Classroom Management Based on Helping Children Get Their Needs Met

I met this four-year-old boy because he had been forced to leave his previous preschool. Apparently, he had taken to hitting, biting, kicking, and otherwise abusing the adults around him. From what I'd been told, and I didn't quite buy it, he got along well with other kids, it was just the adults. Whatever the case, I would know the truth soon enough. As he glared at me from under his bangs, I knew we were starting out from a place of distrust.

I said, "Good morning" to him without any extra enthusiasm, then let him go about his business. My original plan might have been to spend the morning getting him on my bandwagon, but that was out the window with his very clear signals to back off, so plan B was to observe him from afar. And sure enough, he began making friends right away. His father had told me that he was a "big fan" of Legos, so I'd dumped our entire collection of plastic bricks into the sensory table and that's where he spent most of his morning, talking constantly about the cool things he was making. He positioned his body as far away from the adult as possible without leaving the table entirely.

I've known kids who were suspicious of me before, who found my personality a little too big, my voice a little too loud, my presence a little too overwhelming. I get that, but I'd never met a kid who kept his distance from all adults, his own parents, of course, excluded. His father had told me that he felt the problem in his previous school was that the teacher "kept getting in power struggles" and his son "always wins power struggles."

The boy had a spectacular morning, frankly. He was charming and engaged, eventually moving away from the Lego table, making a little art, checking out the cabinets in the home center, playing a round of a board game. He even sought me out at one point to show me the Batmobile he had created from Lego. The family, in consultation with an occupational therapist who had found nothing "diagnosable" in her time with the boy, had come to Woodland Park in the spirit of getting a new start.

It wasn't until we hit clean up time that his glare returned. "I'm not going to clean up!" he shouted at me when I passed where he sat, sulkily against a wall. "Fair enough," I answered, "Maybe you want to read a book or something." This is my standard response to a child who opts out and wants me to know about it.

Later as we gathered for circle time, he said, "I'm not coming to circle time." Again, I answered, "Fair enough," adding, "Sometimes kids like to spend circle time in the loft where it's quiet. If you change your mind, you can always join us."

I was employing a technique borrowed from improve comics. Too often, important adults in the lives of children become so focused on controlling a child's behavior that we forget that our primary role is to help children get their needs met. When we find a way to tell a child "Yes, and . . ." we are letting them know that we are on their side, that we are not "opposition," but rather an ally. What we say after the word "and" is a suggestion for an alternative to conflict.

All too often, traditional "classroom management" advice involves adults drawing hard lines with rules, schedules, and other expectations, enforcing them with the threat of punishment. This, of course, puts them in direct opposition to all children, but especially strong-willed children, which invariably leads to the class power struggle this boy's father was talking about.

That first day, the boy simply glared at us from his stance of opting out, although he did take my suggestion to look at books as the rest of us tidied and took refuge in the loft during circle time. And he made those choices the following day and the day after that, as the rest of us went about the business of our community, tidying up, singing songs, and talking about important things. 

On his fourth day with us, however, our circle time conversation turned to superheroes. One of the kids asserted, "I like Batman because he can fly to the clouds." I'd noted that the boy had been listening to us from afar and this was something he clearly couldn't let stand. "No he can't!" We all turned as he came down from the loft to tell us, "Batman doesn't fly. He swings on a rope and drives a Batmobile."

As the other children took up further debate, he slowly made his way across the room, drawn in by the manifest importance of this conversation. He had chosen to join us, a choice he continued to make from that time forward.

He never lost his knee-jerk opposition to adults who would presume to tell him what to do. It would come out whenever we forgot that his healthy need to think for himself must first be met. Of course, all children have this need, but in this boy it was particularly pronounced. It's an instinct that might frustrate future teachers who don't know that "challenging behaviors" are almost always best addressed by examining ourselves and our environment. The key is transforming how we think, how we feel, and how we talk about children who exhibit challenging behavior. And more often than not, this starts with stepping back from our urge to command and control to take a long hard look at what needs are not being met.

This is often a difficult thing to do. Our culture tells us that it is in the job description of any adult who works with children to "control" them, to make them behave, to insist upon obedience, to walk them in single file lines, to make them do their fair share. This attitude is reinforced everywhere, and it stands at the center of nearly every conventional "classroom management" system out there. 

As classroom teachers we are often, first and foremost, judged for our "classroom management" skills, which is really just fancy jargon for compelling obedience. Parents are often judged by how appropriately their children behave and when they misbehave it's the parents who have "lost control." In other words, we, as a society, expect young children to instantly and without objection set aside their own needs, always, and upon command, in favor of the needs expressed by the adult, be it for quiet, stillness, tidying up, or whatever. No wonder some children, like this boy, rebel. Indeed, I worry most about the children who simply go along with whatever they are told to do.

In my brand new 6-week course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management -- we will explore a whole range of techniques designed to let the air out of this cycle, and refocus our efforts on helping each child get their needs met, including the use of "Yes, and . . ."

When we see our role as helping children get their needs met, rather than controlling them, much of what we label as "challenging behavior" is transformed. By not engaging in power struggles with this boy, I discovered that he had a strong need for autonomy, to make his own decisions, a healthy, natural thing. When I offered, "Yes, and . . . ," I let him know that he was heard and, even more importantly, trusted.

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, click here.

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

Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management

I'm excited to announce that registration is open for my brand new 6-part course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management.

The phrase "classroom management" has always bugged me. Most of the time, when people use it, they're talking about adults who have "managed" to make their preschool classroom into a quiet place populated with well-mannered, attentive, motivated children, who raise their hands, walk in lines, and obey the teacher. 

More often than not, when people use the term "classroom management," what they're really talking about is some sort of system of behavioral mangement involving rules, schedules, punishments, and rewards: classic behaviorism. The adult's role is that of a benevolent dictator. As an educator once put it to me, "I'm their best friend until they cross the line, then I come down like a house of bricks." 

As an approach to both behavior and learning, behaviorism is an archaic oversimplification of human cognitive processes. It centers the relationship between adults and children on adult power and external motivation (rewards and punishments), ignoring what we know about how the human brain learns. Not only that, but command, control, and manipulation, the core of behaviorism, is an incredibly disrespectful way to interact with our fellow humans, even if they are children. It teaches that obedience, not thinking, is their highest calling.

My play-based classrooms have never been like that. Indeed, visitors have often used the term "controlled chaos" to describe what's they see happening. 

Sure, it can get loud and even a bit rowdy, but are the kids engaged? All of the time. Are they motivated? All of the time. Are they learning? At full capacity.

. . . But are they well-behaved? Perfectly. They are behaving like preschoolers who are engaged, motivated, and learning. You see, disobedience isn't a problem if obedience isn't the goal. 

A well-managed classroom is one in which the children are free to follow their curiosity, in the company of others, while getting real-world practice in living in a world with other people. Instead of learning to obey, the children think for themselves, make their own agreements with one another, and learn how to get their own needs met while also creating the space for others to met their's. It's no place for rewards or punishments, but rather an opportunity to learn through the natural consequences of their behavior. A well-managed play-based classroom may well look chaotic from the perspective of behaviorism, but that's because the "control" is discovered through self-regulation (the gold standard for behavior) rather than external force.

This course is intended for play-based educators, directors, and owners who are committed to respecting and honoring children as they learn through experience rather than rules. This course is especially for preschool and kindergarten teachers who find themselves overwhelmed by behavior management. And even if you're not a purely play-based practitioner (yet), I promise that once you've taken this course, you'll never go back to your old behaviorism system of classroom management.

I've based this course on nearly three decades of experience, my pedagogical philosophy, best practices, and on-the-ground practical methods, tips, and ideas. You will learn how to "manage" your classroom in a way that maximizes children's freedom, learning, and fun, without slipping into actual chaos (at least most of the time!). Not only will the children be empowered to develop intellectually, emotionally, and socially, but as an educator you will spend far les time dealing with so-called "challenging behaviors" and a lot more time focused on supporting what maters most: learning.

True play-based learning involves treating young children as fully formed humans with the attendant rights, responsibilities, and freedoms, and that's the kind of classroom management children need and deserve.

If this sounds interesting, check it out by clicking here. I'd love to see you in the first cohort for this course.

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Click the link to register and learn more about my new 6-week course -- Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. 

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

Spoiling What Should Be Our Greatest Pleasures

A couple days ago, my wife and I got a hankering for shortbread. We then proceeded to eat too many shortbread cookies. They were delicious. The desire was sated . . . probably for a good long while. Not only did I spend the rest of my afternoon feeling slight queasy, but we were dinner guests that evening and I felt compelled by politeness to do their efforts justice. I went to bed stuffed to the gills which impacted my sleep, casting a pall over the following day.

I've often joked with children that the best part of being a grown-up is that you can eat cookies any time you want. The worst part of being a grown-up is also that you can eat cookies any time you want.

When we're hungry our bodies release the neurotransmitter dopamine, which motivates us to seek out food and take pleasure in eating it, hence the idiom "Hunger is the best sauce." It's an evolutionary strategy that kept our species alive during most of human existence when food was relatively scarce and often took great effort to acquire. 

In other words, our willpower is up against two millennia of evolution. 

Not only have many of us have learned to eat without hunger, we've also taken much of the effort out of it as well. When previous generations desired shortbread, it wouldn't have been handled by a quick trip to the neighborhood supermarket. Assuming there was butter, sugar, salt, flour, and vanilla in the pantry, it would have, at a minimum, required baking. But if any ingredient was in short supply it would mean a trip to the next village, or at least to a neighbor's, to borrow a cup of whatever was missing. Depending on circumstances, it might have taken the better part of a day before the urge was satisfied.

As it was, it was too easy. I overate, without appetite, and thus without pleasure. Objectively, that home cooked meal was good, but it was all I could do was choke down enough of it to convince my host that I was grateful.

"Just as eating contrary to the inclination is injurious to the health," wrote one of history's great polymaths Leonardo da Vinci, "so study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in."

Neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists tell us that dopamine is likewise connected to how our brains have evolved to learn. Dopamine plays a key role in memory and concentration and is what has motivates us to learn new things, but first must come the appetite for learning. And our hunger for learning is whetted by necessity and curiosity. Otherwise, as happens all too often in top-down, adult-centric curricula schools, we find ourselves choking it down without because we don't want to risk disappointing the grown-ups.

One of the reasons, I overate was that I was raised in the era in which the "clean plate" was expected of all good little children. Today, most of us understand that, as da Vinci knew, it's unhealthy to eat beyond hunger, so while we might still, in the name of politeness, insist that our children "at least try" something, we know to back off forcing them to keep eating when they aren't hungry. Our schools, however, have emphatically not learned this lesson when it comes to learning. Indeed, just as it was considered shameful to leave food on your plate, schools teach our children that's it's shameful to not learn everything being taught, no matter how dull and irrelevant. It's the surest way possible to destroy self-motivation because to learn without curiosity spoils the memory, just as that shortbread spoiled my appetite.

Play-based learning is self-directed learning. It is learning in the way we have evolved to learn. Dopamine often gets a bad rap because it can be manipulated to make us behave as addicts, always seeking that next "fix" be it easy food, sex, or endlessly scrolling through our social media feeds looking for something, anything new. Indeed, it's strange that one of the few areas of life in which we actively suppress dopamine is at school, where it would do the most good. Instead, we've made "learning" into the glamorous twin of overeating, spoiling what should be among our greatest pleasures. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

Unleashing Our "Unlimited Power"

In Sarah Perry's picture book classic If . . ., she surprises us with illustrated responses to prompts like, "If butterflies wore clothes," "If caterpillars were toothpaste," and "If toes were teeth." Whenever we read that book I suggest that the kids might want to try their hand at their own "If . . ." illustrations.

Once a boy sat down to illustrate "If 1 were 2 . . ." Isak was one of those preschoolers who was teaching himself to read. He had recently discovered the concept of the "silent H." He liked the idea so much that he began writing his own name as H-i-s-a-k, "with a silent H." When he learned that my proper name was Thomas, also with a silent H, we became "silent H brothers."

In other words, he was intellectually creative, the kind of kid destined for "gifted" programs, but this illustration stumped him. He sat in front of a blank page with his pencil poised for a good half hour, often muttering to himself. At one point he seemed frustrated, so I suggested he come up with a different "If . . ." statement to illustrate, but he wanted to draw this one. I joked that he could draw a person with two heads and four arms, but he informed me that this was about numbers, not people. So there he sat, alone in a crowded room, considering what this idea might look like. But try as he might, he couldn't get his head around it. When he finally walked away, all he had managed was a faint, aimless line of graphite.

Imagine a square circle.

Imagine a new color not based on any color you've ever seen before.

Imagine a realty in which the past, present, and future exist both simultaneously and infinitely. The math tells us that this is indeed reality, but even our genius physicists break their brains trying to imagine it.

A person who has been blind since birth cannot imagine the color red, no matter how creatively we try to explain it to them. A person who has never smelt cannot imagine the scent of a rose. A person who has never heard cannot imagine a mockingbird's song.

"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man," writes philosopher David Hume, "and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external sense, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision."

"What if pencils had arms"

In other words, it seems that everything that's in our heads must first come to us through our senses, and try as we might, we cannot easily think outside the box of our senses, our sensory unwelt, as biologists call it. Some, like Hume, say it's literally impossible. I hope he's wrong, but I suspect he's right. I might think I can imagine what it's like to "see" through echolocation like a bat does. Indeed, in his book An Immense World, journalist Ed Yong, tells the story of a blind human who seems to have figured it out, but no matter how skilled he becomes, he'll likely never actually "see" the way a bat does and the color red will remain out of his reach. 

Hisak found himself confronted by this limitation of the human perspective.

Meanwhile, the other children were producing silly pictures based on their own "If . . ." statements.

"What if a cow was also a chicken?" resulted in a crazy mash-up of cow and chicken parts.

"What if slides were hats?" resulted in a silly picture of a person wearing a slide as a hat.

"What if clouds were body parts?" resulted in a human made of puffy clouds.

"What if hearts had butts."

These children were creating and imagining from that "original stock of ideas" furnished by their senses. They had experienced cows and hats and clouds which allowed those concepts to be playthings for their minds. 

Hisak disliked mud and mess. He was motivated by abstractions like letters and numbers, while his classmates embraced the mud and mess. It's irrelevant, especially as preschoolers, where they focus their senses. The greater their stock of ideas, the more raw material they have to mix, compound, separate, and divide. This is our "unlimited power" and it's why a proper education must be driven by curiosity and led by the senses, all the senses.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

Making Makes Meaning

When children pick up the hot glue gun, many are drawn in simply by the prospect of using this oft forbidden tool. Others have made a search of the junk box and are intrigued by something they've found there. In Angie's case, she had found the plastic housing for one of my asthma inhalers. 

I'd collected a dozen or so of them, run them through the dishwasher, then dropped them in the box only that morning. As usual, several of the children had chosen to construct with them. I've found that children find these particular artifacts uniquely compelling. Perhaps it's because most of them have no idea what they are, which allows them to be anything. 

One boy, immediately identified them as "cannons," then used several them on the "fort" that this idea inspired. He talked of "blasting" invading aliens, pirates, and other assorted baddies as he worked.

Another boy used one as an engine for his rocket. He'd been inspired to make a rocket by a paper towel tube. Discovering the inhaler shell was the final touch. 

If Angie knew what she was making, she didn't say. All we know is that she wanted to use that inhaler. We know because she had said, holding it up, "I'm going to use this." She then spent the morning on her project. Starting from that inhaler, it grew over the course of an hour, taking shape in the way only hot glue gun projects can, into an elaborate landscape? Building? Artwork? People kept guessing. She neither confirmed, nor denied, but rather listened to each guess almost as if she was considering whether or not she agreed.

At the end of the day, we ask the children if they want to take their projects home. It's always surprised me that most don't. They know that if they stay at school we're going disassemble them and return the still usable parts back to the junk box for future projects. Maybe that's why so many are okay with having their work destroyed: they can always make it again tomorrow. After all, for many, the "making" is the fun part.

Angie wanted to take hers home. Her mother, upon seeing it, turned to me bemusedly, "Is that one of your asthma inhalers?" 

A couple days later Angie brought her project back to school. I figured she was ready to dismantle it and start over, but instead she only wanted to repair it. This happened several times over the course of the next few weeks until her mother bought Angie her very own hot glue gun for home use. I never saw that construction again.

Years later, I ran into her mother at the supermarket. She said, "I actually think of you every day," but before my chest swelled too much, she added with a kind of sneer, "I still can't get Angie to throw out your damned asthma inhaler!" 

Making makes meaning. Making makes something, anything, matter.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

Racing Heart, Sweaty Palms, Tense Muscles

I once knew a two-year-old who was terrified of pinecones. In nearly every other circumstance, he was a bold, confident child, but when he spied a pinecone he froze in fear.

One day, to his horror, noticed that there were cones on the branches of a scotch pine that lived on the playground. We all know the feeling, racing heart, sweaty palms, tense muscles. That day, he couldn't be outdoors at all. For the next week, it was all he could do to cross the playground to the front door each morning. The tree, he discovered, was visible through the classroom windows, so he attempted to spend the entire day with his back turned to them. He would go outside, he loved playing outside, but avoided the corner where the tree grew. There were moments when he forgot, and glimpsed the pine cones overhead and the fear would overwhelm him. Slowly, however, over the course of weeks, he began to intentionally turn toward the tree and its pinecones. Then he began to talk about them, "I can see the scary pinecones." Since learning of his fear, I'd been meticulous about discarding any stray cones that had fallen to the ground, but one day he asked me to "pick one down" for him. He kept his distance. He definitely didn't want to touch it. But he did stand his ground as he made is study from afar.

Another boy, likewise bold, was petrified by mascots, like the kind you see at sporting events. It normally didn't impact his life. Mascots are generally easy to avoid, but I once went trick-or-treating with him. It turned out that costumes were fine, he didn't bat an eye, but when we came across a person dressed in a full body suit and an oversized head, he freaked. Our daughter couldn't bear the presence of crabs, which is a problem in a seafood city like Seattle where live tanks abound. She would throw herself on the ground and refuse to move which meant I had to make sure our course around the supermarket avoided the fish counter.

One of my own irrational fears is dogs. Growing up in suburbia, my earliest exposure to dogs was being warned about rabies. If we were playing outdoors and a stray dog showed up (and back then a lot of dogs were allowed to roam the neighborhood) we were told to assume it was rabid and get inside, quick! Otherwise, we'd risk being attacked and, supposedly, the only antidote was delivered through a ten inch long needle -- at least that's what the neighborhood kids said. This is obviously the seed from which my irrational fear grew. In fact, it shows that there is nothing irrational about my fear.

It also illustrates that the difference between my irrational fear and yours: mine makes sense. I'm sure the boy who feared pinecones, if he'd had the words, would agree.

Today, of course, I live with a dog, the seventh one I've lived with over the course of my life, and I'm friends with many more. Yet still, when I see a dog running around off its leash, I have a brief physical experience of panic. My heart races, my palms sweat, my muscles tense, but my brain has learned to wave off these physical manifestations of fear, because, you know, it's irrational even if my body remains convinced by those earliest experiences.

I imagine we all have some kind of irrational fear, be it clowns, insects, or the sight of blood. These fears can, of course, be debilitating. In that case, we turn to professional help, but for most of us, we've come up, over time, with our own philosophy or strategy or other habit of mind that allows us to live with these fears. Most of the time it involves some version of ad hoc exposure therapy, often induced by life offering us a choice between our fear and something we value. In my case, it started when Mrs. Beale offered to pay me to care for their German Shepard JB while they were away on vacation. I had to choose between my fear and more money than I'd ever had before in my life. And so it was that I got paid $1 a day to begin what has turned out to be a lifelong process of exposure therapy until today most would consider me a dog lover, having no inkling of the occasional racing heart, sweaty palms, and tense muscles.

The boy who feared mascots became his high school's mascot during his senior year.

In our daughter's case, she still won't eat crab, but she's learned, over time, to be "fine" with other people at her table enjoying it. 

As for the boy who feared pinecones, I was his teacher for another two years and the subject never came up again after the day he had me "pick one down," although I could tell it persisted by the way he would occasionally cast a wary eye toward the tree. The school moved to a new location the following year. Our new playground had no pines, although the ground was covered in cedar cones. I don't know if he had any feelings about them. If he did, he never mentioned it. He was too busy doing what he enjoyed most, playing outdoors, but I imagine there were moments when his heart still raced, his palms still sweat, and muscles still tensed.

Therapists are there to help us overcome our irrational fears, but for most of us, most of the time, just by living, we encounter the exposure therapy we need. Sometimes we just call it experience.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

As a Man Who Can See the Future

Physicists assure us that despite how it seems, there is no difference between the past and the future. The math tells us it's true, even as the perspective provided by the biology of human bodies simply doesn't allow us to experience the past (except through our unreliable memories) or the future (except through even more unreliable fortune tellers). The cliché is to shrug and say that all we have is the present, but even the present isn't truly available to us. It takes a few milliseconds for our sensations to reach our brains, so even what we are experiencing right now is actually occurring ever so slightly in the past.

In his introduction to The Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut wrote: "Stephen Hawking . . . found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the future is child's play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now . . . To Stephen Hawking and all others younger than myself I say: 'Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and likes you no matter what you are.'"

I'll be 63 in a few weeks, more than 20 years older than Vonnegut was when he wrote his great novel. As a young man, I often wondered about what would become of me. I worried about it. I wished for a glimpse, just a tiny glimpse of my life as an old man. I thought that if I could see where I live in the future, how I live, who I'm with, I could rest easy in the choices I was making in the present. If I saw my future self as, say, a professional baseball coach, I would know not to quit playing baseball. If I saw my future self as a happily married man, I'd know not to mourn the women with whom I'd already broken up. If I saw my future as a down-and-out drifter, or a convict, or if there was no future at all, I'd at least be able to relax and enjoy myself while I still could. After all, if the math is right, if the future already exists, there's nothing I can do to change it, even if everything I do will help bring it to reality.

Like Vonnegut, remembering the future is now child's play for me, but what never occurred to me as a young man is that there is a future beyond 63. From my younger perspective, life seemed to be about striving to get through school, get on that career track, find that special someone, then, I guess, just coast the rest of the way. If I'd seen myself as I am today, I'm quite certain that I'd have, at some level, neglected to live in the present because what I have now would have looked, on the surface, pretty good to my younger self. If I'd known the whole story from the start, my life would have been a lot of going through the motions which is how people with clinical depression say they experience life. Oh sure, I'd get fired up for the day I met my wife or the birth of our daughter, but every bit of joy would be tempered by the certainty of those times when illness or stupidity or bad luck made life suck. And always, down the road, would be this 63-year-old man that I've become no matter what I did. All this to say that I'm thankful that I never met the genii to grant my wish for a peek into the future.

Schooling, as it's practiced today, is an effort to shape this unknowable future. "We must get our children ready for the jobs of tomorrow" is the mantra of our policymakers whenever they talk about education. It's BS, of course, because no one knows what those jobs of tomorrow are going to be. At best, our schools are preparing children for the jobs of today, most of which are soon be relegated to the past. But really, when we look at what's actually being taught in our schools, we're mostly just preparing children for the jobs of yesterday.

Maybe we shouldn't be preparing our children for anything, but rather give them permission to live the life they are prepared for right now.

As a man who can see the future, I'm here in the present to urge us all to forget this crazy project of 20 years of mandatory vocational training for every child, humans who show they know more than we do. They show us they clearly understand that if they are to be princesses or superheroes, the time is right now. And if a child knows that, right now, they want to be something more pedestrian, like a supermarket cashier or to sell popcorn at a movie theater, not only do our laws forbid it, our entire system of schooling tells them "No." They must first be educated for at least two decades in order to fill their past up with what those of us who do see the future know will be mostly useless. And what bits and pieces that do turn out to be relevant can be more easily learned by simply living, maybe even as a cashier or popcorn seller. We tell children, "But, supermarkets and movie theaters won't exist by the time we're finished with you," "Princess is not legitimate career tracks," and they may or may not know to reply, "Duh! That's why I need to be those things now!"

If I'd gotten my wish and seen myself as the 63-year-old I am, I might well have given up playing baseball on the spot instead of, you know, being a baseball player for as long as I could. I might well have never made all those friends as I waited for my one true love. I might well have never tried my hand at the many "careers" I explored before settling on this one. At the end of the day, the more we cast our gaze on the future, the less we live in the present . . . Or rather that moment a few dozen milliseconds in the past that appears to us as right now.

That dog of the future is curled up at our feet right now. It's always there, knowing and liking us. We ought not have to wait our entire lives to pet it.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

A Theory of Collecting

As a boy, I was a collector. Baseball cards and comic books are the specific items around which I most often place the sepia halos of nostalgia, but those collections didn't start until I was eight and ten respectively. By then, I had already developed a theory of collecting. Beginning in my preschool years I collected hats, seashells, rocks, Matchbox cars, flags of the world, and stuffed animals. Indeed, I collected almost any appealing thing to which I had easy, inexpensive access. Rocks and seashells were obvious things to collect, whereas hats, stuffed animals and Matchbox's came my way through the kindness of gift-givers. Once people know you have a "collection" that's what they bring for birthdays and other holidays.

"Almost all children collect something," writes psychologist and philosopher William James and I've found that to be true. A while back, I wrote about a boy who collected sticks. One of the aspects of his collecting was that he had a robust criteria even if he wasn't able to put it into words. Once his collection became common knowledge, people -- both children and adults -- were, in the spirit of gift-giving, forever offering him sticks "for your collection." He would take each offering seriously, studying it for a moment with his discerning eye, looking for whatever it was that made a stick collectable. Most of the time, he would say "No thanks," but every now and then, to the giver's delight, he would add a pro-offered stick to the collection.

This boy's collection endured over the course of months, but preschool collections might just as easily exist for only a few hours. Over the years, our playground has been seeded with thousands of florist marbles. We keep seeding the playground because most of them disappear into the depths of the sand pit or under the wood chips (a delight for future diggers) but many go home in pockets, collections for a day (although a mother once sheepishly returned hundreds of "jewels" in well-sorted jars that her son had been secretly collecting in his bedroom for months). But that isn't all: pinecones, pebbles, leaves, unripe blueberries, rubber bands, worms, and just about anything that occurs "naturally" in numbers on our playground can be collectable.

As a boy, I would play with my collections by spreading them out on the floor or on my bed, organizing them, sorting them, ranking them, experimenting with them, and wondering about them. Not being a child of the internet, I relied on our family's set of encyclopedias (with Mom's help) to inform me about those flags of the world. The seashells could be sorted by shape or size or color or according to the beaches from which they came. Same with the rocks. My stuffed animals were organized alternatively by "personality" (e.g., clever, funny, mean, nice) or athletic ability (e.g., strong, fast runner, high jumper, good thrower). Likewise with the Matchbox cars, although, given their wheels, I could spend hours, building ramps of books then ranking each car based on how far and/or straight each car could go based on gravity alone. This is what I mean by a "theory of collecting." By the time I got to baseball cards, I was ready for all those statistics printed on the back. They could be sorted in dozens of different ways.

James wrote of childhood collecting as the basis of natural history study: "(N)body ever became a good naturalist who was not an unusually active collector." In collecting, he saw the emergence of neatness, order, and method as being "instinctively gained." He pointed out that collections, like stamp collections, serve as an "inciter of interest in the geographical and historical information." This was certainly true for me and my collection of foreign flags. But that's far from the only place collecting leads.

For one thing, a collector is exploring basic concepts in mathematics. Collecting is an exploration of how things connect as well as diverge. It is a process of discovering and experimenting with nuance, shades, and subtly. It leads to questions about origins, uses, functions, and beauty. To be a collector means making a study of things, not because there will be a test, but because it's interesting.

As a play-based educator, it's always useful to learn about a child's collections. This is where we see their passion. In a play-based environment, we see this urge to collect as part and parcel with the urge to go more deeply into a subject, any subject. As adults, we are wise to avoid allowing our judgments to dismiss childish collections. That Pretty Pony collection, for the collector, is every bit as valuable as the stamp or coin collection, and can lead to as many places. But that's beside the point. There is nothing I collected as a child that I continue to collect today. In each case, one by one, I lost interest: I'd exhausted each one's capacity to "teach," at least for now, and moved on to the next collectable.

One caution, however. Just because a child shares their collection with you, their passion, that isn't an invitation to attempt to "extend" or "scaffold" their learning. A father I know killed his son's passion for collecting knives by becoming too passionate about it himself. His idea was to "share" something with his son, but instead he took it over. And there is nothing that can put an end to a collector's passion faster than to have it made into a lesson. 

The beauty of collecting is that it must remain self-selected and self-motivated, like that boy and his sticks. Of course, we help them answer their questions, but this is their thing to master. And it is up to them to determine what mastery entails. The power of collecting is that it's not only self-selected, but self-assessed. What is being collecting hardly matters to anyone, but the child. The process of attaining mastery through collecting is vital to intellectual development. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

No One Wants to Raise a Little A--hole

Alfredo Jaar (Mahatma Grandi's "Seven Social Sins")

A little over a decade ago a study led by Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd found that 80 percent of US children believe their parents are more concerned with their grades and test scores than such things as kindness and compassion.

I don't imagine much has changed in the past decade. Recently, Pope Francis felt compelled to defend Jesus Christ's most famous speech, The Sermon on the Mount, because so many congregants, especially in the US, are objecting to its central message of forgiveness, generosity, humility, and peace as being too "woke." This week, on the day we've set aside to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr., we installed a President who, whatever you think of his politics, is a notoriously boastful bully. Many of his supporters say they see this as "strength."

Selfishness and self-interest are clearly ascendant in contemporary society. Perhaps it's always been this way. I mean, politicians and organized religion don't have a particularly clean track record when it comes to virtues, but it does seem, for better or worse, that we've stopped trying to hide it and our children have noticed. We can lecture them all we want. We can tell them stories of goodness. We can let them know how we expect them to behave, but at the end of the day, our counter messages of kindness and compassion, selflessness and humility, are being overwhelmed by the real world.

Or is it? Yes, it's a problem that children think their parents care more about school success than being kind to others. I imagine that had the Harvard study asked their parents, most of them would reply that kindness and compassion come before grades. Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but having spoken to thousands of parents about their aspirations for their child, I've never met one who placed academic achievement over virtue. After all, no one wants to raise a little asshole.

There are those who believe that humans are essentially evil, of course, and that there is nothing we can do about any of this other than Skinnerian punishments and rewards. There are others who believe that we are essentially good, and that if parents/schools/society could just ensure that everyone is has their physiological needs met (e.g., food, clothing, shelter), are physically safe, and know that they are loved, then virtue will naturally emerge.

A 2007 study out of Yale found that infants as young as six months old possess an innate sense of morality, can distinguish right from wrong, and show a preference for good over bad. Subsequent research finds that children as young as 18 months will set aside their own pleasure in order to help strangers, even if no reward is offered for doing so. On the other hand, when resources are limited, when children find themselves arbitrarily divided into groups, or when they are explicitly taught that their needs are more important than the needs of others, they tend to behave in selfish ways, including bullying. In other words, children tend to behave according to the environment in which they find themselves. But they start on the side of virtue.

Competitive schooling and parents who focus on academic achievement obviously steer children toward selfishness. Children who are raised in a world in which the wealthy and powerful are raised onto pedestals, obviously learn the lessons of wealth and power. Children who see boastful bullies elevated and praised understandably conclude that kindnesss and compassion are weakness.

As Rutger Bregman writes in his book Humankind, "(T)o stand up for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be. For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we're not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership. A company with intrinsically motivated employee has no need of managers; a democracy with engaged citizens has no need of career politicians."

To stand up for goodness is to invite cynicism and ridicule, but only from cynics and those whose power is threatened by goodness. As Bergman tells us, a British study finds that nearly 75 percent of us report that we identify more with "values such as helpfulness, honesty and justice than with wealth, status and power," yet almost the same percentage believe that others are more selfish than they actually are. In other words, it appears that we've been "taught" to assume the worst of one another. We've been taught that if we aren't selfish, we're losers. No wonder so many of us behave like little assholes.

It seems that young children are born knowing the opposite. It also seems that most of us grow into adulthood knowing the difference between right and wrong.

I'm taking a break from the news and am trying to manage my social media use in a way that allows me to focus on my friends, family, and the community of early childhood educators and parents who are attracted to the things Teacher Tom is up to. I'm reading more, especially fiction, which is known to increase empathy and compassion. I'm spending more time with people in the real world, my neighbors and friends, and while I might disagree with them about many things, I find that our opinions about values are more similar than not. In other words, I'm being subversive and even seditious.

Our species has always produced selfish people, but for most of our 300,000 year history they were pointed out as such. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were intolerant of boastful bullies, ridiculing them, and even banishing them if it got too bad. So it hasn't always been this way, but we have always had to act against it. As Bergman says, "That's how good overpowers evil -- by outnumbering it."

We have the numbers, despite what the cynics say, and there are more of us being born every day.

As early childhood educators, we must know that not only are the children in our care programmed by evolution for virtue, at least 75 percent of their parents value virtue as well. "Teaching" the virtues, however, is a famously difficult thing to do: we must live it, role model it, and be courageous (one of the most important virtues) in standing up even when those around us are giving in. This is how our children will come to learn not only that we value goodness over evil, but that it's something worth fighting for.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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