"June (& Debris)"

It wasn't until mid-morning that I noticed the box, there on the table just inside the gate to our playground. Someone had written "Junk (& Debris)" on the side. I figured it was something Teacher Rachel had cooked up for the kindergarten class so left it there. Later when I asked her about it, she told me it had been there when she had arrived and also that it said, "Danger" and "Caution" on it as well. Upon further investigation, I found that the mystery box-leaver had also written "Loose Parts" in large bubble letters. I still didn't know who had left the box (although I had my suspicions that I later confirmed) but it had clearly come from someone who "got it."

After checking to make sure that the box was not, in fact, full of danger, I re-taped the top and took it indoors to unwrap properly during circle time.

I told the kids how I'd found the box and we speculated about what might be inside. A few of them squinted at the words, trying to sound them out. One of the girls got "Junk!" but the ampersand and the non-phonetic spelling of "Debris" stumped them so I read that for them, "Junk and debris," explaining that debris was basically another word for junk. We also sussed out the warning words, which lead us to wonder if the box might be full of dynamite or poisonous spiders. Finally, we read the phrase "Loose Parts" which meant nothing to us. Several of the kids scooted themselves away from me as I made a show of opening the box, heeding the warnings.

Inside where items worthy of the label "loose parts." There were a couple different kinds of wood off-cuts, a bag full of some sort of metal clips, a box of glass mason jar lids with their orange rubber seals, a large stack of yellow styrofoam trays like they use in the meat departments of supermarkets, and several dozen tubs that might have once contained some sort of yoghurt. As we went through the items I said things like, "I wonder what we could use these for," which, of course, prompted the children to offer their ideas. The wood, they thought, could be used to build our treehouse, for instance. When I pointed out that the containers I had originally thought to be for yoghurt had tiny holes in the bottom, something that disappointed me a bit because it limited their versatility, one of the kids immediately suggested that they would be perfect for planting seeds in the spring. Brilliant!

Stupidly, I then began to pack everything away again, striving to be as tidy as our benefactor, only to have several of the children object: "Why don't we play with everything now?" "Just put them on the checkerboard rug instead of blocks," "We could build some good bad guy traps with those," and "We should also have some animals to play with them." So I got out a box of small "critters" and that's what we did.

I could write volumes about what I saw happening as the children played with these random materials and speculate about what they were learning, but in all honesty, that would be total BS on my part. The truth is that I have no more idea about what they were learning from their play than the children did about what was in the box before we opened it. I could have spent my time grilling them about what they were building, creating, discussing, and pretending with an eye toward somehow gaining a better understanding of what was going on in their heads, compelling them to focus on my curiosity rather than their own. I could, I suppose, have pre-tested them prior to opening the box, then re-tested them after playing with the junk, but what would be the point? I don't need to know what they are learning, only they do. It's none of my business what they learn as they play.

So I just left them alone, secure in the knowledge that they were attempting to teach themselves what they, in that moment, most wanted to know, following their own interests and passions. That's enough. Any more than that is BS.

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It's Compassion That Gets Stuff Done

We often conflate the words "reason" and "logic," but as psychologist Julian Jaynes put it, "Reasoning and logic are to each other as health is to medicine, or -- better -- as conduct is to morality."

No one, including even the youngest child, does anything without a reason. It may not be logical; indeed, on a day-to-day basis, our reasoning is likely not at all logical. Logic is a product of conscious thought, employed when our goal is objective truth, whereas reasoning, a product of our lower level cognitive processes, is concerned primarily with survival.

Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinkler asserts, "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness." In his book The Case Against Reality, another cognitive psychologist, David Hoffman, makes the case, logically, that the world as we perceive it is almost certainly not the world as it actually is. Our eyes take in photons from the world which our minds then construct into what we know as, say, a tree, not as it is, but rather in a way that serves our survival. If one were capable of applying pure logic to day-to-day life, one might well perceive and appreciate the truth of the molecular and biological operations occurring at the base of that tree, but the reason you run away is because there's a freaking tiger crouching there!

When a child, or anyone, is behaving "unreasonably," rest assured that they have their reasons. This is why, if we are to help them, logic generally doesn't get us anywhere. It's why when we say such logical things as, "There's nothing to be afraid of," or "That's nothing to cry about," or even, "You're okay," we are, at best, wasting our breath. At worst, we're expressing doubt about their lived experience, telling them, in effect, that their own reasoning is to not be trusted. We're insisting upon truth when, in fact, their reasoning, which is derived from a stew of emotion, unconscious cognitive processes, and unreliable memory, is perfectly valid. There is something to be afraid of: the evidence is that I'm afraid. There is something to cry about. I'm not okay.

If we hope to help them, we help them best when we first accept their reasoning, even if it doesn't seem logical to us. We say, "You are afraid." "You are sad." "You are hurt." Now, we are at least seeing the same tree, the same tiger. 

This doesn't mean that we ourselves are afraid, sad, or hurt. When this happens, we call it empathy, a powerful perspective that helps us understand what other people are going through by feeling it ourselves. The weakness of empathy, however, is that it involves feeling with other people. As we know, these kinds of negative feelings are exhausting and ultimately incapacitating. I know many early childhood educators who describe themselves as "empaths," which probably explains, in part, why they are always so emotionally drained at the end of the day. When we allow ourselves to feel another person's fear, sadness, or anger, when we try to connect with them by saying things like "That frightens me too," "I'm also sad," or "It hurts me as much as it hurts you," we become as useless to them as we are when we appeal to logic.

They don't need to know that we're in the throes with them any more than they need us to logic them out of their reasons.

What children, or anyone in distress, needs is our compassion, which is feeling for them, rather than with them. "(U)like empathy," write Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind, "compassion doesn't sap our energy." And it's our loving energy that they need: not our logic or our empathy. It's compassion that allows us to be the calming presence they need beside them as they work through their completely reasonable emotions. It's compassion that gives us the energy and insight to know when they need a hug or to be reminded to breathe or when to try getting on with their life of doing.

Logic and empathy are amazing things. They are, in many ways, the crowning achievements of our species. But it's compassion that gets stuff done.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 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!

Re-Visiting Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society

"(L)earning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful society."

Ivan Illich was a Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic. His best known work, Deschooling Society, published in 1971, is a no holds barred critique of institutionalized, compulsory schooling, arguing that the overall effect is to alienate most children from their own learning.

"All over the world the school has an anti-education effect on society: school is recognized as the institution which specializes in education. The failures of school are taken by most people as proof that education is very costly, very complex, always arcane, and frequently (an) impossible task."

As a preschool teacher who has spent his entire career in play-based settings, I've always felt that my colleagues in more standard schools tend to complicate things. To be honest, when they talk about what they do to and with the children in the name of moving them through "the curriculum," I'm struck by a kind of despair. Learning, in my experience, is primarily a process of self-motivated individuals interacting with their environment and the people they find there. When I hear these educators talk about what they do to make learning happen, it sounds for all the world like the kind of micromanaging that causes adults to hate their jobs. Frankly, I couldn't handle the stress of believing that these children's futures depend on my ability to "teach" them all these things they aren't particularly interested in learning. 

“A . . . major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich counties, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.”

In my experience, "teaching" can only lead to learning when the learner is actively wondering about the questions being answered. Sadly, most of what we do in standard school is offer answers to questions that no child has ever asked . . . "for their own good." Without curiosity, educators are left with no alternative but manipulation through a system of punishments and rewards which are still not guarantees of learning, but rather, at best, of successful test taking.

Teaching and learning are very different things. They're not even on the same spectrum.

“Many students . . . intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.”

Illich pulls no punches and it can be painful to read him, even for someone like me who has spent his career outside the currents of modern education. When Illich was writing, our kindergartens and preschools, and even, for the most part, our elementary schools, were far less school-ish than they are today. Recesses were long and frequent. Art, music, and stories stood at the center of the school day. Testing was rare and largely inconsequential. If the goal is real learning and real freedom, then we have definitely gone the wrong direction in the past several decades.

As a product of those types of schools, my memories are of the playground, of my friends, and of the crushes I had on my teachers. Yet even then, the best days were those when I awoke to remember that it was Saturday. I was not one of those kids who struggled in school, and I liked the playground, my friends, and my teachers, but I nevertheless preferred not going because I preferred freedom.

“Equal educational opportunity is, indeed, both a desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with obligatory schooling is to confuse salvation with the Church. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes future promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition.”

Like I said, reading Illich can be painful and he clearly has anarchist leanings (although he never used the word to describe himself). And when I consider all those well-meaning teachers who genuinely love the children in their care and want only what's best for them, I cringe at the comparison to things like the Inquisition. It's harsh. But the criticism is of the institution, not the people, and as people who love the children, who care about doing what is best for them, it behooves us to at least sit with criticisms like this.

“If society were to outgrow its age of childhood, it would have to become livable for the young. The present disjunction between an adult society which pretends to be humane and a school environment which mocks reality could no longer be maintained . . . The disestablishment of schools could also end the present discrimination against infants, adults, and the old in favor of children throughout their adolescence and youth . . . Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us the children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.” 

It's worth reflecting on. Few adults would willingly subject themselves to schooling, just as few children, if given the choice, would choose to spend their days there. We might have fond memories, but the reality of being managed to the point that you need permission to pee, is beyond the pale.

“The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical. The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil. When the schoolteacher fuses in his person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life. A teacher who combines these three powers contributes to the warping of the child much more than the laws which establish his legal or economic minority, or restrict his right to free assembly or abode.”

Those of us who work in play-based settings or schools (like those based on the democratic free school model of the Sudbury Valley School) that trust self-directed learning, have created bubbles in which the human instinct to educate itself is kept alive. It's not always joyful, of course, but the learning is always self-motivated. The reward is not a grade or a test score, but rather the satisfaction of having asked your own questions and found your own answers. As adults our role is not to micromanage, teach, or to act as jailers, but rather to use our experience to keep the children safe enough, to respond honestly to the questions they ask us, and to be a loving presence when they struggle.  

I recently received a message from the parent of a former student who I'd not heard from in over a decade. I remember him as the type of child that institutional schooling loves most. He taught himself to read by the time he was three. He was bright, curious, well-spoken, and motivated, the kind of kid who lands in "gifted" programs. I'm sure he tested well because he loved playing games. His mother told me that in high school he was feeling pressure and said, "'What's the point? Work hard to get good grades so you can get into a good school to work hard to get good grades so you can get a job that you hate' . . . He held on to the idea that work could, and maybe should, be about play. You played a big part in setting that mindset in motion."

He's just taken a gap year and is off to university in the fall to study acting.

“The American university has become the final stage of the most all-encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth . . . We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling.”

There was a time when I genuinely believed that if I simply made my case for play-based learning, the world would see the logic, not to mention the humanity, and rally around the project of reformation. That was the whole point of this blog in the first place. I was naive, of course, but the intervening decades have not made me cynical if only because I know that even if I was just their preschool teacher, they learned that it's not just okay, but essential to play, which is another way of saying to find their purpose and strive to be free.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 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!

Learning is a Process of Upsetting the Status Quo

On a cellular level, learning something new requires growing new nerve cells along with the connectivity between them. In other words, learning always means replacing the status quo with something else.

As a little boy, it was self-evident that tiny people somehow got inside our television set or that there was another child inside the mirror who delighted in imitating me. As a species it was once self-evident that the sun revolved around the earth, that life could arise spontaneously from non-living matter, and that lightening was caused by angry gods.

What learning does, for the individual as well as for society as a whole, is change the order of things. And change can be frightening. It can be unsettling, even terrifying, to recognize that what we know is not definitive. It can also, sometimes even simultaneously, delight and awe us as we find ourselves privileged to see the old world in a new way.

We typically think of education as a process of moving from ignorance to knowledge, that we build learning from the foundations up, like a constructing a house. But it is really more like an unveiling, a lifting up of the curtain of ignorance to see behind it, first from this angle, then from that. Each peek shows us a new perspective on truth, one that doesn't negate what we once thought we knew, but rather adds to it, just as our brain adds neurons and connections as it learns.

Every now and then, we see things from a perspective that causes a revolution in our thinking, like when a child realizes, That's me in the mirror, or when Einstein recognized the theory of relativity by imagining himself on a beam of light. We call it epiphany and from that moment on, everything has changed. The status quo is no more. Long live the status quo.

As adults, those moments tend to be rare unless we go out of our way to seek them out, to become curious about things that may at first seem to have no apparent connection our status quo life. This is why we tend to become hideabound and jaded, sometimes to the point that we simply cannot, or refuse to, even consider new perspectives because we know it all. For young children, however, these moments of epiphany come fast and furious as they encounter so much for the first time. It's their openness, their curiosity, their willingness to have their status quo upset, that makes us declare that their minds are "sponges." Indeed, for young children, each day can bring a new ephipany.

Too often, we adults, seeing their capacity for learning, decide we must take advantage of these young brains growing all those new neurons and connections by striving to somehow cram as much in there as possible. I'm thinking here, of course, of the increasing academic-ization of preschool and kindergarten. When we do this, we show our own ignorance of how humans have evolved to learn, stripping the process of curiosity and replacing it with the far weaker external motivators of rewards and punishment. The result is that children become as hidebound and jaded as adults because it's just status quo all the time.

When we allow curiosity to lead, as we do in play-based settings, we lay the groundwork for epiphany. "We consciously take in . . . new experiential data," writes cognitive psychologist and author Christine Caldwell, "and if we feel sufficiently drawn to it (i.e., curious about it) or emotionally invested in it, we will commit this new experience to memory, which is another way of saying that we just learned something. This also explains why we have difficulty learning things we don't care about."

Caldwell goes on to say, "If learning is an act of upsetting the status quo, then, it stands to reason, that conflict is essential to learning. Collaboration is a conflict of ideas."

And this is the vital second piece of what makes play-based learning, or self-directed learning, the gold standard. The ultimate way we access new perspectives is through other people. Playing with others teaches us how to live in a world of conflicting perspectives, to collaborate, and that is why I often say that "together we're a genius."

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 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!

The Old Bangeroo

I always used a hand drum as the signal for transitions. At some point, I started referring to it as "the old bangeroo."

For instance, when it was time to tidy up, I'd say, "I guess it's time for the old bangeroo." Several kids would usually object, joyfully, "It's a drum, Teacher Tom!"

"Well, I call it a bangeroo because I'm going to bang it for clean up time."

Sometimes I would say I'm going to bang it so loud that their brains are going to come shooting out of their ears. Sometimes I would say I'm going to bang it so loud that their heads are going to pop off of their shoulders, bounce off the ceiling and come down on someone else's body. Sometimes I would drop the bangeroo bit and instead pretend it's the "clean up time banjo" or "trumpet" or some other instrument as the children corrected me, "It's a drum, Teacher Tom!" Whatever the case, I typically made something of a show of it, one that could go on for several minutes before finally signaling that it was time for our transition.

I started doing this as just another goofy thing to do, something to make our day a little more fun, but over the years I've come to see that it actually provided a function. Young children are notoriously reluctant about transitions, and I don't blame them, I feel it every Monday morning, but this process, one in which I simply goof around for a few minutes, tends to draw the children together and allows them an opportunity to "prepare" themselves for the impending transition. In fact, as I go on, it's quite common for the children to start demanding that I bang the drum as I go through my schtick, especially as I stretch it out. And for those not drawn in by my show, those who need to finish playing, it lets them know they need to start wrapping things up in a way far more concrete than, say, the classic "five minute warning," which is meaningless to very young kids.

Often, by the time I actually bang the drum, kids are standing over their playthings, poised to go into action, anticipating the starting pistol, so to speak. And they usually make short work of it.

One day, we were playing with our wooden trains. We have a big box of tracks and a big box of trains. I try to discourage the kids from just dumping the boxes because all those small items quickly get scattered across the entire space, leaving it unusable as a building area, which results in kids mostly just walking on and kicking through the mess. That said, someone almost always has the idea of dumping the boxes. When it happened on this day, I waited until the dumper had found what he wanted, then uprighted the box and began refilling it, just by way of keeping things tidy.

A girl looked at me with wrinkled eyebrows, "I didn't hear you bang the old bangeroo."

"I didn't."

"Then why are you putting things away?"

"Oh, I'm just getting some of these tracks back in the box so kids don't walk on them. When kids walk on them, they sometimes get broken or people trip and get hurt."

"Oh."

Seconds later, another child, "Teacher Tom, did you bang the old bangeroo?"

"No."

"But you're cleaning up." I repeated my explanation.

Moments later, another, "When did you bang the old bangeroo?"

"I didn't."

Then, without a word, the kids started packing things away, sorting the trains into the train box and the tracks into the track box. I said, "Hey guys, I haven't banged the old bangeroo. It's not clean-up time yet."

And a boy paused long enough to say to me, "Yes it is. You just forgot to bang the old bangeroo."

So I banged it, catching up with them for I am supposed to be their leader.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 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!

Motor Plans

The two-year-old was attracted to our cast-iron water pump. Maybe he was drawn to the water play. Maybe he was fascinated by the mechanics of it. Maybe it was simply that this is where the older kids tended to congregate and he was drawn to their energy.

Whatever the case, he made a beeline for the pump whenever he was on the playground. At first, he simply observed, but soon, he began taking advantage of gaps in the action to try out the pump handle with his own two hands. His first attempts produced there merest trickle of water, but day-after-day he worked on it until he was pumping with vigor and technique. 

The other children played in the water that flowed downhill from the pump, digging channels and holes in the sand, filling buckets, adding lengths of gutter, building dams and bridges, all of which were dependent upon that flow of water. Before long, the boy was orchestrating his actions to match the needs of the other children, reading the situation, while also responding to calls for "More water!" by pumping with a joy that appeared to fill his entire body.

In a matter of weeks, of his own volition and efforts, he had made himself into the unofficial "pump master."

"One of the best ways to get good at a complex action (such as playing a musical instrument or pitching a baseball game) is to practice it until it becomes a motor plan," writes movement expert and psychologist Christine Caldwell. "Throwing a ball or playing musical scales over and over starts to feel almost automatic, able to be done quickly, almost effortlessly. With the motor plan in place, we can concentrate on the small but tricky adjustments that turn a fastball into a curveball or successive notes into a melody. This is where most of our movement habits come from."

This is clearly what this two-year-old was doing with our water pump. Without prompting or prodding, without instruction or even guidance, through his sacred urge to play, he had developed his "motor plan" to the point that he was able to tweak his movement to suit a variety of situations. He later moved on to joining the older kids in their engineering project, but it began with this process of habit creation through practice and adjustment based on feedback from the environment. 

The development of motor plans through practiced movement and adjustment is obviously intertwined with cognitive functions like attention, perception, and decision-making. The psychological parallel to motor plans is often referred to as "motor cognition." In other words, just as we develop automatic movement habits that allow us to drive a car or knit a scarf, we likewise develop psychological habits including problem-solving and decision-making. Indeed, both motor planning and this kind of cognitive processing seem to share the same brain regions. This suggests that movement and thinking are fully entangled with one another.

This is why young children must move as they learn. Our schools struggle to grasp this concept, even as some are starting to recognize that recess or "movement breaks" help children focus on many of mind-numbing tasks that are assigned them in school. But when we remove the school-ish practice of forcing young children to sit still and silent during "instructional time," and let the children move as they learn the way we do in play-based programs, we free them up to fully engage what cognitive philosopher Andy Clark calls their "minds on the hoof."

He asserts that Homo sapiens have evolved to hunt and forage. For most of our existence as a species, we have been constantly on the move. Our minds have therefore evolved for an active engagement with the world around us, hence "minds on the hoof." The process of developing motor plans and motor cognition are essentially one and the same. We simply aren't able to think as clearly when our bodies aren't involved.

In other words, we have evolved to not just learn, but to become masterful, through our motor plans, like the one this two-year-old developed, driven by curiosity. And motor plans demand the freedom to move our bodies, which is to say, to play.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 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!