Motor Plans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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!