How We Grow in Emotional Intelligence and Agility

Being a preschool teacher (or the parent of young children for that matter) is exhausting, largely because at any given moment, someone is experiencing a big emotion and letting the rest of us know about it. I doubt there is any less anger, sadness, fear, or frustration in a typical workplace, but there's an expectation that adults should have already learned the cultural "display rules," those unspoken rules by which we know what emotions a person may express in a given place and time. Adults who are regularly "out of control" emotionally are generally not tolerated for long, whereas with preschoolers, a great deal of the developmentally appropriate learning they are doing is focused on figuring out their culture's display rules, and that begins with expressing your emotions.

Our job is exhausting because it calls for us to support young children in this vital aspect of early learning, requiring the often heavy lift of what psychologists call "emotional labor" on everyone's part. We are with them as they feel their emotion, often empathetically feeling it right along with them; we help them name it; we join them as in trying to understand it; and remain shoulder-to-shoulder and heart-to-heart with them until they've emerged on the other side. 

This is the job and this is the way young children learn the emotional display rules that most of us take for granted. Too many of us mistakenly believe that we can simply "teach" these rules by shaming (e.g., "Don't be such a baby"), dismissing (e.g., "Oh, that's nothing to get angry about"), commanding (e.g., "Stop that nonsense at once!), scolding (e.g.,"You're driving me crazy!"), and punishing (e.g., "If you don't pull yourself together, you can forget about ice cream"). This behaviorist approach, may produce temporary results in terms of children who have been bullied into compliance, but what children wind up learning is to be ashamed or afraid of their big emotions. Instead of figuring out healthy ways to feel and express, they learn to replace that with obedience to authority figures. Indeed, the behaviorist approach seeks to exchange authority figures for self-regulation, which means that all bets are off when the authority figure isn't present.

Not only that, but the behaviorist approach requires the psychologically unhealthy practice of "stuffing" emotions on command. And everyone knows that you can only stuff emotions for so long before they force their way out, usually in destructive ways.

As an early childhood educator, I strive to avoid imposing emotional display rules on children, drawing the line at physical violence. That means there's going to be some bawling, screaming, and shouting, often a great deal of it, as the children do the difficult, exhausting work of figuring it out, with me there, not as their leader or teacher, but as their colleague and guide. Simply put, if the goal is self-regulation, then we must create safe environments in which young children are free to practice self-regulation.

In many ways, this is the core work of the early years because ultimately it doesn't matter how academically precocious a person is, if they aren't capable of getting along with others, their life, and life of people around them, will be miserable. A big part of this, is learning to understand and obey any given culture's emotional display rules. But equally important is coming to recognize when toxic display rules (i.e., the ones imposed by behaviorists) must be broken, because at the end of the day, that is how we grow in emotional intelligence and agility.

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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.

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A Full, Rich, and Complex Life

I recently heard a researcher interviewed on the radio about her team's amazing discovery regarding a certain species of animal. At one point, she qualified her enthusiasm by saying that, of course, humans are much more "complex" than this particular animal, but that her team's discovery indicated that it was nevertheless "more complex than previously thought."

I can't recall the specifics of her research, but this knee-jerk need to rank species (more complex, less complex) with humans at the top, struck me a startlingly unscientific, if understandable, mindset.

I mean, my own life is definitely full and complex, it fills up every moment of every day, and I feel I can assume that this is true of you as well. I might not know the specifics of the rich fullness of your material-social-intellectual-emotional life, but I imagine, as a fellow human, it's there, like mine, all the time. So what makes us think the same complexity isn't true for, say, our pets? The prejudice is that other animals are simpler than us in that they are primarily motivated by baser instincts: food, procreation, and fight-or-flight survival type things. If we imagine that our dogs experience humanlike emotions, however, scientists caution us about anthropomorphizing, which is to attribute human characteristics to non-human things. 

But we know our dogs love us. I know that my dog experiences a full range of emotions, from joy and excitement to depression and despair. I know this, even as scientists might mock me for claiming to know it.

Dogs "see" the world through scent and sound in ways I cannot comprehend. There are spiders whose entire experience of the world is vibration; in fact, it could be said that they think with their web. Bats echolocate. Songbirds orient themselves according to the earth's electromagnetic fields. If any human possessed these abilities we would call them superhuman. I'm sure the radio scientist knows all of this, yet she still casually ranks humans ahead of other species, in part because it's an aspect of the scientific tradition to assume that humans are the apex of evolution and any effort to suggest that another species -- animal, plant, bacteria, or fungi -- is equally complex, is a kind of sacrilege. What's lost in this urge to rank is that every species that exists is the apex of evolution . . . so far. 

Indeed, animals, and especially humans, are new kids on the block. Plants, bacteria and fungi are our elders by billions of years. They haven't merely adapted to the environment, they've in many ways created the environment in which we, for a brief time, have been enabled to thrive.  The more you know, the more you see our species as no more or less complex than any other, it just feels more complex because we're inescapably inside of it, just as my dog, or that grapefruit tree outside my window, is inescapably inside inside its own rich, complex life.

The same goes for young children, even newborns. Our adult-centric world tempts us to view them as "simpler" humans, driven by random urges, and irrational responses. In our most light-hearted moods we find them cute, even precocious, but like that scientist, we often rank our own intelligence, our own sensibilities, our own concerns and consciousness as somehow above theirs. In our less charitable moments, we become frustrated by their "ignorance" or "immaturity." We dismiss their concerns as childish and their passions as simplistic, yet every child, every day, at every moment is living a life that is as full, rich, and complex as our own adult lives. 

When a child cries over something, or demands something, or eagerly anticipates something that we find simple or silly, rest assured, that the child doesn't find it simple or silly at all. As important adults in the lives of young children, we may know things they don't, but we ought not confuse that with superiority.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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The More Perspectives We Collect, the Better Educated We Become

While on one of our regular trips to New York City to visit our daughter, my wife and I went with her to the world premiere of our friend Rob Epstein's new documentary about the 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist live performance of Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music.

The biggest challenge for Rob and his co-director Jeffery Friedman was to take the hundreds of hours of footage from this one-time-only 24-hour performance during which Mac sang 246 songs, covering the span of American history from 1776 to 2016, and somehow condense it into two hours while still conveying the thought-provoking beauty of this unique performance. The film is currently wrapping up a short tour of large screens before premiering in its permanent home on HBO Max where it will be available for streaming as of June 27.

Going in, all I knew about Taylor Mac was that he is a well-regarded NYC actor, playwright, performance artist, director, producer, and singer-songwriter who has won numerous prizes and honors throughout his career including a MacArthur Genius Grant. Most people, however, would probably first and foremost label him as a drag queen. I also knew going in that he uses the word judy as a gender pronoun. I was going to have the opportunity to meet him after the premier and even practiced using judy, but found that everyone else, including his spouse, was using the traditional male pronouns, so that's what I did.

If what you've read so far plugs you in, I'm assuming you'll skip the documentary, although I urge you not to because you'll miss out on something extraordinary. 

History, they say, is told by the winners. And it's true to the extent that most of us learn the stories as told from the perspective of the majority, which in the case of American history tends to be white, male, and straight. As a straight, white male, I've seen myself at the center of the American story for most of my life, but for the past few decades I've found myself craving every alternative perspective I can get my hands on. American history as told from the perspective of a Native American tells different stories in different ways than the ones I grew up with. Black and brown people show me stories through perspectives that have always been there but are new to me. The stories told by women bring yet more depth and, again, perspective. The perspective presented by Taylor Mac is an unapologetically queer one. His choice to present it through the history of popular music, starting with Yankee Doodle Dandy (which we learn was originally sung by the British as an gay-slur insult to American soldiers), shows us that much of our history's beauty and horror has always hidden in plain sight (or sound) through songs we've known and loved.

As Mac sang a popular sea chanty from the early 1800's, a song about the teamwork of hoisting a sail, we see the beauty of Americans pulling together to get things done. When he pauses to explain that the lyrics tell us that when they are done they will go together to rape enslaved women, we are crushed by the causal horror with which many of our fellow Americans have always lived. I was reminded of the song Jump Jim Joe that we sang for years in preschool, not knowing its history in racist minstrel shows during the 1820's. When I learned this historical fact about our beloved song, one that I'd sometimes referred to as our school's anthem, I was at first reluctant to stop singing it. After all, the children didn't know. But now I knew and knowing meant it had to go. Mac says to his audience that he understands why someone might not want to give up something, anything, that builds community and brings people together. "I get it," he says. But when the core of that unity is "evil" we are morally obliged to rid ourselves of it.

This is exactly why I crave new perspectives, not just on history, but everything. The older I get, the more I understand that my understanding of the world, even things that I felt were firmly established, is always incomplete. There is always another perspective. As an Ojibwe educator named Hopi Martin once told me, even if you've talked with all the humans, you then have to start asking the animals and plants.

I was recently accused of "indoctrinating" children: first by an insulting neighbor, then, after posting here about it, by "readers" who may or may not have actually read my post about it. The basic gist of their collective objections was that, as parents, they and only they had the right to decide what, when, and how their children should be exposed to history, gender, sexuality, and race. In other words, they objected to the very idea of offering their children any perspective other than their own.

I get it. 

The perspectives of people who experience the world in ways other than we do force us to rethink everything, even some of the things we hold sacred. That can be upsetting, frightening, and, perhaps most importantly, it can make us feel that the things that hold our beloved community together are being threatened. It's upsetting to learn that our anthems are rooted in evil. The state song of Kentucky, as Mac tells us, originally included the racial slur "darkies." It was only changed, after a great deal of controversy, to "people" in the 1970's. People of Kentucky, that cosmetic change does not erase the evil.

But I get it. Allowing ourselves to see through the eyes of others always contains the prospect of transforming our world in both large and small ways. That can obviously be upsetting. No one wants to be shown their own evil, but true evil, I've found, comes from knowing better and not doing better. My discovery, however, is that most of what I learn from exposing myself to new perspectives does not take anything away from me, but rather adds to, and even multiplies, me. To put it selfishly, the more perspectives I collect, the bigger I become.

Viewing Taylor Mac's masterpiece as condensed for the screen in this documentary, caused me to squirm at times. I didn't always like how it made me feel. But it did make me bigger, which is what education is always all about. As the author Doris Lessing wrote, "People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself." In other words, our strongest defense against being indoctrinated, which is to say avoid being trapped by one narrow perspective, is to get out there, collect perspectives, and think for ourselves. The more perspectives we've understood, the easier it is to think for ourselves. No one possesses the whole truth, but together, sharing and listening, we might be able to come close.

I cried during my viewing of the documentary of Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music. It overwhelmed me as Mac urged the entire live audience of some 600 people to engage in a slow-motion fist fight with one another. It was both painful and joyful to see all those people, strangers brought together for a 24-hour theater experience, going through the motions of a fistfight, slapping, punching, and kicking, while simultaneously smiling, laughing, and creating. Together. 

To quote Lessing again, "That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way."

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Reason, Perseverance, Patience

Back in 2015, I came across a collection of Bloomberg graphs showing how America has changed its collective mind on social issues like interracial marriage, prohibition, women's suffrage, abortion, same-sex marriage, and the legalization of cannabis for recreational use. In most of the charts we see that these issues have a tendency to bubble along in terms of support, somewhat under the surface, with slow, uneven progress over decades, until, suddenly it seems, the change becomes inevitable.

Women's suffrage is the classic example. In 1890 Wyoming granted women the right to vote. Three other western states joined them (Colorado, Utah, and Idaho) joined them in fairly rapid succession. Then for 15 years after that, they remained the only states that permitted women to vote until, suddenly, between 1900-10 eight other states joined them. In the following five years, even more suddenly, another 15 states signed on, creating the momentum that lead to the passage of the 19th Amendment extending voting rights to women everywhere.

This phenomenon has stuck with me because I've spent most of my professional life hoping to move the needle on play-based, or self-directed, learning in preschool and beyond. The deeper I dig into the science of how humans learn, how our brains work, and how curiosity-based learning is the most rational approach if the goal is self-motivated citizens who work well with others. 

Standard schooling, contrary to the evidence, is largely based on a top-down approach in which adults tell children what, how, and when to learn, then employ an elaborate system of punishments and rewards designed to "motivate" the kids. Research consistently finds that this behaviorist approach to schooling is, at best, a waste time for most kids, and the main lessons many children learn are either that school is stupid or they are. 

When I started blogging here in 2009, I naively thought that I would be part of the sudden, final surge. After all, the case for play-based learning is so obvious. Despite the overwhelming scientific support for curricula based on play, however, and despite our best efforts, most schools have proven to be largely unable or unwilling to embrace any sort of meaningful change. This is true even as nearly every early childhood educator I've ever met knows the truth about play. 

One of the lessons I've taken from these charts, and my own experience with trying to move the needle, is that reason alone isn't enough. Societal progress also requires patience and persistence. After all there was a 180 year gap between when the first states that legalized interracial marriage (Pennsylvania and New Jersey) and it finally becoming law of the land in 1967. Another lesson I've taken from these charts is that in the beginning, it happens in just one or two states.

In 2018, New Hampshire amended its education law to require public kindergartens to provide "child-directed experiences," "movement," "creative expression," "exploration," "socialization," and "music." Oklahoma's Play to Learn Act passed in 2021 doesn't go quite as far, but it does state that "(s)chool districts shall not prohibit a teacher from utilizing play-based learning in early childhood education." This year, Connecticut's legislature passed education legislation that directs "playing-based learning during the instructional time of each regular school day" not only for publicly-funded kindergarten and preschool, but also encourages elementary school teachers to do the same. Not only that, but the law also requires professional development, including training on play-based learning for preschool through fifth-grade teachers.

I'm not discouraged by the fact that in all three states there remains a mandate for instructional time (e.g., academics) as well. I'm confident that when professional educators find themselves doing both, they will see, with their own eyes, the power of play. I'm a little less confident that administrators will "get it" as long as funding remains connected to standardized test scores. And I'm very concerned about the influence of for-profit "education companies" that will find that it's hard to make big bucks off play. But I'm hopeful that schools will discover that true play-based learning can be far less expensive than those off-the-shelf, churn-and-burn academic curricula that cost districts and states millions every year.

If you're an educator in New Hampshire, Oklahoma, or Connecticut, please know that you are in the vanguard. I urge you to embrace play as fully as you can, because that is the future, even if it's 180 years away.

I know it can be difficult to keep the big picture in view as we spend our days on our knees, eye-to-eye with children who need us to sooth them, to wipe their runny noses, and to listen with our full selves. I also know that it can feel like nothing changes when it comes to our schools. But I wanted to post this today as we launch the Fall 2024 cohort for my 6-week course Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, because, after decades of bubbling along under the surface, the slow, uneven progress toward play-based learning might be underway. Sure, there may still be decades between now and then, but this morning I'm hopeful that reason, perseverance, and patience will make this change inevitable.

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I've been forced to close commenting directly on blog posts because when I open it, the threads get spammed by bots, but if you're an educator in New Hampshire, Oklahoma, or Connecticut, I'd love to hear your thoughts on your states' new laws. Please drop me a line on Facebook, Instagram, X, or Linked-In. Or email me at TeacherTomHobson@TeacherTomsWorld.com. How is it going? What are your hopes? Fears? Thank you!

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 if the Goal of Education Was to Support Each Child in the Project of Coming Alive?

For the past week, I've been promoting the Fall 2024 cohort of my 6-week foundational course, Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning. Well, that's coming to an end. You have until midnight tonight to register (see below) . . . My greatest wish for every child who has ever come my way -- and every adult for that matter -- is that they find their purpose in life. What if we understood this to be the goal of education: to support each child in the project of coming alive?

 

He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most; God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us. ~Samuel Butler

I find that more and more of my peers are retired. They tell me that their plans are to seek their pleasure, to enjoy the grandkids, to golf, to travel, to garden, to paint. In other words, they are doing, or aspiring to do, all the things that our younger selves were told were, at best, a waste of time. Of course, that's why most of these people can afford to retire: they've worked hard, pinched a sufficient number of pennies, invested wisely (or luckily) and now, during what will hopefully be the final third of life, they can, without guilt, take their leisure.

I don't know if I'll ever be in a position to retire. Oh sure, my wife and I could likely figure out a way to manage it financially, but the truth is that I can't quite imagine life without my work. While I've yet to enjoy the fruits of a lucky monetary investment, I have been lucky in how I've invested my time, which has allowed me the great privilege of living a life of purpose, which, at the end of the day is indistinguishable from a life of pleasure. I'm lucky because as many of my peers are just now getting to the part of our lives we set aside for pleasure, I'm decades ahead of them. 

Aristotle believed that our highest calling was for each of us to find our true path in life and that the way to discover that was through the answer to the question "What gives you pleasure?" By that, he proposed that we seek out and embrace those things that we do without prompting, effortlessly. In fact, the Ancient Greek word for leisure, skhole, is the root of our English word for school. That's right, at the roots of Western civilization lies the transformative idea that school should be a place of leisure, a time to discuss and study, not what others assign you, but rather according to what gives you pleasure. And through that, we discover what it is that makes us come alive.

As the novelist Samuel Butler put it in his masterpiece The Way of All Flesh: "Pleasure, after all, is a safer guide than either right or duty. For hard as it is to know what gives us pleasure, right and duty are often still harder to distinguish and, if we go wrong with them, will lead us into just as sorry a plight as a mistaken opinion concerning pleasure. When men burn their fingers through following after pleasure they find out their mistake and get to see where they have gone wrong more easily than when they have burnt them through following after a fancied duty, or a fancied idea concerning right virtue. The devil, in fact, when he dresses himself in angel's clothes, can only be detected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does he adopt this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen talking to an angel at all and prudent people will follow after pleasure as a more homely but more respectable and on the whole much more trustworthy guide."

As a society, we hardly begrudge a retired person their leisure. After all, they've earned the right to it after a life at the grindstone, but there is a tinge of sorrow in it for me that so many of us arrive at that point having never known what it means to have lived a life of purpose. From a very young age, we are taught that the grindstone is our duty. To pursue pleasure, we're told, is selfishness, best confined to weekends and holidays. Many of us even define pleasure as a kind of sin against both man and nature. We're all too eager to subject even our preschoolers to the toil, and it is always toil when we are compelled to do things we'd rather not.

The argument, of course, is that if we allow children to live lives of leisure, they will simply squander their youth on television, social media, and video games. And despite the big talk about painting and golf and gardening, that's where so many of my retired peers wind up. And no wonder: when you've never had the choice, when leisure has always been the forbidden fruit, it's only natural, when finally "free," to gorge yourself. This is especially true for children, who are rarely allowed to forget that all too soon they will be forced back to their duty, back to virtue, and that their pleasure, if not brought to an end, will ruin them.

When we allow young children their leisure to play, however, we seen natural humans discovering purpose through the pursuit of pleasure. Unlike my retired peers, however, or any adult on holiday for that matter, the children's pleasure is not mere rest, escape, and irresponsibility, but rather curiosity and passion. That is the what Aristotle means by the question, "What gives you pleasure?" I don't need to pose it to the children, however, because without the impending and onerous threat of duty to the grindstone, or adherence to some code of virtue, leisure leads inevitably to discussion and study, to learning and action. This is the only way to discover our own unique path in life, that thing that elevates us beyond mere responsibility, to a life of purpose. Of course, I don't expect for preschoolers, through their play, to find their life's work, but I do hope that they learn what it means to come alive and that is exactly what the world needs: people who know how to come alive.

If you ask any elected official or policy maker a question about education, they will always connect it to the economy. "We must get the children ready for the jobs of tomorrow!" "We must out-educate the Chinese!" But they are not alone. Too many of us have likewise bought into this devil dressed as an angel.

I've spent my adult life as a play-based educator and as such I've spent much of my time defending what I know is right from these devils clothed in duty and virtue. Many accuse me of spoiling or ruining the children. Some have even declared that I'm the "problem with America." Through this blog, public speaking, courses, and other endeavors, I've attempted to give them a view from within our bubble, and perhaps some progress has been made. For instance, most reasonable people will today agree that preschoolers should be playing, although it all too often morphs into duty as they take up our words and twist them into "play with a purpose" or "teachable moments" or simply deploying the promise of play as a trick to turn their attention back toward duty and virtue.

Author and educator, John Holt described it like this: "One reason the walled garden of childhood does not work very well is that the people who build and maintain it cannot stay in it. This very often leads them to resent the children for whose sake the garden was built. How many times must adults, comparing the lives of their children and themselves, think bitterly, "Why should they have it so easy when I have it so tough?" Often they say it out loud. It leads to this, that the people who built the garden to protect the children from the harsh reality outside begin in the name of that same harsh realty to put weeds, and stones, and broken glass, and barbed wire into the garden. "They'd better learn," they say furiously, "what the world out there is really like."

This is the natural response of someone who has never been allowed the leisure to discover what it means to live a life of purpose. This is why Samuel Butler dared not publish his greatest novel during his own lifetime.

The biggest challenge faced by so many of my retired peers, from my perspective, is that they don't know what to do with a life that is suddenly free from the "harsh reality" of duty. They are suddenly confronted with the biggest question of all, the very one that preschoolers at play are always in the process of answering: Who am I going to be? It's a disconcerting thing, I imagine, to have lived most of your life only to find that without duty and virtue to hold them back, with the freedom to be anything, they simply don't know who they are. I can't tell you how many of my retired peers have resorted to working part time as cashiers and waiters, not for the money, but simply to feel that their life still has meaning.

As publisher and philosopher Antonia Case writes in her book Flourish (a deep exploration of what it means to live a life of purpose), "We are so governed by our minds that we can fool ourselves into believing that self-change comes from thinking about it . . . We fool ourselves into thinking that we just need a little time, some space, and then, once all the receptors are open, the voice within will tell us the way . . . But this is not how self-change happens. Your footsteps are the road and nothing more."

This is what we were born to do: for each of us to find our purpose and it is never discovered through duty or virtue. Indeed, duty and virtue are the very things that prevent us from enjoying the leisure that we need in order to discover what gives us pleasure (as opposed to escape), and is the ultimate guide to discovering, at any stage of life, what makes us come alive.

I dream of a day when we all understand that this is what it means to be educated.

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 This is your last chance to join the Fall 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. Registration closes at midnight tonight. It's a particularly powerful course to take with your entire team. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information 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!

Academic Preschools Harm Children

One of the most powerful aspects of my Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning course is that it supports entire "teams" of educators and caregivers to get on the same page when it comes to offering the kind of play-based learning young children need. (See below)

The long-term effects of the things we do to children in schools is a notoriously difficult thing to capture in research.

Generally speaking, however, we as a society have concluded, based on our collective behavior and with little evidence, that more academic training at earlier ages is the way to go. We assume that if we want kids to be good at school (a dubious goal at best) then we must give them lots of practice in preschool, which has lead in recent decades to two-year-olds being expected to sit at desks to be the targets of formal literacy and mathematics training. It has lead to our youngest citizens spending the bulk of their days indoors, focusing increasingly on things like worksheets and memorization drills. And it is harming them.

Many of us, including readers here, have looked on with horror. Preschoolers are simply not developmentally ready for this type of schooling. We see evidence that these unrealistic pressures are one of the leading causes of the current spike in childhood anxiety and depression. When we point any of this out, when we say that the push toward academic preschools is harmful to children and prevents them from working on the foundational social-emotional learning that young children need, proponents of top-down, adult-directed academic style schooling insist that it's the price we must pay for the long-term benefits, especially for disadvantaged children. They point to studies that show that children who are exposed to these "school readiness" types of curricula have a leg up with things like letter recognition and print awareness.

They can legitimately assert this because the research on the short-term effects consistently shows that children from academic preschool programs do enter kindergarten with certain advantages over those who have spent their preschool years playing. The part of the research that they ignore is that whenever an attempt has been made to study the long-term impact, we see that those advantages disappear rather quickly leaving the drill-and-kill kids largely indistinguishable academically, and worse off by other measures, from comparable peers who were not enrolled in academic-based programs. 

This is a consistent finding, going all the way back to the Perry Preschool Project, still the gold standard for long-term research on the impact of preschool. This study continues to track low-income children from a play-based program since the mid-1960's. They were the first to find that academic advantages faded rapidly once the kids moved on to elementary school. It's a result that has been replicated repeatedly, right up to a recent study on Tennessee's Pre-K program for children from low-income families that not only recreated this result, but found that by 3rd grade the children who attended the academics based program performed worse on both academic and behavioral measures than classmates who were never in the program.

In other words, the Tennessee Pre-K program harmed the children it sought to help.

The children studied in the Perry Preschool Project, however, the ones who attended a play-based, child-centered program also lost their short-term academic advantages, but continued, into adulthood, to reap the benefits of their behavioral head start. They had fewer teenage pregnancies, were more likely to have graduated from high school, to hold a job and have higher earnings, to commit fewer crimes, and to own their own home and car. They are more self-motivated, better at working with others, and, generally speaking, are more personable. 

The key, I think, is that these kids got to play when they were young, which is the soil from which healthy, happy, well-adjusted adults grow. 

(If you want to read more about the research into the harm caused by academic preschools, I urge you to take a look at this piece in Psychology Today from author and researcher Peter Gray.)

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One of the most powerful aspects of my Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning course is that it supports entire "teams" of educators and caregivers to get on the same page when it comes to offering the kind of play-based learning young children need. It gives educators the tools to reveal, explain, and defend their play-based program to parents and other stakeholders who have been taken in by the "academic" snake oil. Parents will likewise find this course empowering as they will learn to become effective advocates for what their child needs. Please join the Fall 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based learning pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. I can't wait to share it with you! Registration closes this week, so it's go time! For more information and to register, click here

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Play Isn't Silly, Play Isn't Silly at All

You'd think that people would've had enough of silly love songs

But I look around me and I see it isn't so

Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs

And what's wrong with that?

I'd like to know

'Cause here I go again.

                          ~Wings (Paul McCartney)

On her album Cowboy Carter, Beyonce covers and updates Dolly Parton's heart wrenching classic Jolene. Whereas the original is about a woman in love begging for mercy from a rival who has set her sights on her man, this new version is about a woman in love threatening that same woman. As Parton said about the new version, "Beyoncé is giving that girl some trouble and she deserves it!"

If an alien from another planet were to try to understand "love" by listening to our love songs, it would likely conclude that we don't know what we're talking about. Love is kind. Love is a battle field. Love is blind. Love is a second hand emotion. Love saves. Love is a lie. Even more confusing, I imagine, would be to realize that these songs are mostly about romantic love: that there is also parental love, the love of a child for a parent, spiritual love, and love as a universal, unifying force. We love our cereal. We love that love song. Love makes the world go 'round. People die for love. And for the same reason that we will never run out of love songs, our alien researcher would never reach the end of a definition because there is always something else or someone else or some way else to experience that crazy little thing called love.

Just as there is no agreed upon definition for "love" there is no agreed upon definition for "play." Defining play is every bit as elusive as defining love, probably because it includes emotion, intelligence, and behavior that is universal in terms of both time and space. The best we can hope for, for all practical purposes, is to identify characteristics or conditions, that when they exist, would indicate that a person is playing, but an all inclusive definition is far beyond us.

And that's fine, because on a day-to-day basis, none of us need a definition of play. We know it when we see it, or feel it, and that's enough, which is likewise true for love. I mean, if you've got it in your life, why mess around trying to pick it apart, right? Both tend to disappear when looked at too closely, so the best plan is to use it or lose it.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what scientists do, pick things apart in order to understand them, and in our modern world, if science can't explain it, if there is no data to discuss, then it's nearly impossible to get policymakers, for instance, to take it seriously. Without an agreed upon definition, play, like love, appears to the hardheaded decision-makers as silly.

I think this is why we've had so much difficultly creating a cohesive and persuasive body of research to support play-based learning. If you can't define what you are studying, the tools of the scientific method, like creating replicable experiments, won't work.

In his book The Genesis of Animal Play, evolutionary biologist Gordon Burghardt proposes five characteristics that must exist in order for us to call behavior play: 1) It must be nonfunctional (at least not obviously connected to survival or reproduction), 2) It must be purely voluntary and not forced by external influence, 3) It must be distinct from the animal's other behaviors, 4) It must involve repeated movements, but with variations and modifications, and 5) It can only occur when the animal is well-fed, safe, and healthy.

Of course, not all scientists agree with Burghardt. Indeed, I imagine that many of the play-based practitioners reading this have quibbles, and therein lies the challenge we face, I think. If we are to get policymakers, administrators, parents, and others to understand the power and centrality of childhood play, our modern world demands a robust body of research that "proves" it.

Over the decades I've tried to share the science and data about play, but the current state of affairs is that it's all over the place, often unconnected and contradictory, usually because each study seems to start with a different idea of what constitutes play. There is over a century of play research out there, but it doesn't feel like we are any closer to understanding play within the context of human evolution and learning than we were 100 years ago.

Perhaps that's because play, like love, is always in the eye of the beholder.

Love doesn't come in a minute

Sometimes it doesn't come at all

I only know that when I'm in it

It isn't silly, love isn't silly

Love isn't silly at all.

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Despite our inability to agree on definitions, we know it when we see it, even if it takes different forms in different places, with different people. The bottom line is that the scientific consensus is us that young children learn most of what they need to learn through play, through their self-selected activities, through asking and answering their own questions. Whether you are just starting out as a play-based educator, are a veteran of play, or are a parent/caregiver interested in providing children a playful childhood, please consider joining us. Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning is a 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed to make you think deeply about the role you play in the lives of children, and give you the inspiration, insight and tools needed to create an environment of genuine play for the children in your life. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information 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!

Helping You Develop Your Own Unique Approach to Play-Based Learning

I started this blog in 2009 simply because I'd written a couple articles for Seattle's Child magazine that I thought were pretty good and felt they deserved a life beyond the recycling bin. That was the entirety of my ambition. This blog would provide an online home for these two articles. Period. They didn't have any readers beyond my friends and family, and that was fine because that's all I expected.

Before long, however, I began adding posts, inspired by the children as they spent their days playing at Woodland Park. It became a place where I told their stories, where I told my stories, and where I told our stories. As the only teacher in this school owned by the parents who enrolled their kids, I began to crave connection with other educators who felt as I did, who were learning from young children as they played. It took some hunting back then, but I finally found a handful other educators scattered around the globe that were, like me, celebrating play-based learning.

The cocktail of being a relatively new teacher, children at play, and these inspiring women, who to this day I think of as sisters, was a heady one. Our little informal collective began to inspire one another. We shared ideas and projects. We challenged one another. We one-upped one another. We had each felt alone in our play-based worlds, but now that we had found one another we began to realize that maybe we weren't crazy after all. In a world in which preschool was becoming increasingly academic and, frankly, hard-hearted, we were creating, in our own ways, and in our own corners of the globe, the opposite.

We were trusting children.

We were following children.

We were embracing this radical idea that, through play, through their self-selected activities, the children in our care were learning to be self-motived, to work well with others, to be critical thinkers, and, most of all, to love learning. 

Slowly at first, then suddenly, we all began to see our audiences grow. There were others like us! I guess I knew that something big was happening in 2013 when I was invited to speak in Athens Greece where a man who I now count as a dear friend, John Yiannoudis, had started his own urban preschool based, he told me, "on your philosophy." 

I have a philosophy?

When I met John face-to-face he confessed, "At first I thought, 'Who is this crazy guy in a red cape doing all these crazy things with kids?' But then I started reading your posts and realized that this is what I wanted for my own daughter."

John had organized an event at which I was the only speaker, scheduled for 6 pm on a Friday night, and the venue he had rented seated 400 people. Talk about crazy! When I saw all those empty seats on the day before the event I felt sorry for him. I imagined how disappointed he was going to be. There was no way, I thought, that more than a couple dozen people would turn out for this event featuring an English-speaking preschool teacher from a little cooperative school halfway around the world. 

When the day arrived, however, there were people sitting in the aisles. Maybe this idea of play-based learning wasn't so crazy after all.

Over the years, as I've continued to write, I've tried, each day, to share something true, something I've learned, or something about which I still have questions. And nearly every day someone tells me, echoing John, that they want "this" for the children in their lives -- play. Over the years I've received thousands of messages from educators and parents asking how to "do what you do."

This is the motivation behind my 6-week course, Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, in which I share my "philosophy," one that places the pure joy of learning at the center. In this course, I provide the details, insights, and reasons behind my unique approach to child-led, play-based learning, with the idea of helping you to develop your own unique approach, one that honors the children and families in your life.

My career as an educator has been an accidental one in many ways. I was lucky to find my way to where I am. I'm grateful to my readers, my mentors, my blog sisters, and especially the families and children who continue to inspire me to look deeper, to think more radically, and, ultimately, play harder. You have helped me realize that I do have a philosophy, one that has emerged one blog post at a time, one question at a time, one epiphany at a time. I've been sharing it little by little for well over a decade now, scattered over 4000 posts, two books, and hundreds of talks. This new course is my attempt to pull it all together in one place, not so that you can do what I do, but rather so that you can do what's best for the children in your life, which is, as always, to let them play.

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Registration is now open for the Fall 2024 cohort for my 6-week course, Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning. It's for early childhood educators, parents of young children, grandparents, and caregivers who believe the radical idea that children deserve an authentic childhood centered around play and wonder. You will be both challenged and inspired as we launch into the new school year. Sign up your entire "team" (discounts available) to get everyone on the same page! Click here to learn more and register.

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 Radical Idea of Treating Children Like People

As we open enrollment for the Fall 2024 cohort of my 6-week course, Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, I'm reminded once again how radical our ideas are about young children. I forget that not everyone trusts children even if most people say they do. I forget that most adults are convinced that children must be guided, coerced, tricked or otherwise manipulated to do "right" things, even as they genuinely profess a belief in their innate goodness. I forget that out there, outside our bubble, grown-ups might proudly say they want "kids to be kids," yet their behavior demonstrates that they can't imagine them thriving absent a background of near constant correction, "good jobs," and unsolicited advice. Most people think that we agree with one another about children, but once we get talking, they start to realize that what we're saying is radical.

It's the radical idea that children are fully formed people, due the rights and respect due to all the other people. When we treat adults as untrustworthy, when we seek to guide, coerce, trick or otherwise manipulate them, when we correct or offer false praise or unsolicited advice, we are generally considered to be jerks of the highest order. Yet somehow, many of us, maybe most of us, live in a world in which it's considered normal to treat children this way.

Do they need us when they're young? Of course they do, in the way that seeds need gardeners to make sure the soil is well-tended, that it is protected, and that it gets enough water, but the growing, the sprouting, the leafing, the budding, the blooming, and the fruiting is up to the plant.

I am spending more time these days outside of our bubble, interacting with adults who seem to genuinely want to do the right thing by children, to do better by children, but who are stuck with misguided ideas of what children are. They have no notion that, from an historical perspective, what they think is normal is not: for children to spend their days doing what the grown-ups tell them to do, to sit still, to spend all those hours indoors, to move from place to place driven by a schedule rather than curiosity. Recently, I was in a meeting with a pair of partners interested in investing in educational matters. Their own children had both been in cooperative preschools like the one in which I taught for nearly 20 years. One of them said, "On my first day working in the classroom I was down on my knees helping the kids build with blocks. Teacher Sandi tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'This is the children's project, not yours.' That was a real eye-opener for me."

I know Teacher Sandi. I know exactly how she said it. I've done it myself, often to highly accomplished professional people "slumming" for a day in the classroom. This kind of thing, as simple and as obvious as it sounds to those of us who have dedicated our lives to progressive play-based education, is for most people still a radical idea. Sometimes the thought of making the changes that need to happen seems overwhelming. It makes me want to crawl back into the bubble and stay there, focusing on the children of the parents who get it. But then I'm encouraged by how readily this radical idea can also become an "eye-opener," just as it was for me as I set out on the same journey more than two decades ago, and just as it continues to be.

Most of what I've learned from and about young children over the past two decades comes down to un-learning the modern lessons of parenting, schooling, and the capabilities of children. I've discovered that if I am to do right by children I must release control, shut up and listen, get out of their way, and love them. And whenever I'm challenged, whenever things are not going well, I've discovered that the answer always lies in returning to the radical idea of treating children like people.

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Treating children like people stands at the center of play-based learning. Please join this new cohort for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, a popular 6-week foundational course on my play-based pedagogy, designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents and grandparents. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information 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!