Teacher Tom's Podcast: Taking Play Seriously

Hi. I'm Teacher Tom. And welcome to Teacher Tom's Podcast . . .

That's right, the first three episodes of my brand new podcast have dropped! You can find them at the Mirasee FM Podcast Network page, on Apple Podcasts, and on Spotify. 

The tagline for the podcast is "Taking Play Seriously," and that's exactly what my guests and I do.

Play is not the dessert for young children. It's the main course. Play is the human instinct to educate itself made manifest. Play is the key to healthy intellectual, physical, social, and emotional growth in the earl years. Sadly, today, childhood play is in crisis around the world. Our young children are spending more and more time in those institutions we call school. And, tragically, schools, even preschools, are becoming increasingly academic, forcing our youngest citizens to do things that are no only developmentally inappropriate, but in many cases outright harmful to that development.

Not only that, but even in the evenings and on weekends, children find themselves enrolled in adult-directed activities or in front of screens or even doing homework, when past generations were outdoors, playing.

Play is at least part of the solution to so many of the things that ail us, both individually and as a society. Not only does play supercharge learning, but it sets us free to pursue our passions and become the humans we were meant to be. After all, that's what the world needs: more people who have come alive!

If this podcast has a goal, it's to support early childhood educators, parents of young children, grandparents, caregivers, aunts, uncles and any other adult who loves children, in providing them an authentic, playful childhood.

If you're reading here, you might already be aware that I've been writing almost daily here on the blog for nearly 15 years, that I've written two books, that I offer online courses for educators and parents, and that I travel all over the world to teach, coach, and inspire early childhood educators about play-based pedagogy. Don't worry, I'm not giving any of that up. I'm just adding the podcast.

But that begs the question: Why a podcast?

What other people tell me is that podcasts are the present and possibly the future. They tell me that people today prefer to listen or watch, that they don't read, and that I just need to keep up with the times. I know this isn't entirely true because tens of thousands of you read my blog posts every month, but fair enough, I suppose. I'll be 63 next week. I still have a third of my life ahead of me. I'm not ready to go the way of the ancient scribes who chiseled on stone tablets. So, you know, Teacher Tom is trying to get with the times.

Other people tell me that a podcast will help me reach a new audience. Specifically, a younger, hipper audience. That's a good thing, I think. After all, those are the people raising young children and there will never be a generation of children, parents, and early childhood educators who won't benefit from taking play more seriously . . . And on a very serious note, there is a genuine concern that childhood play is becoming alarmingly rare, which is not just a tragedy for young children, but for humankind.

But in all honestly, those aren't the reason I'm aspiring to be in your ear.

When I was younger, I used to love drive time radio. Specifically, there was a morning show on KLOO AM radio in Corvallis, Oregon, where I went to high school, starring station-owner Bob Houglam, called Toast & Coffee. Basically, what he did each morning along with his co-host, was talk about the community with the community. I always thought it would be fun to have my own show like that.

In a way, that's a little bit like the career I've experienced as a preschool teacher. I mean, you come together each day with your community. You talk and listen. You share, sing, dance, bicker, and agree. Sometimes you have special guests or go on a field trip, but generally ou follow a familiar, comfortable schedule. Then you go home, knowing that you'll come together again at the same time with the same people and do it all over again. This is, for me, the heart of what community is all about.

Community has always stood at the center of my work with young children.

Another thing that some of you might know about me is that I spent the better part of 20 years as a teacher; for most of the time, the only teacher, at the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool in Seattle, Washington.

A cooperative preschool is a school that is owned and operated by the parents who enroll their children. And I’m not talking about symbolic ownership, but actual legal ownership.

Typically, we would enroll 65 or so families each year, and they would become 65 equal owners of the school, with me, the teacher, being the only paid employee. Everything else that goes into running a school was done by the parents. Parents took on all the administrative work, they handled enrollment, gardening, repairs and maintenance, purchasing, food prep, field trip planning, photography, custodial tasks, and anything else that needed to be done. 

When decisions needed to be made, it required the parent community to come together to discuss, debate, and, when consensus was impossible, to vote.

And as the only paid employee, I had, in a very real sense, 65 bosses. They hired me, they evaluated me, and they could, if they so desired, fire me.

Now, I imagine there are some of you educators out there thinking, “No way! I could never have 65 bosses!” I get it, but for me, it never felt that way.

You see, the part of being a cooperative that I came to value above all else, was that each family was required to provide me with an adult, one day a week, to serve as an assistant teacher. That’s right, one day a week, the parent or caregiver came to school with their child to serve under my supervision.

I often think the world would be a better place if more institutions or enterprises worked as cooperatives. I mean, the owners are also the customers and the employees. As customers, the motivation was to get your child a high quality preschool education at the lowest possible price. As employees, you wanted a satisfactory workplace. And as owners, you wanted a business that operated on sound financial principles. 

But it was more than that. Every preschool becomes a community, but in a very real sense, a cooperative becomes a community of families, not unlike a tribe or village or neighborhood.

This is the kind of community humans have evolved to live in. For 99 percent of our existence we were hunter-gatherers living in communities of 20-200, closely-related individuals. It’s only been relatively recently that we’ve begun to aggregate ourselves into larger populations. Many of us have adapted, of course, but for many of us, and especially for young children, smaller communities like the one we created in our cooperative – or like those still found in some neighborhoods or churches or other affinity groups – are our most natural learning and living environments.

That’s my aspiration for this podcast: to become a kind of community for early childhood educators, parents, grandparents, and other caretakers of young children. And my hope is for it to be a community that takes play seriously!

Some of you may already know that I’m a married man. My wife and I have been together since 1984 – married since 1986. That’s nearly 40 years! So, you know, woo hoo! Our only child, Josephine, was born in 1996. When she was in kindergarten, I was talking with the head of her school about community. He said something that has stuck with me: “The sign of a healthy community is how quickly newcomers are brought into the center.”

We’ve all been part of – or tried to be part of – communities that seemed to resist our efforts to take part. Maybe there are too many rules – written and unwritten. Maybe the community is clique-y. Maybe there are divisions and divides that make it impossible to navigate. These are unhealthy communities. I’m hoping that the community that forms around this podcast can be the kind that brings newcomers immediately into its center.

That doesn’t mean that we all have to agree with one another. I mean, I have a few hard lines, like no violence, name-calling, or threats, but when it comes to young children, our adult roles, community, and what it means to be educated, I hope there will be room for everyone.

Another thing you might know about me is that my wife and I have produced global online early childhood education summits called – get ready for it – Teacher Tom’s Play Summit. A couple of years ago, I was interviewing an Ojibwe educator named Hopi Martin. He asked me to imagine a burning campfire around which people, including you, were sitting. If someone wanted to know more about that campfire, they could ask you to describe the fire. You might talk about the color, the intensity, the way the wood is stacked, what kind of wood you think it is, the smoke, the heat. 

But that’s just the fire from your perspective. If this person really wants to understand that fire, they would have to ask the person sitting next to you to describe it, then the next person, then the next. They would have to do this all the way around the circle until, finally, they had learned about the fire from all perspectives. But even then, Hopi said, they wouldn’t have the full picture of that fire until they asked the birds in the trees . . . Until they asked the trees themselves . . . Until they asked the worms underground . . .

I love this metaphor because it makes it clear that there is always something more to learn because there is always another perspective to consider. It has allowed me to see that when someone disagrees with me, they aren’t my rival, but rather my teacher. Every time I can see the world from another perspective, my own perspective, my own ideas and knowledge get bigger.

In our preschool, this phenomenon came up every year around Easter when the children would debate the details of the Easter Bunny. Some thought the bunny laid eggs. Some thought chickens laid eggs and the bunny just painted them. Some thought the Easter Bunny was a normal sized bunny. Others thought it must be extra large. Some thought there were multiple Easter bunnies. Some thought the Easter Bunny was a girl . . . And, of course, there was always at least one Jewish child who insisted, “Your parents are lying to you!”

These debates could get intense – as debates about faith often do. Sometimes there was even yelling to the point that it sounded a lot like our adult political debates. And like our adult debates, at the end of the day, I don’t think anyone had changed their mind. In fact, most of them become even more convinced of their beliefs.

But that’s not the point. No one’s minds have changed, but what has changed is that now each child can look around and think, “I believe what I believe, but that friend believes something else.” “That friend believes bunnies lay eggs.” “That friend doesn’t believe in the Easter Bunny at all.” As individuals, none of us may have changed, but now, since we both shared and listened to all the perspectives, we have a bigger and more accurate picture of who we are as a community.

And then, the best part, is that the children do what we adults have forgotten how to do. Once the debate is over, they all go outside and get back to playing with each other within the context of this bigger idea of who we are.

I want Teacher Tom's Podcast to be like that campfire or those Easter Bunny debates, which is why most of the episodes will be about me stepping back and sharing the microphone with someone else.

I will be starting off by interviewing people I already know, people with interesting perspectives, people who I hope will help expand your perspective. But if there are people you want to hear from . . . Or people you think I’ll benefit from speaking with . . . Or topics you’re interested in hearing about . . . Shoot me an email (TeacherTomHobson@TeacherTomsWorld.com) and let me know.

Let’s grow our ideas together!

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Teacher Tom's Podcast is on the air! In these first three episodes I talk with Dr. Denisha Jones, "Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent, and founder of Free Range Kids Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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