification of human cognitive processes. It centers the relationship between adults and children on adult power and external motivation (rewards and punishments), ignoring what we know about how the human brain learns. Not only that, but command, control, and manipulation, the core of behaviorism, is an incredibly disrespectful way to interact with our fellow humans, even if they are children. It teaches that obedience, not thinking, is their highest calling.

My play-based classrooms have never been like that. Indeed, visitors have often used the term "controlled chaos" to describe what's they see happening. 

Sure, it can get loud and even a bit rowdy, but are the kids engaged? All of the time. Are they motivated? All of the time. Are they learning? At full capacity.

. . . But are they well-behaved? Perfectly. They are behaving like preschoolers who are engaged, motivated, and learning. You see, disobedience isn't a problem if obedience isn't the goal. 

A well-managed classroom is one in which the children are free to follow their curiosity, in the company of others, while getting real-world practice in living in a world with other people. Instead of learning to obey, the children think for themselves, make their own agreements with one another, and learn how to get their own needs met while also creating the space for others to met their's. It's no place for rewards or punishments, but rather an opportunity to learn through the natural consequences of their behavior. A well-managed play-based classroom may well look chaotic from the perspective of behaviorism, but that's because the "control" is discovered through self-regulation (the gold standard for behavior) rather than external force.

I'm excited to announce that registration is open for my course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management.

This course is intended for play-based educators, directors, and owners who are already committed to respecting and honoring children as they learn through experience rather than rules. You're already doing the right thing. This course will inspire you to take it to a new level. But even if you're not a purely play-based practitioner (yet), I promise that once you've taken this course, you'll never go back to your old behaviorism system of classroom management . . . Because it works! 

I've based this course on nearly three decades of experience, my pedagogical philosophy, best practices, and on-the-ground practical methods, tips, and ideas. You will learn how to "manage" your classroom in a way that maximizes children's freedom, learning, and fun, without slipping into actual chaos (at least most of the time!). Not only will the children be empowered to develop intellectually, emotionally, and socially, but as an educator you will spend far les time dealing with so-called "challenging behaviors" and a lot more time focused on supporting what maters most: learning.

True play-based learning involves treating young children as fully formed humans with the attendant rights, responsibilities, and freedoms, and that's the kind of classroom management children need and deserve.

If this sounds interesting, check it out by clicking here. I'd love to see you in this accelerated pre-holiday cohort for this course.

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Registration is now open for this accelerated version of my course on how classroom management works in a play-based setting. Go into the holidays on fire! Here's the link to learn more and register for "Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management."

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!

Adults Learning from Children

I feel that it's important for us, as early childhood educators, to stay abreast of the latest research in our profession (all of which supports a play-based approach) as well as some of the other areas of cognitive and neuroscience (all of which supports a play-based approach).

Here is some densely worded support for play-based learning from one of the world's top neuroscientists, Antonio Damasio:

Usually the brain is assumed to be a passive recording medium, like film . . . This is pure fiction . . . The organism (the body and its brain) interacts with objects, and the brain reacts to the interaction. Rather than making a record of an entity's structure, the brain actually records the multiple consequences of the organism's interactions with the entity. What we memorize of our encounter with a given object is not just its visual structure as mapped in optical images of the retina. The following are also needed: first, the sensorimotor patterns associated with viewing the object (such as eye and neck movements or whole-body movements, if applicable); second, the sensorimotor pattern associated with touching and manipulating the object (if applicable); third, the sensorimotor pattern resulting from the evocation of previous acquired memories pertinent to the object; fourth, the sensorimotor patterns related to the triggering of emotions and feelings relative to the object . . . What we refer to as the memory of an object is the composite memory of the sensory and motor activities related to the interaction between the organism and the object during a certain period of time.

All that sensorimotor stuff is what we in the preschool world call play.

Or as Damasio writes, "The fact that we perceive by engagement, rather than passive receptivity, is the secret of the "Proustian effect" . . . the reason why we often recall contexts rather than just isolated things." And speaking of Proust, I also think it's important that we all read Proust because he has come as close as humanly possible, in fiction, to showing us how the human mind really works.

I also think we should all know at least a little something about those who came before us, like John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Loris Malaguzzi, the founder of the Reggio Emilia system of early childhood education.

One of the things I find most useful from Malaguzzi's work, for instance, is the concept that every child has three teachers: adults, the environment, and other children. There is a tendency for us to focus on adult teachers, but the truth is that when children are allowed to play, the environment and other children have far more influence than the heavy hand of the adult. They are far more likely to accommodate all that sensorimotor stuff.

The photo at the top of this post is from 1963. I'm the bigger child holding the book, apparently reading to my newborn baby brother. I'm not actually reading, of course. That ability wouldn't come until I was closer to six or seven, which is when the developmental window for reading tends, on average, to open. But I had already learned about reading from an adult, my mother, and now I was, in turn teaching my brother everything I knew about reading. According to mom, I continued "reading" to him until well after I was actually reading. When my brother entered first grade, his adult teacher found that he was already well beyond his classmates. I'm not saying it was all due to my child-to-child teaching, but our family likes to think so.

When I reflect on my own childhood, I can honestly say that I learned at least as much from other children as I did from adults.

I've done my reading, I've taken classes and workshops, and I try to expose myself to a wide variety of people. I learn a lot from other adults and the environments in which I find myself, but I've often said that most of what I've learned about the world, and most of what I've written about here on the blog for the past 16 years, I've learned from children. I emphasize most. 

Malaguzzi was writing and thinking about the teachers of children, but the science makes it clear that adults have three teachers as well. The other adults and the environment can only take us so far. It's only when we are open to learning from and with children, when we play with them, that we too learn at full capacity.

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Registration starts tomorrow for my accelerated version of my course on how classroom management works in a play-based setting. Here's the link to learn more and get on the waitlist for "Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management."

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!

What Happens When We Stop Bossing Kids Around

Our daughter and I had arrived at preschool at the same time as a mother with her two kids. As we adults greeted one another, her children took off, racing wildly toward the front door. 

She shouted after them, "Get your butts over here!" a command they certainly heard, but chose to ignore. She chuckled embarrassedly, then turned to our daughter who was staring at her with an expression of shock. "Your daddy's lucky you're such a good girl." She then lit out after her kids.

A couple years later, as I contemplated my first day as the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool's 3-5's teacher, I worried about a lot of things. Among them was the recognition that I had a visceral distaste for bossing kids around. But it wasn't only that. This mother wasn't the only bossy parent I'd been around, and if anything, their kids seemed to be less cooperative and more provoking than mine. Throughout my years as a parent of a preschooler I was regularly told that I was just "lucky" to have such a "naturally" well-behaved child, one who "listened." But I'd concluded that they had their cause-and-effect flip-flopped. Their bossiness wasn't a response to their kid's misbehavior, but rather the cause of it. The children were just pushing back against being told what to do, which seemed to me like a perfectly natural response.

I knew that if I took the so-called "tough love" approach with a roomful of preschoolers, I would have be prepared to threaten children with punishment and tease them with rewards. It didn't sit right with me. I'd been "lucky" so far, so I decided I would press my luck

I tried an experiment. I was going to let the children make all their own rules. 

Because it was a cooperative, their parents would be working alongside me as assistant teachers. During our fall parent orientation meeting, I told them that we would begin the year in a state of anarchy, and that their job was simply to keep the children from killing each other -- in other worlds, keep them safe, but otherwise stay out of their way. 

Of course, it didn't stay anarchy for long. On the first day, within minutes of opening the doors, a child complained, "Teacher Tom, she took that book from me!"

That was my cue. I responded, "I can tell you don't like that." I then turned to the group, "Does anyone like it when someone takes something from them?" Of course, none of them liked it, so I suggested, "Then how about we all agree to not take things from each other?" They all agreed, so I made a show of tearing a sheet of butcher paper from the classroom roll, taped it to the wall and wrote, No taking things.

Other hands shot up. "No hitting!" "No biting!" "No yelling in people's ears!"

It was clear the children knew exactly how they wanted to be treated. We soon had a core list of agreements arrived at by consensus. I was at Woodland Park for nearly two decades and this is more or less how it went every year.

I treasure this process of making agreements by consensus because it removes me from the role of commander. I don't have to spend my days saying, "No hitting," or "No throwing things." Instead, when someone forgets their agreement, my job is to remind them: "I want to remind you that we all agreed: no hitting." 

The natural consequence of forgetting an agreement is that you are reminded of it. If they forgot it again, I reminded them again. And again. Just in the same way I might keep reminding a child reciting the alphabet that they had left out the letter D. Of course, if violence was involved, I stopped that because my job, even in our state of anarchy, is safety. I would say, matter-of-factly, "My job is to keep everyone safe. When you hit people it isn't safe, so I can't let you hit people." But even as I physically restrained a child, I added, "I'm going to remind you, that you agreed, no hitting."

But most of the time, all it took was the reminder.

Yes, it's all less efficient than yelling, "Get your butts over here!" but far more satisfying for everyone involved. By stepping out of the role of strongman rule enforcer, I left the children with nothing to push back against . . . And in that space they found that they were free to think for themselves, to make their own decision about how to behave. This is called self-discipline, which is everyone's goal.

I often think about my childhood cartoons when the protagonist was faced with a choice. A little angel would appear on one shoulder and a little devil on the other. When a child is being bossed around, they almost always listen to the devil, but when allowed to think for themselves, the voice they hear is the angel's. Most children, most of the time, make pro-social choices, but they are equally inclined to resist being told what to do. That's the way nature has made us. When left to make their own decisions, their own agreements, I've found that I never have to resort to threats and punishments. I've found that rewards are irrelevant because creating community is its own reward.

If at some point a child wants to change their agreements, they don't pushback against the adults. They understand that they have to talk to their friends about it. One year, a boy began to regret that he'd agreed to "no name calling." Specifically, he wanted to call the other children "poopy head." When he brought it up to the group, however, no one agreed with him. He tried again the following day and the day after that. Then he had the idea to campaign amongst his friends, so that when we gathered that day, there was a genuine poopy head contingent, but since agreements require consensus, it remained a no-go. The remarkable thing about this was that throughout this entire process, he continued to honor his agreement.

This is not due to luck. It's due to human nature.

When I tell adults about this experience, they like to present me with extreme, theoretical cases. "But what if the kids all agree that hitting is okay?" or "What if a kid just won't keep their agreement?" This is the kind catastrophic thinking that has never actually manifested in my classroom. The most extreme thing I've ever done is to say to a child, "You're having a hard time remembering your agreement. I'm going to ask you to play somewhere else until you're ready to come back." I've never met a child who didn't know when they were ready to come back.

It was this experiment that set me on my journey to understanding that the children, these fully-formed human beings, didn't need me to manage them. If I provided the proper framework, they were perfectly capable of managing their own classroom.

My goal has never been "discipline" in the old-fashioned sense of the word. It's an approach to "classroom management" that eliminates the need for behaviorist tactics. It's about respecting children enough to let them think about their own behavior and its impact on others, rather than fearing the potential punisher. 

That first year, there were several skeptical parents, but they all came to see that the stereotypes didn't hold. Indeed, many of them replaced their household rules with family agreements. The children didn't show up as selfish or defiant, but rather, when given the chance to think for themselves, most of them, most of the time, chose cooperation, fairness, and kindness. It's the same discovery I saw every year: the more ownership the children had in their community, the more responsible -- the more self-disciplined -- they became. 

This was my starting point as a play-based educator and is a cornerstone of my course Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management (see below). It's not luck. It's about learning to trust young children enough to allow them to think for themselves. That's not just good discipline, but democracy in action.

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Registration starts soon. Here's the link to learn more and get on the waitlist for "Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management."

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!