If We Want Children to Think, We Must Let Them Move

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. 

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. 

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

The Real Rigor of Play

The opposite of play is not work, it's rote. ~Dr. Edward Hallowell

Our outdoor classroom is one big slope and within that slope there are many ups and downs, reflecting our city which is built on hills. We're forever experimenting with gravity out there, rolling and flowing things downhill or dragging and pushing things up. There are parts of the space that are so steep one needs a running start to get to the top and there is very little flat upon which to rest one's legs.

We have a pair of wagons, which are regularly used on the hills. One day, one of those wagons became an airplane. 

From my photos, it's easy to see the physics and engineering learning, but those were minor aspects, almost side-effects, of the bigger, more important project, which was figuring out how to get along with the other people.

People sometimes question the "rigor" of a play-based curriculum when, in fact, we're engaged in the most rigorous curriculum known to mankind. There is simply no greater or more important challenge than the one of balancing our own individual desires and needs with those of the other humans with whom we find ourselves. 

A play-based curriculum is rigorous because of it's subject matter, which is the all-important one of getting along with the one another, something children are passionate about. Traditional schools, on the other hand, are rigorous simply because they attempt to teach less interesting things by rote, lecture, and text book, the most difficult way to learn new things because most children find them tedious and frustrating. It's an artificial rigor designed, I guess, to make the adults feel important.

Many people confuse hating school with rigor, saying things like, "It prepares them for life," but those of us who work in a play-based environment spend our days amongst children who love school, who arrive each day eager to tackle the challenges of community, and I would assert that there is no better preparation for life. Make no mistake, it's not pure joy, it's not all laughter. There are tears. There is conflict. There is negotiating and compromise. Children might complain, but they return each day eager to engage, to figure out the things they are most driven to figure out: the most important things of all.

There was so much to learn about flying our airplane together. Would it be safe? Where would everyone sit? How many of us can go at a time? Who gets to steer? Who rides and who "launches?" How do we get it back to the top of the hill? How do we make sure everyone gets a turn?

For the most part, we adults stood back, taking a few pictures, letting the kids work it out. Sure, the first few times they launched themselves down the hill, I jogged just ahead of them, prepared to intervene in the name of safety, but as it turned out on this day, I was unnecessary, even when the airplane crashed and burned.

I'll take the real rigor of play over the artificial rigor of rote any day. And so would the kids.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

In Endless Dialog With An Interconnected World

Yoan Capote (detail from Isla, oil, nails, fish hooks, artist's blood)

I often talk about my blogging habit as the core of my reflective practice as an educator. I generally don't sit down and write because I have answers, but rather because something has happened that intrigues me, or challenges me, and I want to understand it better.

Maybe it's a child doing something. Maybe it's something I've read. Maybe it's something someone has said. Maybe it's the state of the world. It starts with an anecdote or quote or phenomenon and this part, the writing, is my best effort at making sense of it. I like writing for publication because knowing that someone might read it, gives me an imagined thinking partner or interlocutor. I write a sentence and wonder how someone might respond. Will they, with reason, scoff, will they doubt, will they be confused, will they be angry or depressed or inspired. They say we shouldn't worry what the other people think, and sometimes that's probably good advice, but I find that if I'm not considering how others will respond, then it's often difficult to think of anything at all.

One of the things I think I've learned from working with young children is that they seem to think best while engaged in play. As developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky put it, "In play a child is always above their average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than themself."

In this way, my blogging, I think, is a form of play, a way to sustain a thread of thought, not with a specific goal in mind, but rather because I've learned if I'm not rushing toward a conclusion, I'm much more likely to discover connections I could not have otherwise anticipated.

In their book, The Dawn of Everything, David Greaber and David Wengrow, write:

“When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds . . . the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on tend. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic. Ancient philosophers tended to be keenly aware of all this: that’s why, whether they were in China, India or Greece, they tended to write their books in the form of dialogues. Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem.”

Play is likewise a kind of sustaining dialog, a thread that keeps children engaged without forcing a predetermined destination. This is why it stands in such sharp contrast to normal schooling, which is all about predetermined destinations in the form of "correct answers." Play, like dialogue, is inherently about taking the time to explore questions without the pressure of being judged right or wrong.

In his book Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that Neanderthals, our species' chief hominoid rivals, were individually much more intelligent than individual Homo sapiens. If Neandrathals were like mainframe computers, we are much more like PCs, individually less powerful, but far better connected. This is what our species has evolved to do: to think through, with, and alongside people, places, and things. Our minds are not confined to our brains, but rather come into being through the connections we make.

In other words, thinking is at least as much a social activity as it is a cognitive process. Together we're a genius.

We've evolved in conversation, in argument, storytelling, joking, teaching, debating, writing, and playing. And it seems to me that play is the seed from which it all grows. Play is how we evolved to sustain inquiry. It's how we come to stand a head taller than ourselves. Children do it with blocks, mud, and pretending. Adults do it with ideas, stories, and conversations. In both cases, the activity provides enough structure to keep the thread from dissolving, to keep our minds from distraction, while remaining open enough to be surprised and delighted by what we find; not because it's the right answer, but rather, as Eleanor Duckworth puts it, because it's a "wonderful idea."

When we are free to play, this is what we're doing, moving from one wonderful idea to the next, in endless dialog with an interconnected world.

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Who do you want to be when the children arrive? If you want to learn more about how the language we use with children impacts not just our relationships with them, but also their entire learning environment, join us for summer camp. This is my popular 6-week course, The Technology of Speaking With Children So The Can Think, condensed into a single week. Join colleges from around the world as we examine how the language we use with children creates reality. We will explore how the way we speak with children becomes an environment in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. This is great summer PD for the whole team. There is nothing like getting everyone on the same page to start the new school year! Clink here for more information and to 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!

Our Minds Have Minds of Their Own

Several years ago, we had a scare while on a field trip. A boy, racing to the bus stop, attempted to get around one of the adults by shooting for a narrow gap between her and the roadway. While both his feet were off the ground, her hip swung slightly in that direction, knocking him into the street. I'd been watching the whole thing and managed to snatch him back to safety. Seconds later, a garbage truck came rumbling past.

It wasn't exactly a close call, but it did cause us to review our safety protocols, especially around traffic.

A few days later, at our leisure, the boy and I were discussing the incident. He casually asked, "Do you remember when you knocked me into the street?"

That's not what had happened! "No, I rescued you."

"No, you bumped me and I went into the street, but I got back on the sidewalk just in time."

It's not surprising that he remembered the event. We tend to form memories around unexpected or unusual things, what memory researchers call novel experiences. Yet, his specifics were all wrong. I had had the benefit of extensive conversations with the boy's mother (who had been the one who released his hand to let him race), the parent whose hip had nudged him while in flight, and other adults who had witnessed it. We were in agreement about what had happened, yet this boy, the protagonist at the center of the story, had formed a memory in which he was his own self-saving hero.

As a species, we've evolved memory, not so that we can commune with the past, but rather to help us orient to the future. As adults, we had used our memories explicitly for this purpose, cobbling together our best recollections in order to tighten up our safety measures for the next field trip. The boy, however, had taken the exact same novel incident and formed a memory, however inaccurate, in which he had kept himself safe with quick, effective action, a picture that may very well secure his safety in the future.

Memory researcher Charan Ranganath says our hippocampus, the part of our brain most associated with memory, prioritizes memories for "the unexpected oddball pictures." Surprising events trigger a sequence of neural responses that increase learning. 

Non-surprising events reflect things that we've "seen" in the past, but by now seem old hat, which goes a long way toward explaining why many of us find so much of what we are taught in school to be irrelevant or boring. The novelty of yet another equation or rule of grammar stands no chance of cutting through the novelty of, say, a friend passing us a note or a raven spiraling in thermals in the sky outside the window.

This is why so many educators in normal schools work to remove "distractions." They forbid note passing. They close the shades. They hope to focus students' minds by leaving them little else to think about, narrowing the world as much as possible to the lesson at hand. Meanwhile, the children, whose brains are wired to prepare for the future are busy seeking out unexpected oddball pictures, like dust motes swirling in a ways reminiscent of those ravens or a friend trying to pass notes via eye contact and smirks. More experienced teachers then strive to introduce "novelty" to their lessons by, say, stern warnings, cracking jokes or forcing participation, all of which may focus young minds for a moment, but are no guarantee that their takeaway memories will have anything to do with the lesson being taught.

Our minds have minds of their own. They shape memories, learning, from raw experience, each in their own way as they attend to novelty after novelty, question after question, satisfying curiosity, always looking for knowledge that will serve their future.

Things like grades, the promise of rewards, and the threat of punishment have an impact, of course. Experienced students have learned that these external motivators are a kind of payment they receive (or suffer) for proving (or not) to the teacher that they have retained in their short term memory what is intentionally being taught. However, this leaves long term memory relatively untouched.

This is why the anxiety of school endures so much longer than the lessons themselves. It's why some of us, still, 40 years later have dreams about sitting for a test only to realize we're totally unprepared. It's why we remember that raven spiraling or that note from a friend far more clearly than anything the teacher was saying. We've evolved to remember novelty.

Play-based learning dispenses with the pre-planned lessons, the grading, the testing, and, ideally, even the rewards and punishments, replacing it with each child's quest to fill their memories with useful knowledge, which requires actively attending to novelty while largely ignoring the mundane. After all, no matter how much adults wag their fingers about the future, these children will be the ones creating the future and the future is the entire purpose of learning.

I doubt that the boy who recalls saving himself remembers much of anything about the day leading up to that moment of danger, even though we had spent the morning at the Center for Wooden Boats using hammers and nails and rowing ourselves in umiaks around the south end of Lake Union. I mean, for five-year-olds who attend the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool in Seattle, hammers, nails, and getting out on the water is nothing new. Almost getting run over by a garbage truck? Now that's exactly the kind of thing for which his hippocampus is eager to make into something useful. 

That the boy's memory involved his own agency is an important lesson for his future, even if it is not entirely accurate. That we adults used our memories to improve our safety measures is an important lesson for our future.

When we are free to play, we free the mind to do exactly what it has evolved to do: to notice novelty, get curious about it, ask our questions, then store the memory in a way that will help us orient to the future. That's learning.

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The Preschool Autism Summit is going to be great! Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I can't wait to dig into all 30 of these sessions. I know I'm going to learn a lot . . . And I know I'm going to be a better teacher for it. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for 3 days of outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right 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!

Hunger is the Best Sauce

We spent our holiday weekend in a nearby mountain village with a group of friends. On Friday evening we met at one person's home for food and drink. We then met the following morning for the charming local parade where we likewise gathered around food and drink. Later that evening, we met again for a grill feast. And on Sunday morning, we wrapped up the festivities with a group brunch.

Russian author Leo Tolstoy is among those philosophers who considered it to be a kind of secular sin to eat without appetite, which is what I've been doing for the past few day. I mean, the food was amazing all around, but there were moments when I found myself chewing for reasons that had nothing to do with hunger. For instance, I finished my hamburger out of a misguided sense of courtesy toward my host. I had a second desert because, well, two people had brought special desserts. I didn't drink that Bloody Mary because of thirst.

And the wages of my "sins" is an overstuffed, bleary-headed lethargy which will last until I once more feel the pangs hunger. Indeed, this morning as I write this, I'm, for the first time in days, feeling the beginnings of appetite. It's a feeling that I'm going to allow to grow for a bit. I might even wait until I'm ravenous because I know that a corollary to Tolstoy's framework is that hunger is the best sauce.

We talk a lot about curiosity in the world of play-based learning. I've often described it as a manifestation of our drive to educate ourselves. There is survival, which causes us to find food, procreate, and avoid danger, but beyond that, curiosity is what motivates us to bridge the gap between what we know and what we'd like to know. Psychologist George Loewenstein sees curiosity as an unpleasant state that compels us to take action, in the same way that thirst and hunger drive us. And like with thirst and hunger, once our curiosity is satisfied, we feel, however briefly, sated.

"Everything is explained now," said musician Tom Waits in an interview. "We live in an age when you say casually to somebody, 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I'd just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now." 

It's one of the greatest challenges of our information age. Just as most of us can instantly satisfy our barest inklings of hunger, we can now do the same with our curiosity. From an evolutionary perspective, thirst and hunger are about the motivation to take action to seek out food and water. When it's always at the tip of our tongue, however, we lose our motivation. We then find ourselves eating and drinking for reasons that have nothing to do with, you know, eating and drinking. The same goes for curiosity: it's the motivation to get our questions answered.

Normal schools are set up as correct answer factories, serving children endless information with no regard for the natural process of curiosity and wonder. Since our internal drive to learn, our curiosity, is sidelined, our schools must then devise complex systems of external motivations (grades, competition, punishments, rewards, and pleased adult) to get incurious children to do the work. And that's what learning becomes in this context: work. 

No where in modern schooling do we allow the time and space for curiosity to grow. Indeed, children who display actual curiosity, who actually wonder, are generally shushed and re-directed. Research consistently finds that rewards, punishments, and other external motivators, reduce instrinsic motivation: they replace the joy of learning with the work of learning.

We've heard a lot about the neuromodulator dopamine over the last decade or so, often within the context of what's popularly called a "dopamine hit." We wring our hands over the "easy" dopamine of, say, social media scrolling, but that's at least in part a misunderstanding of the function of dopamine. Dopamine is central to the hunger that is curiosity. As neuroscientist Charan Ranganath puts it, "(I)f dopamine motivates us to learn, then maybe the boost we get from curiosity isn't from getting the answer to the question we're interested in, but rather from the question itself." In studies, dopamine circuits seem to be triggered by the questions that make the participants curious, rather than by learning the answer.

In other words, curiosity is about what we often call thinking. This is what early childhood education pioneer Eleanor Duckworth was talking about when she said that correct answers are far less important to education than the thinking that leads to answers, even objectively wrong answers. 

"Chasing information to satisfy our curiosity," writes Ranganath, "can sometimes have bigger effects on memory than learning in order to get an external reward . . . curiosity improves memory for both the mundane and the interesting, whether you're eight years old or eighty-eight. In contrast, external rewards seem only to enhance memory for information that we re not curious about . . . Our findings suggest that the people who show the biggest learning benefits from curiosity also score high on a personality trait called openness to experience."

And openness to experience, wonder, is a far better predictor of learning even than simply being interested in something. 

Play-based learning puts curiosity at the center where it belongs. Unlike the standard school approach of stuffing children whether they're hungry or not, play-based learning provides the time and space for the "thirst" for knowledge and the "hunger" for learning to naturally emerge. It's what motivates us to bridge that gap between what we know and don't know. Curiosity, like hunger, is the best sauce.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

"Well, He Won't Do That Again"

"Well, he won't do that again."

We've all said, or at least thought it. And more often than not (but not always) we're right. Like when a child goofs around on the edge of a fountain on a cold day and falls in. We expect that unpleasant experience to "teach" them a lesson. At least, we hope, it's less likely that they're going to need us to caution them about it the next time. Either they're going to avoid it or they're going to use the information they gathered the next time to exercise a bit more caution

This doesn't mean that we don't care about their tears. Of course, we comfort the child. Dry them off. Get them new clothes. But we don't need to add to the unpleasantness by attempting in our heavy-handed adultness to "drive the point home" with a lot of "So what did we learn today?" style scolding. That just shifts the focus from the actual lessons learned to whether or not the adult is pleased with them, which is a different thing. 

In his book Why We Remember, neuroscientist Charan Rangnath, writes, "We are wired to learn from our mistakes and challenges -- a phenomenon called error-driven learning." It's learning that derives from actively doing (playing on the edge of a fountain) rather than passively memorizing (listening to a safety lecture). If a child really wants to play by the fountain, no amount of our cautioning will teach them as effectively as that error.

Memory is a strange thing. Most of what you will do today will never become part of your memory. The boy who fell in the fountain will likely never fully recall the events leading up to his fall. He will, if necessary, be able to construct a "memory" involving walking to the bus stop with his classmates and riding to the Wooden Boat Center, but that will mostly be his brain determining what "must have" happened rather than what "actually happened." 

Our brains have not evolved for literal recall, which is why we struggle with things like remembering the name of that movie with that actor from that other movie. Or as cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."

No, what this boy will remember of the events leading up to his fall will be largely cobbled together from what is called his semantic memory, which is "our ability to recall facts of knowledge about the world, regardless of when and where that information was learned" and applied "across a range of contexts." In other words, other field trips and bus rides will play at least as large a role in what he remembers.

When he recalls the fall itself, however, and perhaps the immediate aftermath (the shivering, the discomfort, the consequences), that will be called up by his episodic memory, which is "the kind of remembering that allows us to call back, and even reexperience, events from the past." It's still a construction, but one that requires us to "mentally return to a specific place and time." Episodic memory is what we generally refer to when we talk about "our memories." (Although, this too is a construction, or an "imaginative reconstruction.")

Much of what passes for education in our schools involves training children to do something that isn't natural to the human mind, which is precise recall, usually assessed by testing. The problem, as Rangnath puts it is that "tests are optimized for last-minute learning that enhances short-term performance at the expense of retention." And as we know, most of what we store in our short-term memory is gone within days, if not hours.

"Lasting benefits come from error-driven learning, during which we are not always going to be successful," writes Rangnath. "We learn and retain more from the struggle of pushing ourselves to the edges . . . than we do by memorizing and regurgitating on command." This is a big part of why play-based learning, which could really just be another name for error-driven learning, is so powerful.

"Perhaps," concludes Rangnath, "instead of rewarding success, we should normalize mistakes and failures and incentivize constant improvement. Rather than emphasizing mastery, we need to celebrate the struggle -- working to learn, rather than to prove you have learned something."

In this case, he's writing about his university students. Fascinatingly, he is not opposed to testing, but rather believes that we do testing in the wrong way. In his work, he uses tests not as a foundation for grades, but rather as learning tools in which his students are free to be wrong. He's found that "when we look under the hood of the hippocampus . . . we see that the benefits of testing do not come from making mistakes per se, but rather from challenging yourself to pull up what you have learned." The more often we do that, the more likely it is that we will be able to recall it.

"Well, he won't do that again."

The boy tested his world. He fell into cold water on a cold day. The consequences tell him it was a mistake. But this is different than a university test with its precise answers. As adults we might think there is a "correct answer," that the boy has learned to never again goof around on the edge of a fountain. We may even try to drive that point home, but that may not be how he sees it. His urge to goof around on the edge of the fountain may remain, but what he has done, through error-driven learning, is gain information that will make it less likely that he fall in the future.

He may still hop up on that fountain if, say, it's a warm, sunny day when the consequences of a fall won't be so uncomfortable

He may still hop up on that fountain if, say, he feels he has developed a better sense of balance.

He may still hop on that fountain if, say, the adults turn their backs, because, at the end of the day, he was curious about testing a different kind of limit.

Perhaps the worst thing we do in education is make children afraid of being wrong. They worry about bad grades, adult disapproval, or even punishment, instead of being free to struggle toward their own learning. Error-driven learning is play-based learning. It's not the successes that matter, but the pursuit of success that gets us out of bed in the morning. And that's where the learning is.

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The Preschool Autism Summit is going to be great! Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I can't wait to dig into all 30 of these sessions. I know I'm going to learn a lot . . . And I know I'm going to be a better teacher for it. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for 3 days of outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right 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!

Making Our Preschools Worthy of Autistic Children

Play-based preschool should be the default. Research consistently tells us that young children -- all young children -- need play and lots of it for both intellectual and healthy social-emotional development. 

Unfortunately, ignorance and fear continue to drive too many parents to seek out factory model schooling for their children in the misguided hope that they'll get a leg up on the competition for getting into Harvard or Stanford. These settings, in contrast to play-based settings, do not serve all young children, which means that kids who need to move their bodies, who need to learn with their hands and hearts, who need to be outdoors, who need to learn with all their senses, who need to followed their curiosity, and whose neurotype doesn't match up with command-and-control models, wind up being a "problem." 

The superpower of play-based learning is that it adapts to the child rather than forcing children to adapt to the school. This is why so many of these "misfits" thrive with us. I can't tell you how many children wound up at Woodland Park after having been essentially expelled from other programs. And many of those children over the years were autistic.

When I first started teaching, I didn't really understand autism, even though, looking back, I can see that I worked with dozens of children who were likely autistic, but since play-based theory requires that we adapt our environments to support children in their self-directed learning, these kids never showed up as "problems." Indeed, these children were some of my most important teachers.

Back then, about 1 in 150 children were identified as autistic. In the intervening two decades, autism research and awareness has had its day. Today, about 1 in 30 children will be identified as autistic. This is because we've come to increasingly understand autism as a spectrum of traits, with each autistic person possessing a unique pattern of strengths, challenges, and support needs. And that can't be standardized for the "generic autistic child," because such a human doesn't exist. In other words, the infinite flexibility of play-based learning makes it the right approach for all children.

There continues to be a great deal of research and debate in the autism community, which is normal when the science is moving so rapidly. It can be confusing for classroom educators to keep up, especially given the amount of misinformation that's out there.

This is why I was so eager to take part in the upcoming Preschool Autism Summit, July 12-15.  This free online gathering features presentations from 30 experts, bringing together the latest research and approaches to working with autistic preschoolers and their families. My session is called Making Our Play-Based Preschools Worthy of Autistic Children and I will also be taking part in a live panel discussion. 

Please join us!

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The Preschool Autism Summit is going to be great! Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I can't wait to dig into all 30 of these sessions. I know I'm going to learn a lot . . . And I know I'm going to be a better teacher for it. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for 3 days of outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right here.

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Our Minds Extend Into One Another

It takes humans years before they fully comprehend their separateness from their caretakers. At least that's the widely accepted psychological theory. A newborn doesn't know that they are not their mother and vice versa. This is understandable, of course. After all, it wasn't long ago that they were growing inside of this other person where they were literally one, mind, body, and perhaps even soul. One of their first acts, upon emerging into this bright, noisy world, is to seek the intimate reconnection of nursing and other kinds of physical touch.

Even as we grow into toddlers, we continue to struggle to understand that we are independent people. It's part of why separation anxiety is so common. As we get older, we must learn that we are not our parents: we have our own bodies and minds.

We learn about our separateness. It is not a concept with which we are born. 

There is a growing body of research around the tantalizing idea that maybe human infants are on to something and that what we are teaching them about separateness is all wrong. Certainly, our bodies are separate from the other bodies, but it's beginning to look like this thing we call "the mind," our essential self, extends beyond us and into our environment, including, perhaps especially, the other people.

In an influential 1998 paper, cognitive psychologists and philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers posed the question "Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?", concluding that there is no identifiable line. This concept of the "The Extended Mind," as they labeled it, was at first laughed at, but has over the last quarter century come to be regarded as one of the most important recent insights into how the human mind functions.

It was the work of Russian psychologist and early learning pioneer Lev Vygotsky that initially set Clark's course. Famously, Vygotsky noted that young children learn with the help of what he called "scaffolding" from the outside world, such as the help of an adult or an object. Clark realized that even as adults we rely on the outside world to scaffold our own thinking, including things like writing which is impossible without an interplay between pen and paper or fingers and screen, objects that scaffold our minds.

What Clark and Chalmers realized is what babies are born knowing.

Our minds cannot be confined to our heads. Oh sure, the conscious part might feel like it's self-contained, but much of what we know, think, and recall is actually stored in the outside world. A prosaic example is when I write down my "to do" list. Other people might hold their list in their conscious mind, but functionally there is no difference between us -- we both have our "to do" lists. This is the same phenomenon that is taking place between us and our smartphones, tablets, and computers: our minds extend into them, making them an essential part of our thinking process. A more complex example of how our minds extend into the world, and indeed, other people, is while in conversation. That process of give and take becomes a melding of the minds an interplay that isn't contained within any one person, but rather takes place beyond the confines of our bodies. 

When we moved my wife's mother from her long time home to an assisted living facility because it wasn't safe for her to live alone, it became clear to us that a part of her mind was left behind in that house. Indeed, in hindsight, it's clear that the death of her husband was a trigger for her rapid decline into dementia, which is to say, the process of losing her mind. When we removed her from her environment, we unwittingly removed much of the scaffolding that supported her extended mind.

Some time ago, I wrote about what Eleanor Duckworth called "the collective creation of knowledge," that process by which young children learn together, thinking, discovering, and exploring, as if they have a kind of "hive mind." In the language of Clark and Chalmers, their minds extend into one another, scaffolding one another, erasing the distinction between your mind and my mind, blurring the lines that separate you from me.

Our schools are based upon outmoded models of how human minds think and learn. Specifically, we have bought into the idea of brains as organs that must be muscled up on academics, drilling, testing, and the artificial rigor that characterizes so much of what happens in school. We treat children like self-contained silos into which we must stuff teaching. However, when we understand, as newborns do, that learning is scaffolded by our environment and that our minds work most naturally when they are extended outward in all directions, including into that space that connects us with other people, we see that learning is, necessarily, a collective, collaborative process: not an academic one, but an experiential one.

The more I learn about learning, the more I find myself returning to the Reggio Emilia notion of the environment as a teacher on par with adults and other children. Indeed, in this theory of the extended mind, we see that adults and other children can actually be included in our notions of environment, which means that environment is the only teacher. And as every baby knows, we learn when we extend our minds outward, driven by curiosity and the irrepressible urge to merge our minds with the things and people we find there.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!