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!

Learning Self-Control

On most days, my classrooms look like "controlled chaos." 

That's not how I describe it, but it's been a common enough observation that I know that's how it strikes adults who don't spend their days in play-based preschool. I take it as a compliment, but a backhanded one. I feel like the compliment part is attained by qualifying the word "chaos" with "controlled." As in, "I don't know how you do it, but you have these rowdies right on the edge of my comfort zone."

Of course, chaos isn't a desired state, although I imagine that most of us have enjoyed chaotic thrills on occasion. But when it comes to day-to-day life we prefer it to be at least somewhat more predictable, reasonably ordered, and, well, controlled. That said, most of us also bridle when the control comes from someone other than ourselves.

Children feel exactly the same way. They are human beings who want to feel that their world is predictable and reasonably ordered, but tend push back when others try to control them. Learning self-control, learning to manage one's own body and emotions in a variety of circumstances, is a prerequisite for all other kinds of learning, and the only way to get there is through practice. Unfortunately, when it comes to young children, we have a bad habit of exerting control over them, "for their own good," matter-of-factly backing it up with threats and even brute force. That's called external control and it's almost impossible to learn self-control from there.

French philosopher Simone Weil defined "force" as "that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing." When we "thingify" others, as MLK put it, we deny that they are "a human being with the same status and worth as other human beings." Indeed, when we allow ourselves to force others, we make them into objects, something less than human.

Play-based educators don't deny children their basic humanity. That, at its core, is what sets self-directed (or play-based) learning apart from standard schooling. Oh sure, even the most controlling adults will clutch their pearls and assert that they likewise honor the basic humanity of children. No one wants to be on the other side of that one, but the command and control backed up by threats of punishment gives them away: it makes children into things rather than people.

As play-based educators we seek to place freedom at the center of the children's experience. We strive to create safe enough spaces, beautiful, varied, and populated with other people. The project is to then make sure they know they have permission to explore, discover, create, succeed, fail, and, well, play. And, from the outside, that can look like chaos as dozens of independent humans pursue their curiosity. 

But it's not chaos at all, not from the inside.

From the inside, children will bump into one another and the adults' job is to help them figure out what to do about it. From the inside, children will take risks and the adults' job is to help them figure out how to do it safely (or at least safely enough). From the inside, children will experience strong emotions that may cause them to behave in challenging ways and the adults' job is to help them through it. In this balancing act of "controlled chaos," the children make their own agreements about how they want to live together. They learn that the only way out of a battle of wills is through negotiation and collaboration. They learn that when it comes to their own learning, their own curiosity is the best guide. And they understand that the role of adults is not to control them, but to keep them safe and to help them when they ask for it. We will not force them. I will not thingify them.

This is the way we learn self-control.

The most common response from those who cling to their right to exert force on children, is some version of the hypothetical, "But what if the child is about to run into traffic!" As a teacher in a very urban preschool, I've spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours, near traffic with young children, but I don't take them anywhere near that traffic, or any other hazard for that matter, until I'm convinced they understand the dangers. And even then, I hold their hands because my responsibility compels me to ensure their safety. 

Actual safety is the one exception and it's force that is not compelled by the threat of punishment, but rather by a clear and honest explanation of the natural consequences: "If you run into traffic a car might hit you and that will hurt. You might even die." We give them facts to think about, not punishments to fear.

In my course "Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management," we learn how to break the habits of force and "thingification". It's an approach that recognizes the full humanity of young children. Participants come away knowing that "chaos" cannot be assessed from the outside, and certainly not by adults who cling to their ideas of command. (Registration will begin soon and the course will be completed before the holidays.) 

"Controlled chaos" refers to the balancing act we perform with and for young children, these fully formed humans who deserve order and predictability, but only on their own terms. It's the only way any of us have ever learned self-control.

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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!

"Be Careful What You Teach"

Be careful what you teach. It might interfere with what they are learning. ~Magda Gerber

"Why are those balloons stuck to the ceiling?"

"I rubbed them on my head and Teacher Tom stuck them up there."

"Is your head sticky?"

"No, I made electricity come out of my head!"

I was in the balloon cage, occasionally batting a balloon into the air, but otherwise I was just listening.

"Hey look, I found a little balloon."

"Me too. They're baby balloons."

"Did the grown up balloons have babies last night?"

"I guess so."

I'd thought about tossing the deflated balloons before the kids arrived, you know, because they were deflated, but had gotten distracted.

"All the balloons are on the ground."

"Sometimes they go in the air, but you have to push them up there."

"Then they all get down when nobody's pushing them."

I suppose I could have been correcting the kids, interrupting them with my superior adult knowledge about things like electricity or procreation or gravity. I suppose I could have been teaching, attempting to add to their store of trivia, but then, I would have risked interfering with their learning. From the outside, the balloon cage can look and sound like barely controlled chaos, and sometimes it is, but from the inside, sitting with the children, absently toying with the balloons that drifted my way, listening, I found it to instead be a place where the children were attempting to cobble together understanding.

That they were getting the trivia somewhat "wrong" is immaterial. What matters is the discussion, the theorizing, the agreeing and disagreeing. Thinking matters much more than mere attending, which is what happens when adults interfere, even if we believe we are "extending" or "scaffolding." When I look back upon my long life as a teacher, I see that I've done it "wrong" at least as much as I've done it "right." Indeed, I expect that I interfere every day, arrogantly assuming that I know to what they ought to be attending, directing them to look where I assume they ought to be looking, preventing them from answering their own questions in favor of my own. When I remember to listen, however, to just listen, I leave the space open for thinking which is what school, and life, is for.

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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!

Reality Isn't Always as it Seems, Especially When it Comes to Classroom Management

The image at the top of this post is obviously AI generated.

I feel like I can always tell when something is AI generated. Usually, it's the eyes, but in a picture like this one, the giveaway is most often something awry in the background . . . Not to mention the sheer impossibility of this scenario.

We're using this image as part of the promotion for my course Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Learning. We wanted something that reflected how it sometimes feels, from the inside, to be a play-based educator in the midst of children experiencing genuine freedom.

Over the years, I've taken thousands of pictures of children at play at Woodland Park and elsewhere. For obvious reasons, most of the photos you see on this blog are of hands (where the action is), the tops of heads (the adult perspective), or long shots that show children doing cool stuff at a distance. The occasional child's face that appears here is included with permission from a parent. 

When seeking out a photo to use to promote this course, I figured it would be easy to find a classroom or playground shot that evoked that feeling of controlled chaos, but as I combed through my collection, every photo instead evoked calm focus. That surprised me. Even images from days that had nearly overwhelmed me in the moment showed self-possessed children busy asking and answering their own questions. The wildness, the over-the-topness, and the emotion, had been largely erased by the act of turning my subjective reality into an objective photograph. We tried finding stock photography images that capture that controlled chaos feeling, but with similar results: they either evoked simple happiness or anxiety or nothing at all.

What I like about this AI image is that while it is hardly a direct representation of physical reality, it evokes, for me, that controlled chaos that sits at the center of much of our experience as play-based educators. "Classroom management" in the standard sense is all about controlling children, whereas for us, it's about setting children free, trusting them, and yes, sometimes holding our breath as they take it right to the edge. It often does feel exactly like this stampede of babies in tutus. 

This process has revealed to me how powerfully our experiences are shaped by perspective, especially in our roles as teachers. The whole in-control/out-of-control dynamic is something centered within each of us, often evoking strong emotions that actually have little to do with what's going on in the world around us. 

There was one day when we were discussing "compliments" during circle time. I made the statement that "compliments are things you say to people to make them feel good." This led to the children wanting to compliment one another -- to make one another feel good. It started in a controlled way, with everyone taking turns, but rapidly became a kind of free-for-all with the children racing about, hugging one another, and saying, "I love you." As delightful as this might sound from the perspective of words on a screen, in the moment, as things ramped up, as the hugs became more assertive, as the volume of giddy squealing rose, I went on high alert, worried I guess that, as mom used to say, someone was going to put an eye out or something.

Recalling how I'd felt, I specifically sought out the photos I'd taken in that moment, certain that one of those would perfectly represent controlled chaos. What I found was a collection of sweet pictures of young children embracing one another, their expressions were both joyful and peaceful, their bodies relaxed. It seems that only I had experienced chaos.

The feelings we have as adults are real, but reality isn't always as it seems. Our catastrophic imaginations too often lead us to feel that if we allow children to move freely, to follow their own designs, the ask and answer their own questions, we'll lose all control. But as I looked through all those photos, I found myself wondering, Lose control of what? Myself? Because the children in my photos, the perspective from outside, were pictures of self-control and self-direction, the gold standards for play-based learning.

I suspect none of us will ever experience an actual stampede of Burning Man babies charging toward us, but it sometimes feels that way. It's what we do about that feeling that matters to both ourselves and the children.

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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!