Transforming Classrooms Into Natural Learning Habitats

Psychologist Kurt Lewin, often recognized as the founder of social psychology and one of the most cited psychologists of the 20th century, developed what is known as Lewin's Equation: B = ƒ(P,E), in which our behavior (B) is a function of our personality (P) in the environment (E). 

In other words, behavior is the result of the interaction between our inner selves and the outer world. It's not a difficult concept to understand, indeed, it seems self-evident, but putting into an equation does, for me at least, crystalize and simplify an important dynamic. And it also highlights why so many of our efforts to change or influence our own behaviors, or the behaviors of others, so often fail.

Weight loss diets, for instance, often focus on transforming our relationship with food by somehow training ourselves, our personality (in the broadest sense of the word), to view food or eating in a new, healthier way and through that develop new food habits. When a child exhibits challenging behaviors such as hitting classmates, a typical response is to employ some combination of positive and negative reinforcements, sometimes in the form of rewards and punishments, in order to create new behavioral responses, or habits, to certain stimuli. These are both examples of addressing the P factor of Lewin's Equation: personality, or our inner selves.

Personality, of course, is not a fixed thing. It can and does change, but the arc of that change in humans is typically long, and to shorten it, which is what we try to do with these diets and reinforcements, is notoriously difficult. This usually requires us to call on will-power, which is to say regularly and consciously overriding the habits and instincts that cause us to behave in certain ways. It's hard enough when we're self-motivated to change ourselves, but neigh impossible when we are trying to change personality by proxy, as happens when adults are trying to modify the behavior of a child. Rewiring personality is a very difficult task for us habit-forming humans.

Usually, it's far easier to change E, the environment, which is to say changing what a person sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches on a daily basis. Indeed, whereas change in P involves lots of time and effort, changes in E can have an almost instantaneous impact on B.

For instance, we've all known children who bounce off the walls indoors, but who drop to their knees to study motes the moment they get outside. We've all known children who become "different people" when exposed to noisy, chaotic environments versus hushed, controlled ones. We ourselves find our behaviors altered, often in dramatic ways, when we find ourselves, say, at a cocktail party or in a confined space or on the penthouse floor of a skyscraper. 

Loris Malaguzzi, the founder of the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood learning, postulated that each child has three teachers, adults, other children, and the environment. As early childhood educators and parents of young children, we tend to focus on the role of the adult teacher. Likewise, we know that it's important for the children in our care to have relationships with other children. However, that "third teacher," E, the environment, often gets short shrift. No where is this more evident that in cookie cutter classrooms and playgrounds, out of the box spaces that force children, no matter their personalities, to conform, and this has, obviously, a significant impact on behavior, including the what and how children learn. A poor learning environment can mean that the adults spend too much of their time and energy on managing behavior rather than focusing on what we should be doing, which is observing and supporting the children as they go about the business of following their own learning instinct, their curiosity, through play.

If this sounds like something you want to explore, please consider enrolling in my new 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning, where we will be taking a deep-dive into both the theory and day-to-day practicalities of transforming our classrooms, playgrounds, and homes into environments that work with children, and ourselves, in the spirit of a "third teacher." We will be exploring both indoor and outdoor environments, as well as aspects of environment that are often neglected, with an eye toward making our spaces the kind of flexible, open-ended natural learning habitats in which all children can thrive. Not to mention freeing the adults up to be the kind of educators we've always wanted to be. I would love for you to join us!

******

If you're interested in transforming your own space into this kind of learning environment, you might want to join the 2025 cohort for my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning. This is a  deep dive into transforming your classroom, home, or playground into the kind of learning environment in which young children thrive; in which novelty and self-motivation stand at the center of learning. In my decades as an early childhood educator, I've found that nothing improves my teaching and the children's learning experience more than a supportive classroom, both indoors and out. This course is for educators, parents, and directors. You don't want to miss this chance to make your "third teacher" (the learning environment) the best it can be. I hope you join me! To learn more and 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!

Is There Anything More Beautiful?

"Let's pretend . . ."

Is there any more beautiful way to start a sentence? 

It's an invitation to entwine imaginations.

Psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik, a pioneering researcher, writes in her book The Gardener and the Carpenter: "By far the most important and interesting problem for young children is figuring out what's going on in other people's minds. Theory of mind, as it's called, is the ability to figure out the desires, perceptions, emotions, and beliefs of other people . . . Children who pretend more have a distinct advantage in understanding other people."

Gopnick sees the period from 18 months to five years as "the great watershed" for developing theory of mind.

When I hear "Let's pretend . . ." I know I'm not needed as the children engage with this "most important and interesting problem." I can, as a teacher, turn my attentions elsewhere, although there are few things more delightful than to act as a fly on the wall as children weave their stories of princesses and firefighters and mommys and daddys. They might pop on a hat or a cape or wrap a scarf around their waist and in that instant they are transformed into something they were not, embodying a person, or even an animal, about whom they are curious or by whom they are inspired. And then they play their way to a deeper understanding of another's experience from the inside out. When it begins with "Let's pretend . . ." it means they are doing it in collaboration with another mind who is likewise transformed.

As adults we tend to stop inviting one another with "Let's pretend . . ." although reading fiction or engaging with drama via theater or screen serve a similar purpose. Research finds that reading fiction, especially literary fiction, greatly increases empathy for, and understanding of, others. Even more so than a movie, novels put us into the minds, or shoes, of others, allowing us to experience the world from a new perspective and that works on us in much the same way that "Let's pretend . . ." works for young children.

The great beauty of "Let's pretend . . ." for early childhood educators is that most of the time all we have to do to make it happen is get out of the children's way. It emerges. Even without costumes, even without props, children are driven to entwine with one another to explore this most important and interesting problem.

"Let's pretend . . . " Is there anything more beautiful?

******

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!

How to Not Become an Angry Old Man

Walt Whitman wrote:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

It's perhaps my favorite line from my favorite poem, Song of Myself.

It is an acknowledgement that the self is the sum total of everything we have seen, smelled, tasted, heard, and felt. It is that moment when we recognize that we are not any one thing, but rather all the things and all of our responses to things. It's true of me. It's true of you. And it is true of all of us together. It is both a simple and great truth.

As I approach the final third of my life, I'm concerned that I don't become one of those angry old men. It's something to guard against, given how many of us age into a kind of bitterness. From the time we were children, the world told us to keep our heads up and our eyes forward. We're asked as children, "What are you going to be when you grow up?" We're never asked, "Who are you right now?" 

We're urged to "Keep your eye on the prize!" We are rarely asked if we are satisfied with right now. 

We're told our career paths must be ever upward, that achievement is about striving toward goals, and that if only we work hard enough we will reach the promised land.

When I listen to those angry old men, they tell stories that begin not as "Once upon a time," but as "Back in my day." No wonder they are angry. Their day is in the past. And, to boot, all these whippersnappers are doing it wrong. No one will ever again ask them, "What are you going to be?" They are now and forever stuck with who they are right now as the rest of the world continues becoming.

They are no longer large. They no longer contain multitudes. They have become a fixed point kept in place by memories and to do or be anything else is a contradiction. And contradiction is not to be tolerated. No wonder they are angry.

When I hear those angry old men railing against the young, the "lazy millennials," for instance, I breath more deeply and find myself in that so-called laziness. When they gripe about this or that technology, I strive to embrace it and to make it mine. When I detect that old man anger in myself, I remind myself that it is really fear and the antidote to fear is, always, to turn toward the unknown, and lay my hands on it the way a child does, which is, as the great Bev Bos reminded us, the only way it will ever find a place in my head or my heart.

This is why we must have young children in our lives, why we must bring them back from the pink collar ghettos into which we, parents, caretakers, and educators alone are privy to the secret to understanding the multitudes within ourselves. Children belong in the center of life because they are they are large. Life without their wisdom of turning toward the unknown and laying hands upon it, is one that is ever narrowing, one that teaches us that we're in this alone. It tames us, it contains us. But when there are young children in our lives to remind us, to teach us, we can more easily embrace our contradictions, become large again, and to again contain multitudes.

And we can sing:

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

That is the kind of "old man" I want the children I teach to grow up to be.

******

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!

Play is How We Survive

There are some who say that if there are humans in the distant future, we'll have to exist without our cute little pinky toes. The rest of our toes still play a role in balance and movement, but the one that goes "wee wee wee all the way home" isn't a significant part of that. Combine this with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle that is making balance and movement less and less important to survival, and it's so long little toe.

Not every evolutionary scientist predicts this, but it makes sense because that's the way Darwinism works: those aspects of a species that help it survive tend to continue to be reproduced in future generations, and those that don't, don't.

There are those who don't "believe" in evolution, but farmers have been taking advantage of the principles of evolution since the beginning of farming, long before Darwin. The difference is that instead of it being "natural selection" in charge, it's we ourselves who pick "survivors" based on what we perceive to be desirable traits. There was a time before crops were cultivated, when most wheat grass plants produced a single head with, at most, a handful of berries (kernels). Under human farming, the typical wheat plant grows five heads containing 22 berries per head. Humans made that happen.

Our farm animals have also undergone a similar process of "human selection." Breeding practices have brought us meeker, meatier cows, and chickens that produce larger quantities of eggs. 

So whether or not one believes in evolution, the process postulated by Darwin does happen, virtually right before our eyes.  

Indeed, we're even trying to steer our own evolution. When we choose our mates, we are choosing for the survival of certain traits. Eugenics movements sprang up as a direct result of Darwin's theory, as racists sought to "perfect" our species through "unnatural selection." Today, there are high IQ sperm banks, artificial selection, IVF, and even genetic modification to "select" for preferred traits, like good health or blue eyes.

From one perspective, our dabbling could well be viewed as a kind of Tower of Babel cautionary tale, in which humans have displeased the gods with our ambition and pride. Some of this sounds like a horror movie. Some of it is a godsend. And much of it, seems, well, normal.

We have been steering our own evolution, one way or another, through the choices we make for much of our human existence. Even the plants and animals we modify, in turn modify us.

The theory of "organic evolution" suggests that one of the primary ways steer our own evolution is through play. Through the exercise of free will, the theory goes, which is to say through play, animals, including humans, discover adaptive behaviors that are then adopted by others. I think of this as "viral learning." 

A family once donated several boxes of intravenous fluid bags. I left a box of them near our playground cast iron water pump for several days. The children had no idea what they were, of course, but one day, a boy tried filling one with water. This then went viral as child after child filled bags. Not long after this, another child discovered that under certain circumstances, the water would shoot out of the nozzle attached to the bags. Then, over several days, through trial and error, they figured out that it only worked when you held the bag higher than the nozzle, a discovery that was soon common knowledge. 

Will knowing how IV fluid bags work help these children survive? I don't know. Obviously, the specific skill may not be widely applicable, but understanding how fluid works, how gravity works, how learning from others works, definitely is. That a clutch of children in a single preschool figured this out may not directly impact their ability to procreate, and they won't pass these behaviors along through their genes. But as these children go out into the world, the behaviors they learned through this process may very well come into play.

The theory of "organic evolution" holds that we evolved to play, at least in part, in order to adaptively steer our own evolution. And like with Darwinian evolution, not all the "mutations" prove fruitful, but the ones that do, survive by helping us survive. In all likelihood, the children's viral learning around IV fluid bags will be forgotten by time, but it's also possible that scientists 40,000 years from now will look back on this moment as a turning point in our evolution, like the advent of the opposable thumb or the development of language. It seems doubtful, but you never know. Evolution is a long game.

And it's not just Homo sapiens. Other mammals play as well. As do birds and reptiles. There is even evidence that invertebrates, like snails, engage in play behaviors. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer cites evidence that might suggest that even plants play. Forest scientist Peter Wohlleben makes similar claims in his book The Hidden Life of Trees. It wouldn't at all surprise me at all if we one day conclude that play is as essential to our definition of life as reproduction and respiration. 

Play has a reputation for being frivolous in that it has no obvious purpose other than, perhaps physical exercise. According to this theory of "organic evolution," however, play is central to our species' evolution. It's how we came up with such essential human survival behaviors as dance, music, art, engineering, math, literacy, and even animal husbandry. Play is how we've evolved to discover new things, how we learn, and, ultimately, how we survive.

******

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!

Oh Brother, Thwarted Again!

Nothing is certain

It could always go wrong.

Come in when it's raining

Go on out when it's gone. 

          

          ~The Greatful Dead

"Oh brother, not again!"

It had become one of our classroom jokes. I have no idea where it came from, but it's a common enough expression that it's not surprising that it cropped up in a preschool classroom. 

I say it was a joke, and the kids meant it humorously, but there were no belly laughs. They were using it the way adults use expressions like this, as a way to respond when life thwarts us. And there's always lot of thwarting.

When we observe children at play, much of what we witness is thwarting. The block tower topples over. We trip and fall. We want a red one, but all that's left are blue ones. We want to play one game and our friends a different one. 

The old Yiddish expression, "Man plans and God laughs" is another of these expressions.

"If I didn't laugh, I'd cry all day" is yet another.

There isn't nearly as much thwarting as we might think, although it doesn't always seem that way. Our brains are prediction machines. Generally speaking, when our predictions prove correct, it doesn't even rise into our conscious awareness. It's usually only when our predictions prove wrong that our conscious minds are brought to bear. 

Some have even asserted that if nothing ever went wrong we would have no need for consciousness at all.

Linus: "Don't worry, Charlie Brown, you win a few and you lose a few."

Charlie Brown: "(Sigh) Wouldn't that be nice."

And without consciousness, we would have no sense at all of being alive. If we never failed, if everything went according to plan, if life were perfect, we would have no need to know about it. It's the thwarting that brings our attentions to bear on life, it's what calls us to action, even if it sometimes feels like thwarting is all there is. Without thwarting, success means nothing.

Of course, sometimes all the thwarting frustrates or angers us. Sometimes it makes us cry all day. Sometimes the thwarting overwhelms us, but on a day-to-day basis, every mentally healthy person must learn to shrug or laugh or roll their eyes. We might not laugh exactly, but the cosmic joke is that it's the thwarting that ultimately connects all of humanity.

When a child says "Oh brother, not again" I hear a child who is learning to take the thwarting in stride. And when they then return to the task at hand, whatever it is, with a new plan, with corrections, with the wisdom of previous thwarting under their belt, I see a child who is learning. 

Without thwarting, there is no need for thinking. 

Without thinking there is no learning. 

Without learning there is no life.

"Oh brother, not again!"

******

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!

It's the Risk That Matters

A woman approached me at the entrance to Trader Joe's the other day. She wanted to talk to me about a group she belongs to that meditates for world peace. I have nothing against either meditation or world peace, but I was hoping to get in-and-out, so I took the card she handed me and started to move past her. As I did, she stopped me, "May I ask you a question? Don't you worry about riding your bike out there in all this traffic? I know I worry about you all."

This is far from the first time someone has expressed this to me, going back decades. I've spent my entire life, from the time I learned to ride, sharing the road with cars. There have been a few close calls, but not as many as you might think. In part that may be because drivers aren't as "crazy" as we've let ourselves believe, but mostly, I think, it's because I've learned to stay alert to my surroundings while on the bike.

In the rest of my life, I can let my mind wander, but on the bike, on roads full of pot holes and random debris, amidst cars and trucks and buses, all being driven by people who may or may not be giving their full minds to the task, I better stay alert . . . or else! And it's my alertness that has kept me relatively unscathed over the decades. (I'm knocking on wood as I write this!)

This is a powerful thing for my 63-year-old brain, even if it means taking risks with my 63-year-old body.

One of the delightful things about working with young children is that young minds are exceedingly plastic, which makes it a perfect mechanism for absorbing data about the world. Everything is new. Novelty is everywhere. You never know what to expect next, so you better stay alert. They say that our brains are prediction machines, that we don't perceive the world as it is, but rather as we expect it to be. This is essential to survival, but it can sometimes blind us, or cause us to gloss over, changes both large and small. But you can't get much past a young child because they are so alert to anything out of the ordinary. I like to think that's one of the things cycling does for me as well.

There was a time, not very long ago, when we believed, as a fact of biology, that adult brains simply stopped being so plastic. This was determined by studying bonobos (one of our species' closest relatives) in cages. Perhaps not surprisingly, when scientists thought to study bonobos who were not in cages, they found that adult brains retained much of their plasticity, which is to say their capacity for learning new things, throughout their lives.

I've been thinking about those cages as a metaphor as I've moved into the final third of my life. Too many of my peers become befuddled, disinterested, and set in their ways. We generally think that this is just a natural part of aging, but what if these prediction machines we carry around in our heads have, over time, simply built a cage that doesn't allow us to perceive much of anything beyond the bars of the expected? If our brain expects nothing new, it becomes less alert, less capable of caring about, let alone perceiving, novelty.

When we watch a young child encounter something new, they approach it with some combination of excitement, trepidation, and curiosity, all of which are manifestations of alertness. As they contemplate this novel thing, as they handle it, as they ask questions about it, they're in a state of open-minded awareness, beyond the cage of hidebound prediction. They then, as they play with that object, begin to feel the satisfaction of mastery, of knowing, of understanding. In the natural order of things, this is followed by an alert restlessness that draws them toward the next new thing. This entire process is a visceral experience of our plastic brains absorbing data then gradually solidifying around what we perceive to be true before moving on to the next new thing.

And the cycle repeats like a flexing muscle.

A mind that stops being alert, that anticipates nothing new, falls increasingly into a cycle of habit, which helps to further ensure that nothing new happens, including learning. 

This is all just personal theory, based on my admittedly limited understanding of brain science and my more extensive experience in observing young children at play, which is to say, while learning at full capacity.

Of course, when people worry about me out there on my bike, I generally just agree with them, showing crossed fingers, but that belies my confidence (if that's the right word) in my own ability to remain alert for anything that seems amiss, unusual, or odd. And, yes, at the end of the day, it's the fear that I might get injured or even die, that compels me to be alert.

It's the risk that matters. Real, visceral risk, including risk of the social, emotional, and intellectual variety. Children need this as well. And they know it. This is why no matter how safe we try to make things, the children in our care invariably attempt to play the risk back into it: they climb too high, go too fast, wrestle, hide, and explore as we overly-cautious adults scold them back to "safety." There are no reliable statistics on playground injury rates, but what little we have tends to tell us that our "safe" playgrounds do nothing to reduce injury, and may, in fact, lead to an increase. I suspect that's because when everything is padded, when all the corners are rounded, the children perceive that they can let their guard down, to be less alert. When they perceive that there's nothing here that can hurt them, they fall into the habit of letting their minds wander from the task at hand, and as a person who has spent as much time as I have cycling amidst traffic, that's when things get truly dangerous.

I appreciate the people who worry about me, but I'm happy that none of them have the power, the way adults do over children, to force me to stop. Cognitive philosopher Andy Clark, points out that our minds have evolved for hunting and foraging, free from our self-imposed cages, both alert and on the move in a world full of both hazards and opportunities, fingers crossed. It's called being alive.

******

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!

Eat Your Veggies!

A parent pointed out that her son was eating raw kale that he had picked from the playground garden. "He won't touch it at home, but here, he devours it!"

This isn't the first we've heard of this phenomenon at Woodland Park. In fact, we see it almost every day. One spring, I mentioned to a parent-teachers that we needed to polish off the kale and lettuce growing in one of our raised beds in order to make way for different crops. I wanted her to urge the kids in that direction, but instead, she harvested the leaves herself, then took them to the snack table where she arranged them artistically, like a fan, on a plate. The children were avoiding it like it was the plague.

I told her, "If you want them to eat it, try taking it back into the garden." She doubted me, but moments later I spied children queueing up in the garden for their own leaf to munch. When she said, "You were right!" I wasn't surprised because I've seen it so often I no longer doubt it's true.

Children are notoriously picky eaters, especially when it comes to vegetables served to them at the dinner table, yet time and again we've seen that most kids, most days, are eager to eat pretty much anything from the garden. No one is surprised when kids fall on the berries, but our chives are almost as popular. We eat green beans straight from the vine, the seed pods of radishes that have bolted, and green tomatoes because we are so eager we pick them before they're ready. A pair of boys once ate an entire crop of immature beets straight out of the ground causing their parents to panic when they later produced red urine. We've eaten a whole eggplant, raw. And when they are done, they beg for more. Occasionally, a parent will report that this new adventurousness about vegetables has carried over to home, but more often than not it doesn't: they'll eat the kale from the garden, but not off a plate.

I recognize that there is a lot at play in food pickiness, including power dynamics, but I've begun to suspect that this reluctance to trust unknown or unusual food is at least in part an aspect of ancient wisdom, an evolutionary trait that helps to insure survival. I mean, it makes sense to be instinctively suspicious of new food that just appears on your plate, that was previously displayed at a supermarket, after having been transported on a truck or a train or a plane from a different state or even another country. It's adaptive, I think, to want to know where your food comes from, to have seen it grow, to have watered it, and then to have picked it yourself. I wonder if the pickiness of children around vegetables isn't due in part to our modern system of producing and distributing food. We like to know where it came from and there is no surer way to know than to grow it yourself.

Of course, this doesn't explain the popularity of hamburgers and chicken fingers, because, honestly, if children knew how those things are made, they would likely swear off them forever. Still, it seems like a plausible theory when it comes to veggies and is an argument for every child having access to a vegetable garden.

If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, it's not too late, or too early, to get planting!

******

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!

"They Taught Themselves"

Some time ago, we took the children on a field trip to the local post office. We were a group of some 20 children and eight adults. The woman giving us our tour introduced herself as Ms. Lui, before insisting that the children get in a line. It was an inauspicious start. The kids had no idea what to do. Even we adults were at a loss. Queueing up isn't part of what we do at Woodland Park.

I could see Ms. Lui was irritated with us. She tried to remain cheerful, but it was through gritted teeth. When I explained that we didn't know how to line up, I reckon she thought me the worst teacher in the world.

As a play-based educator, I strive, against a lifetime of training to the contrary, to resist the temptation to exert power over the children which is what we do when we insist on things like marching in lines or sitting in straight rows. It's what we do when we insist on zippered lips, dress codes, or asking permission to use the toilet. School is notoriously a place of rules and regulations, of teachers in the role of drill sergeant, or, if I'm being honest, prison guard.

I am responsible for the children's safety and general well-being, of course, and in that capacity there may be times when I cannot allow a child to do certain things, like jumping off the roof of a three story building, but by default, any power that comes my way by virtue of my titles of "teacher" or "adult" is to be returned to the children in the form of empowerment.

I can make an argument for this position from moral grounds, but my genuine motivation is simply to be a good teacher. I'm familiar with the research on the effects of people possessing more power than others and I've concluded that when I exert power over children, especially the capricious and arbitrary kind of power exerted in most classroom, I'm doing direct harm to the children's educational prospects.

As Rutger Bregman writes in his book Humankind: "One of the effects of power, myriad studies show, is that it makes you see others in a negative light. If you're powerful you're more likely to think most people are lazy and unreliable. That they need to be supervised and monitored, managed and regulated, censored and told what to do. And because power makes you feel superior to other people, you'll believe all this monitoring should be entrusted to you . . . Tragically, not having power has exactly the opposite effect. Psychological research shows the people who feel powerless also feel far less confident. They're hesitant to voice an opinion. In groups, they make themselves seem smaller, and they under-estimate their own intelligence."

That adults should exert power over children is so ingrained in us that many cannot imagine it any other way, but by doing so we make the children smaller, we make them feel ignorant, and we undermine their confidence. 

We've all experienced educators who are convinced that the children are lazy, that they can't be trusted, that they must be constantly monitored and managed. It's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. 

I asked Ms. Lui if we could just promise to stick together as a group. She didn't think that would work at all. She wanted us, on the spot, while on a field trip to a place of great excitement, to instruct them on how lines worked. Fortunately, there was a painted line on the floor so we asked the kids to stand on the line. Most of them tried it out for a moment or two, but as empowered children they were far more attuned to their curiosity than standing on a line. Some wandered off. Some pointed and asked questions. Others negotiated with their friends over their exact position on the line. After several minutes of this cat herding project, I turned to Ms. Lui and said, "This is the best we can do. Do you really need us to march in a line?"

It was a simple question, but it stumped her. After muttering something about "keeping order" she shrugged, adding, "Can you at least tell them not to touch anything?"

That I could do, although even then, I returned the power to these empowered children: "There's a lot of stuff around here that could hurt you. Ms. Lui wants you to ask her before touching anything." I did not command them, but rather gave them information.

She shook her head as she led the way. At every point-of-interest, from the sorting machines to the post office boxes, the children asked, "Can I touch this?" or "What would happen if I touched that?" At first her tone was slightly scolding, but gradually she began to relax, even seeming to take pleasure in the children's obvious curiosity, their confidence, and their willingness to voice their ideas and opinions.

In preparation for this visit, we had written letters addressed to ourselves. Ms. Lui showed us the outgoing mail slot and the children, unprompted, lined up, one-behind-another, to deposit their letters. She was by now in fine spirits. I joked, "See? We can line up."

She lowered her eyebrows at me, "I thought you said they didn't know how to line up."

I replied, "I didn't think they did. Maybe they just didn't need to know it until now."

This time when she shook her head it was with a sense of wonder, "I guess they taught themselves."

******

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!

"It's Really Quiet Here"

"Teacher Tom, it's really quiet here."

I was sitting with the three-year-old at a table. There were puzzle pieces in front of us, but we were just goofing around, making no effort to assemble them. Objectively, it wasn't quiet. There were children squealing, laughing, and low-key bickering all around us.

If an adult had said this, I'd have likely sought clarification, "What do you mean, it's really quiet here?" But when I listen to young children, especially when they say something confounding, I try to give myself a moment to let their words sink in, to contemplate what it is they might mean before responding.

Young children are still learning to express themselves through language. Often what it sounds like they're saying is really an effort to express something else entirely. A boy once told me he was going to "drown the baby," an alarming thing to hear, until I figured out that he wanted to try the experiment of dropping a toy baby into a bucket of water to see whether or not it floated.

Maybe this boy was trying to express the concept of it seeming "relatively quiet." Maybe he was talking about our stillness at the puzzle table in comparison to the motion around us. Maybe he was talking about his own internal state, a kind of internal quiet. I even wondered if maybe he was expressing something about his sense of hearing. (I covertly checked his ears; after all, young children sometimes stick random objects in there!) I considered what I knew of his home life, the morning leading up to this moment, his particular passions and interests.

He was tracing the shape of a puzzle piece with his finger. Without looking at me, he asked, "Can you hear it?"

I told him the truth, "I don't know."

"You have to listen really hard."

I nodded, still wondering what we were talking about.

A pell mell of children frolicked past us, a couple stopping to consider our puzzle before moving on.

"It's really quiet here," the boy mused in their wake, maybe to me, but while looking at the ceiling, "but sometimes it's hard to hear because of all the noise."

In that moment it clicked for me. I sang, "Within the sound of silence . . . "

His head whipped around toward me, "I know that song! Mommy plays it in the car! . . . Did you know silence means quiet?"

******

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!

This Messy, Hard, Emotional Work

We didn't have a huge set of big wooden blocks, which was okay because we didn't really have enough space for more and besides, if the kids are going to play with them, they generally needed to find a way to play with them together, which is what our school was all about.

The kids in our 4-5's class had been playing a lot of "super heroes." It was mostly boys, but they hadn't been particularly exclusionary, with several of the girls regularly joining them, often making up their own hero names like "Super Cat" due to the lack of female characters of the type in our popular culture. This in turn inspired some of the boys to make up their own hero names like "Super Dog" and "Falcon," along with their own super powers. And although there had been a few instances of someone declaring, "We already have enough super heroes," in an attempt to close the door behind them, most of the time, the prerequisite for joining the play was to simply declare yourself a super hero, pick a super hero name, and then hang around with them boasting about your great might, creating hideouts, and bickering over nuance.

At one point, however, a break-away group began playing, alternatively, Paw Patrol and Pokemon, which looked to me like essentially the same game with new characters. One day, some boys playing Paw Patrol used all of the big wooden blocks to create their "house," complete with beds and blankets. A girl who was often right in the middle of the super hero play wanted to join them, but when they asked, "Who are you?" she objected to being a Paw Patrol character at all. Indeed, she wanted to play with them and with the blocks they were using, but the rub was that she didn't want to play their game.

After some back and forth during which the Paw Patrol kids tried to find a way for her to be included, they offered her a few of their blocks to play with on her own, then went back to the game.

She arranged her blocks, then sat on them, glaring at the boys. They ignored her. I was sitting nearby watching as her face slowly dissolved from one of anger to tears. An adult tried to console her, but was more or less told to back off. I waited a few minutes, then sat on the floor beside her, saying, "You're crying."

She answered, "I need more blocks." I nodded. She added, "They have all the blocks."

I replied, "They are using most of the blocks and you have a few of the blocks."

"They won't give me any more blocks."

I asked, "Have you asked them for more blocks?"

Wiping at her tears she shook her head, "No."

"They probably don't know you want more blocks."

She called out, "Can I have some more blocks?"

The boys stopped playing briefly, one of them saying, "We're using them!" then another added, "You can have them when we're done," which was our classroom mantra around "sharing."

She went back to crying, looking at me as if to say, See?

I said, "They said you can use them when they're done . . . Earlier I heard them say you could play Paw Patrol with them."

"I don't want to play Paw Patrol. I just want to build."

I sat with her as the boys leapt and laughed and lurched. I pointed out that there was a small building set that wasn't being used in another part of the room, but she rejected that, saying, "I want to build with these blocks."

I nodded, saying, "I guess we'll just have to wait until they're done." That made her cry some more.

This is hard stuff we working on in preschool. And, for the most part, that's pretty much all we do: figure out how to get along with the other people. Most days aren't so hard, but there are moments in every day when things don't go the way we want or expect them to and then, on top of getting along with the other people, there are our own emotions with which we must deal. Academic types call it something like "social-emotional functioning," but I think of it as the work of creating a community.

It's a tragedy that policymakers are pushing more and more "academics" into the early years because it's getting in the way of this very real, very important work the children need to do if they are going to lead satisfying, successful lives. In our ignorant fearfulness about Johnny "falling behind" we are increasingly neglecting what the research tells us about early learning. From a CNN.com story about a study conducted by researchers from Penn State and Duke Universities:

Teachers evaluated the kids based on factors such as whether they listened to others, shared materials, resolved problems with their peers and were helpful. Each student was then given an overall score to rate their positive skills and behavior, with zero representing the lowest level and four for students who demonstrated the highest level of social skill and behavior . . . Researchers then analyzed what happened to the children in young adulthood, taking a look at whether they completed high school and college and held a full-time job, and whether they had any criminal justice, substance abuse or mental problems . . . For every one-point increase in a child's social competency score in kindergarten, they were twice as likely to obtain a college degree and 46% more likely to have a full-time job by age 25 . . . For every one-point decrease in a child's social skill score in kindergarten, he or she had a 67% higher chance of having been arrested in early adulthood, a 52% higher rate of binge drinking and an 82% higher chance of being in or on a waiting list for public housing.

Here is a link to the actual study. And this is far from the only research that has produced these and similar results, just the most recent one.

If our goal is well-adjusted, "successful" citizens, we know what we need to do. In the early years, it isn't about reading or math. It's not about learning to sit in desks or filling out work sheets or queuing up for this or that. If we are really committed to our children, we will recognize that their futures are not dependent upon any of that stuff, but rather this really hard, messy, emotional work we do every day as we play with our fellow citizens.

******

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!