"I Can't Let You Push People"

"I didn't do it!"

I'd seen the boy push his friend, knocking him to the ground. He was still lying there, whimpering.

His mother had told me, crossly, that she believed in punishment. She understood, however, that I was not going to resort to punishments, although she doubted that I could stick to that, not with her son. "Punishment is the only thing that works," she insisted.

"I saw you push him," I replied matter-of-factly. I strive to never threaten children, even with the volume of my voice, although I will, when I want to make sure my point is made, speak firmly, which I did then, "I can't let you push people."

"I didn't do it!" he shouted again, on the verge of tears himself.

The temptation is to keep pressing, to get him to confess, but there was no point. Everyone involved knew what happened. I was knelling by the fallen friend. I'd already determined that there were no external injuries, so I was rubbing his back. "Malcolm is crying. I'm taking care of him."

"I didn't do it."

This time I let his denail stand. This is the greatest flaw in the theory of punishment: fear of it makes it difficult, even impossible, to come clean and face the harm for which you need to make amends. The threat of harm makes it impossible to deal with the real harm. There are far too many adults in the world like this boy, people in positions of power, people who cannot come clean no matter what. When punishment is off the table, however, it clears the way for making amends.

I focused all of my attention on Malcolm. He shook his head when I asked him if anything hurt. I continued to rub his back. 

Again, the boy said, "I didn't do it," but without energy, almost pleading. I did not need to punish him because he was punishing himself, facing the natural consequences of his behavior, his entire being focused on it. He wasn't denying it any longer, but rather, wishing with all his being that he hadn't done it. We call it regret. It's not uncommon for adults to assert, "I have no regrets." It's meant as a statement of bravado masquerading as strength, but all I hear is a pathetic, "I didn't do it."

We have all done regretful things and the only way to move beyond them is to take responsibility by striving to undo the harm we have done. Punishment leads only to denial. I don't believe anyone who says they have no regrets because none of us has undone all the harm we've caused. "I have no regrets" is just more denial.

Regret is a great teacher, but only if we manage to not allow it to become guilt. And the way to do that is to strive to make amends.

The boy stood watching us as tears brimmed. He picked up a toy truck and tried to hand it to Malcolm, but it was refused. He squatted down and put his face into Malcolm's, "I didn't mean to."

Malcolm replied softly, "Yes, you did."

Now the boy broke into a full cry, "I'm sorry!" He dropped down beside Malcolm, putting his arm around him, his hand replacing mine on his back. Malcolm put his hand on his friend's head and they lay there for a time, in the dirt, a picture of regret and forgiveness.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

When Will We Wake Up?

German psychologist Karl Groos was among the first researchers to take play seriously. Working in the late 1800's, he is credited with what has been called, alternatively, the training, practice, or instrumentalist theory of play. In his book The Play of Animals, he wrote, "The animal does not play because he is young. He has a period of youth because he must play."

The basic idea is that mammals enjoy a relatively long juvenile period because they need that time to play, which is necessary to develop the skills and habits necessary for survival. Humans have evolved by far the longest period of youth of any species, mammal or otherwise, which means Homo sapiens "must play" for at least a decade, perhaps longer, in order to fully develop their capacity for survival.

While some of Groos' ideas have fallen by the wayside, this central idea, the practice theory, remains at the center of play research. During the mid-twentieth century a companion theory of play emerged, usually called the social bonding hypothesis. As science writer David Toomey puts it in his book The Kingdom of Play, this theory posits "that as animals nip, tussle, and give chase, they are learning -- in the phrase memorialized by kindergarten report cards -- to 'play well with others.'"

I find myself often reflecting on these theories as I watch children play. 

Fighting and fleeing remain essential for other species. Nearly every day, I see rabbits playfully chasing one another which is clearly increasing the likelihood that they will be able to evade coyotes and other predators. All spring I've been watching mocking birds fight off the ravens, a skill that I see them practice among themselves as fledglings throughout the summer and into the fall. 

Modern humans, fortunately, generally have little need to do all that fighting and fleeing as a matter of survival. We aren't nearly as concerned with being eaten by, say, a bear or a tiger, as our ancient ancestors were, yet our young still engage in play fighting and games of chase. That's because evolution operates on a scale of millennia and even as we've reduced the risk of becoming prey or the necessity to be predators, the play, or training, instincts remain.

As our species' has moved away from a world of eat-or-be-eaten, however, we have moved toward a world in which "playing well with others" is increasingly essential. When I watch children wrestle, I don't see fighting. I see children engaged in a deep connection in which they must remain constantly aware of the emotional and physical state of their playmate. They quickly learn that if they aren't careful, if they hurt themselves or someone else, the game will come to an end. The motivation to keep the game going, as Peter Gray points out in his book Free to Learn, is a powerful motivator in many of these social bonding games. 

Sadly, many adults break up this type of game as a matter of course, and we should if someone is getting hurt or when actual fighting breaks out. But when we understand the function of this type of play, when we stand near, but without intervening, we see that they are exploring one another. Yes, they may take things right to the edge, sometimes going a little too far, but that's vital to understanding limits. Most of the time when I watch children wrestle, they are looking into one another's faces, beaming, but also "reading" expressions as a way to understand where those limits are.

We see this happening in all manner of play as children bicker (negotiate) their way through their dramatic or constructive or artistic play. When modern schools limit play, they rob children of the opportunity to learn how to play well with others and replace it with adult imposed rules enforced by the threat of punishment. In other words, instead of learning to play well with others, they learn to obey, which is not the same thing.

Play creates major challenges for modern schooling, which views wrestling and running, and, frankly, most other play behavior as, at best, a way to burn off excess energy (which was, not incidentally, the leading theory of the purpose of play during the Victorian era before Groos and others started taking play seriously). At worst, play is seen as a distraction that must be strictly curtailed and limited to recess. And according to the Center for Disease Control, the average American school child spends less than 30 minutes a day at recess, barely enough time to get a game going, let alone learn anything from it.

In other words, the evolutionarily necessary urge to play has essentially been banned in our schools and replaced by a system of rewards and punishments. 

To paraphrase Groos, our children have a period of youth because they must play. For most of human history this wasn't even something we had to think about. It was a given that children would play. They had the time, space, and permission to train themselves in necessary physical skills and learn to play well with others. The only children in today's world who get to play in this way are those whose parents make a special effort to make it happen.

We bemoan the fact that today's youth are increasingly unfit, uncoordinated, anxious,  dependent, depressed, and socially awkward. We blame screens, diet, vaccines, and pretty much everything except the obvious. Children must play, but we just don't let them. It's a crisis with an obvious solution. When will we wake up?

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

We are All Self-Educated

 

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school

It's a wonder I can think at all.

And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none

I can read the writing on the wall.  

                             ~Paul Simon, Kodachrome

The first thing I do upon awakening in the morning is to go to the bathroom, something I learned how to do alongside my mother. She didn't teach me, exactly, but I have memories of her being there, conversing with me as I sat on the little varnished pine potty seat with a blue and yellow figure of some sort painted on it. It was an intimate moment, the two of us in that little room, me on the seat and mom knelling beside me. I do remember standing up, then looking back down to see the yellow liquid I'd made in the white bowl. 

Next I go to the kitchen where I make a cup of coffee. I distinctly remember learning to make my first cup of coffee. I was a freshman in college, living in the dorms. Several of the guys swore by it as a late night or early morning study aid, so I went to the supermarket, purchased a jar of Folger's instant, then followed the instructions on the side of the jar. Since then, I've learned to make coffee in every way imaginable, sometimes by following the instructions and other times by watching someone else then imitating them.

I take my cup of coffee to the chair by the window where I fire up my computer. Dad bought the family an Apple II Plus computer in 1979, the year they were released. He spent a week or so learning to code a simple game that involved a crude monster that ate floating letters of the alphabet. I liked playing the game, but it wasn't until the mid-80's that I had a computer screen of my own, a device connected to a Wang brand mainframe that needed a room all for itself. Yes, this was about the time that Microsoft's PC was beginning to populate every desk top, but our office manager placed his bet on Wang. There were no instructions or training for using the computer terminals on our desks: we were expected to figure it out and we all did, mainly by goofing around on it, asking each other questions, and sending massive numbers of messages, then leaning around the corner to ask, "Did you get it?" before shaking our heads in disbelief at this modern age in which we lived.

It's at this point in my typical morning that I begin writing a blog post that will appear right here. It's hard to pin down when I learned to write, although it logically came along with learning to read, which happened for me over the course of my first grade year. I know that I didn't think I read at all when I arrived in elementary school, but on my first day in class Miss McCutcheon had placed on our desks a construction paper cut out of the character Ted (a stuffed bear) from the Dick and Jane readers. She had written T-E-D across his belly and I knew without being told that it said "Ted." Mom had read to me at home from picture books and I guess I'd just picked some of it up because as it turned out I could read anything Miss McCutcheon put in front of me over the course of the year. I often think that I didn't learn to read as much as discovered that I could.

As for being a writer, as opposed to being merely literate, that has been a process of unlearning most of what my teachers ever taught me about composition and re-learning by reading and writing nearly every day over the course of decades, a process that is ongoing.

I write about all sorts of things, but what I mostly write about is early childhood. I took a couple relevant university courses back in my early 20's and then a couple more 15 years later. But almost everything I've learned about ECE has been on the job, first as a babysitter, then as a children's baseball coach, then as a parent in with a child enrolled in a cooperative preschool, and finally as a classroom teacher myself, a journey that I've been documenting here since 2009. I've learned from books, blogs, conferences, mentors, colleagues, and mostly from the children themselves. This too is an ongoing process.

My point is that here I sit, a man who holds a high school diploma and university degree, the definition of an educated man, but most of the learning I actually use in my day-to-day life came from life itself, not any sort of curriculum. I was an engaged student, one who did all the assignments and received mostly good grades, but the only aspects of my nearly two decades of schooling upon which I regularly rely are the proposal writing vocational skills I learned as a college senior and the memories that guide me in what not to do as an educator.

When I would complain about the irrelevancy of my schools' curricula as a student, adults would assure me that it was all necessary foundational learning, but looking back on all those tedious writing exercises, those worksheets, those nights of grinding through mathematical equations, I see little connection to the educated man I am today. I don't think those adults were lying to me, I believe that they believed the myth of foundational learning, just as most adults continue to believe it today. It would be a horrible thing to finally admit that all those years, over all those generations, have been wasted, so we cling to these unproven ideas of how learning happens because to admit otherwise would send shock waves though society.

Most of the important learning I've done has been decidedly extra-curricular, which, I would assert, is true of all of us. We are all self-educated despite those years of schooling. We learn in the company of other humans, both children and adults. We learn from having the time, space, and autonomy to question, explore, and experiment. We learn when we find ourselves in stimulating environments, especially those we are free to manipulate. We learn when the adults in our life love us and have our best interests at heart. When these conditions are met, the curriculum emerges, unique for every one of us, and that curriculum is life itself.

******

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!

Humans in Motion, Thinking, and Learning at Full Capacity

As you step onto a preschool playground or a play-based classroom, the first thing visitors are struck by is the never-ending swirl of bodies in motion. Adult visitors to Woodland Park have always stopped at the gate or doorway seemingly afraid to get in the way as children move from one thing to the next, leaping, skipping, swinging, crawling, jumping, jiggling, bending, and reaching. Even when children stop to greet the newcomers, they are in motion: kicking a leg for no apparent reason, clapping their hands, bouncing up and down. Sure, some of the children might remain relatively still for a few minutes at a time, but even the ones curled up with a book are bouncing a foot. Even the ones pretending to be a baby under a blanket are wiggling.

"Sit as little as possible," wrote the influential philosopher and notorious nature trail hiker Friedrich Nietzsche, "do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement."

A mountain of studies back up Nietzsche's assertion. When we move our bodies our visual sense is sharpened, our ability to concentrate is enhanced, comprehension is boosted, information retention is increased, and self-regulation improves. Cognitive scientist Sain Beilock even asserts that "(m)oving the body can alter the mind by unconsciously putting ideas in our heads before we are able to consciously contemplate them on our own time." (Italics are mine.) In other words, our bodies can know stuff through movement for which our brains aren't yet ready. And it doesn't necessarily have to be robust movement either: one study found that when people doodle while listening to a lecture, they retain nearly 30 percent more of the information. By now, most of us know that our brains alone don't do our thinking, but rather our whole bodies, other people, and even things are involved, not just intellectually, but emotionally as well. 

Another great 20th century philosopher and psychologist, William James once observed that one of the best ways to overcome mild depression or ennui is to stand up straight, pull our shoulders back, hold our head high, and move confidently. More contemporarily, Katherine Isbister, a professor and researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz, talks of what she calls embodied self-regulation. "Changing what the body does," she writes, "can change our feelings, perceptions, and thoughts. 

(If you are interested in digging deeper into any of this, I highly recommend Annie Murphy Paul's book The Extended Mind.)

One of the foundational myths of schooling is that we must somehow get the kids to stop moving around in order to focus, but the exact opposite is true. Some schools have even gone so far as to cut back on recess in elementary school in favor of more "seat time." The evidence, however, tells us that the more children move, the more clearly they think. This evidence is so clear and so compelling (and by now, so widely known) that the fact that our schools persist in forcing even preschoolers to spend large chunks of their days sitting quietly is outright malpractice.

What visitors see as they stand in the doorway of standard classrooms are humans whose minds are torn between obeying the adults by sitting still and their natural urge to actually think and learn through movement. 

What visitors to a play-based classroom are witnessing are humans in motion, thinking, and learning at full capacity. 

******

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!

I Trust Children With Freedom

I trust children with freedom from the moment they are born.

Yes, I must keep a sharp eye on a toddler around traffic because they've not yet developed the judgement to be cautious around moving cars. Until they do, it's my responsibility to protect them from their own inexperience and serve as an extension of their executive function.

Yes, contemporary life requires us to, at least sometimes, be in certain places at certain times. Toddlers have not yet developed the ability to consider the future in concrete terms. Until they do, it's my responsibility to serve as their scheduling secretary.

And yes, toddlers are not always aware of the conventions of courtesy, those words and behaviors that remove some of the pain and doubt from our social interactions. Until they do, it's my responsibility to help them develop a theory of mind by showing them how their behaviors impact others, and to role model courtesy in my interactions with them.

But that doesn't mean I don't trust them with freedom. 

As an educator, I undertake my responsibilities by ensure that the places in which we gather are safe enough so that they may exercise their freedom without undue risk. I am responsible for creating predictable routines so that they may exercise their freedom with a degree of confidence about what the future holds. And I am responsible for role modeling the courtesy, the human dignity, that is due all free human beings, themselves included.

There are those who would say that what I'm calling "responsibilities" are just a new way to talking about bars in a cage, and they certainly can be used in that way. They often are. The reason that I feel I must assert that I trust children with freedom is that too many adults conflate their responsibilities toward children with being their superiors in all things. It's one thing to prevent a toddler from running into traffic "for their own good" and quite another to insist that they attend to this particular dull lesson, to walk in straight lines, or to sit obediently at a desk for hours on end "for their own good."

I trust children with their own curiosity, with their own questions, and with their own pursuit of answers because the freedom to think for oneself is the freedom that makes the other freedoms -- freedoms of speech or assembly or the right to vote, for instance -- mean anything at all. Maybe the reason so many believe that children can't handle freedom and autonomy is that we are judging their capabilities within a system (standard schooling) where freedom and autonomy aren't welcome: where children are not trusted with freedom.

Freedom is meaningless without responsibility. I am responsible for keeping children alive and relatively unharmed because without life there is only the freedom of the grave. For the same reason, I must prevent them from harming others and role model the alternatives. And I am responsible for allowing them to see that their own freedom is only possible when we take responsibility for how we treat others, because without it we are alone and that way lies insanity.

Freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand. It's tempting to say that they lie on a spectrum and that the goal is to find balance. But the truth is that one simply does not exist without the other. They are indivisible. Freedom without responsibility is psychopathy. Responsibility without freedom is slavery. 

I trust children with freedom because they are my fellow human beings. And what I've found is that when children are trusted with freedom can also be trusted with responsibility, because they are one and the same.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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

"Junk (& Debris)"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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