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Classroom design is about more than colourful walls, polished desks and stylish furniture. A University of Salford study of more than 3,000 students discovered that a "well-designed classroom" has a substantial impact on learning. The effect may be most profound among PYP and MYP-age students, though the principles of good design are applicable across all ages.

In addition to good lighting, air quality, temperature and sound, researchers found that outdoor space can stimulate a range of different developmental areas: as well as encouraging social skills including empathy, it may positively affect cognitive and physical development.

Student input is important, too. The study identified a sense of ownership as one of the top three influencing factors of classroom design. When students feel ownership of the classroom, through displays of their work, this can lead to greater participation and involvement in the learning process.

Colourful environments have significant effects on learning and wellbeing, according to the study. Plain surroundings tend to under-stimulate students, which can lead to restlessness and difficulty concentrating. Over-use of very bright colours, however, can also negatively impact learning, so it's important to strike a balance in terms of visual complexity.

Goodbye, rows of desks!

Three years ago, a professional development conference inspired Adam Turner, a PYP teacher at Prairie Waters Elementary School, Canada, to transform his classroom. Where previously students sat at rows of desks, they now sit in groups at large tables, or on a carpeted area with cushions and two comfortable chairs, depending on discussions. "Our discussions are much more enriching," says Turner. "More often, students don't sit at their desks."

Meanwhile, Ben Toettcher, Director of educational company Skola Group, based the classroom design of Newland College, UK, on a Harkness-inspired round-table set-up. Desks with seating for 14 MYP students are arranged in an ellipse - or oval shape - with a console in the middle, similar to a boardroom. Teachers can switch between direct instruction, using the console, and whole class discussions.

"The main feedback we get from students is that they feel they are heard," says Toettcher. "Since we opened the school at the start of September this year, certain students have become visibly more confident. Parents are especially happy that, with this set-up, it is impossible for their children to feel lost in a class and disengaged."

Asking the students

Harnoop Bhogal, PYP Coordinator, and Olivia Shilvock, PYP teacher, both at the International School of Siena in Italy, have asked their grade 5 class to redesign their classroom for a unit on identity and learning styles.

To see how they learn best for different activities, the room has been sectioned into different zones, including a daylight area; a comfortable seating area with clipboards; a personal display space where the students can add objects throughout the unit; a music station with headphones; and a mathematics area, which is sometimes split to include a science area.

"The students have shown a very sensible approach to the new space," says Shilvock. "I did think that they would all want to sit on the cushions and fight over the headphones but they are already showing different preferences and making suggestions. Some went straight for the mathematics area and started to 'play' with the items there, some went straight to the light area and said they loved it, some went for the music. It was a lovely reaction."

But careful consideration has to be given to the display of certain objects. A study led by the University of Washington discovered that symbolic objects can reinforce gender stereotypes and can cause diversity and inclusivity difficulties. For example, researchers suggested that prominently displaying pictures of past US presidents - who are uniformly white and male - represented a negative stereotype for females and minorities.

Resisting change

Although change is exciting, it isn't always easy.

There is an adjustment period at the beginning of each year, says Turner. Not having a designated storage spot at their desk or a set seat each day is a shock for many new students.

But, as they become accustomed to their environment, students question how they learn best. "Most students gain a better understanding of when is a good time to sit in groups and work or when they need to focus on their own and find a quiet spot," says Turner. "We reflect on which subjects and learning times are best in big groups at a table, and which are best in their own individual realm."

Flexibility must be a key design requirement within school builds, according to the University of Salford study. Classrooms with clear breakout zones were found to have a positive impact on learning. But separate zones, away from the classroom, appear to be ineffective.

Turner rearranges his classroom depending on the lesson. "The large tables allow students to work in groups with ample room, as well as act as good 'staging areas' for sharing work. If we need a large space to convene for class discussions and activities, the tables are easy to move," he explains.

"When students recently shared their mid-unit assessment, we made a 'circle' of the tables - presenters on the inside, observers around the outside."

Teachers no longer feel they are tied to a one-size-fits-all classroom. For many, the traditional row of tables facing a chalkboard is no longer fit for purpose. As well as looking creative, comfy seats on a colourful carpet might be the beginning of a more collaborative way of working.
Tell us how you've changed your classroom and how this has impacted your students' learning: email editor@ibo.org

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Classroom design is about more than colourful walls, polished desks and stylish furniture. A University of Salford study of more than 3,000 students discovered that a "well-designed classroom" has a substantial impact on learning. The effect may be most profound among PYP and MYP-age students, though the principles of good design are applicable across all ages.

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Insight on Inquiry: Starting the Year in Kindergarten

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Looking back on our first unit, we decided to create a piece of pedagogical documentation to reflect on what we learned as a group about 'who we are', one of our transdisciplinary themes. Our investigations, proposals and focus were guided by the big idea of the unit: by establishing relationships with others and the environment, people get to know themselves and develop their sense of identity. This understanding helps us to think about our responsibility towards others, the way we connect with people, materials and spaces and the multitude of perspectives, ideas and identities within a group of learners.

As a group of educators, we agreed to start with this unit as we felt the big idea and concepts would fit very well with our focus at the start of the school year: developing a deep sense of togetherness as part of the process of co-constructing ways of being, of living and learning together. We wondered what it means for children to become part of a learning group. How do individual children influence the learning of the group and how does the group influence the learning of individual children? What impact does all of this have on their sense of identity?

The learning goals of the local curriculum fit well with the unit. Early years learning needs to focus on children 'dealing with feelings, wishes and opinions of self and others, developing independence and social skills and learning to collaborate with others' (Dutch National Curriculum).

The Center of the Developing Child at the University of Harvard 2011 writes "young children experience the world as an 'environment of relationships', these relationships influence all aspects of their development". Guided by a deep understanding that 'everything goes back to the quality of the relationships' we started our year with the question: how do we develop relationships with others? Two other questions; how do we develop a relationship with materials and spaces and how do people develop their sense of identity?' were just as important as young children often develop relationships through shared interests and possibilities with materials which enhances their sense of identity as a friend, group member and researcher.

How do we develop relationships with others?

During the first weeks of school we noticed that many children expressed their appreciation of each other through making gifts. Many children were joyful about being reconnected after the summer holiday, while others used a card or drawing to establish new relationships. We often observed children wanting to sit or play 'close' to others, using their bodies as a language to express 'closeness'.

Many drawings, painting and books were made by children, often expressing love for family members and friendship with peers at school and the community.

We negotiated over time how we live and learn together. Teachers and children established agreements about how to treat each other and solve conflicts. This remains an ongoing process as we continue to learn about perspective and compromise and develop empathy.

Play continues to be the driving force behind the learning of the group: a powerful way to learn about ourselves and others, to discover possibilities of materials and to represent ideas. Perhaps play is also 'a way of gathering' as children 'bring energy and enthusiasm' that generates, echoed in Fiona's words 'a shared space of meaning-making, allowing everyone to connect and belong'.

Play evoked questions and wonderings that we documented and explored together as part of our investigation into how we develop a relationship with the world.

How do we develop a relationship with spaces and materials?

Ample time to play supported the children with establishing relationships with spaces and materials. We observed many times how children continued to develop each other's ideas. This has led to shared understandings that still evolve and often act as 'starting points' when children choose to play with certain materials.

As our relationships developed, new discoveries, questions and other shared learning experiences deepened our joy of learning together.

We discovered shared interest for ideas, stories, songs, music and games, created rituals and have collective memories of shared experiences such as fieldtrips and celebrations. This all adds to our sense of belonging and identity as a learning group.

Along the way, all children discovered different things about themselves, others and their worlds. We will continue to learn about the responsibility to consider the well-being of others and ourselves and our own evolving sense of identity.

We are often moved by many gestures of kindness, it seems many children inherently understand that we all want to feel appreciated and seen for who we are. This recalls Vygotsky's perspective on learning. He emphasized the pivotal importance of belonging and well-being and that 'emotion and cognition can not be separated'.

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DEVELOPING AGENCY AND SELF-EFFICACY WITHIN AND THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS

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Looking back on our first unit, we decided to create a piece of pedagogical documentation to reflect on what we learned as a group about 'who we are', one of our transdisciplinary themes. Our investigations, proposals and focus were guided by the big idea of the unit: by establishing relationships with others and the environment, people get to know themselves and develop their sense of identity.

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The first weeks of the school year are now behind us. It has been 25 days of relationships building with people, spaces and materials. There has been time to play; to discover shared interests, new possibilities with materials and develop friendships. Days and weeks of ups and downs, of joys and tears, of surprises and familiarity, of coming out of our shells or leaving not enough space for others.

And then it 'all of a sudden' feels like 'things are falling into place'. There are so many connections, questions, requests and discoveries that it is sometimes hard to keep track of everything that is going on. A 'domino game' that started with small blocks reappears at the light table, notes are written everywhere, a child wants to go to the forest to look for squirrels, another one really wants to visit a princess house, water colour paintings dry on the rack, a group of children is pretending to travel on the bus and I stand there mesmerised by the beauty of what unfolds around me.

What I notice is what Seth Godin describes so beautifully in one of his latest blog posts about initiative ( https://seths.blog): we're not going to run out. It's a self-renewing resource. He writes 't he only way to get initiative is to take it. It's never given.' which speaks to me about the power of choice and the ability for children to direct their learning through play. Young children never stop playing and are incredibly resourceful in finding new possibilities. Play truly is a space for initiative which shapes the learning that is going on. Sometimes research is i nitiated independently, at other times a small group may take charge of something before others do:

How do people communicate through writing?

How does an insect behave?

What sound does it make?

How do I share my learning with others?

I followed up on the requests to visit a princess house. I asked Aya where we should go and she said 'Well, you know." I had to tell her that I don't know where to find the princess house. Apparently 'you have to find the dragons, if you find them, you find the princesses'. I am thinking of going along with Aya's thinking by proposing to create our own princess house and involving the children in the construction of this new play space . I wonder where this will take us and what it will reveal about the children's relationships with each other and their surroundings. I am hoping they will become even more aware that they can shape the classroom space and the learning just as much as I do.
I wonder:
What kind of initiatives have you noticed lately with your students?
How do you document these moments and how does it inform your planning?
How do you engage with requests, theories or interests that may feel 'uncomfortable' (for example weapon / superhero play or conversations about death)?
Seth Godin reminds us that many of us have been educated or raised in such a way that initiative was not valued and taken away from us. Early childhood settings that value play provide a space for agency. This is how young children learn about themselves and others and how to live together.

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The first weeks of the school year are now behind us. It has been 25 days of relationships building with people, spaces and materials. There has been time to play; to discover shared interests, new possibilities with materials and develop friendships.

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Becoming who I am

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Becoming Who I Am from Museum Center for Learning on Vimeo.

People oftentimes ask, What becomes of children after they graduate Opal School? I imagine it's a question that comes up in all of your schools - learning environments that prioritize community and connection, the social-emotional and the intellectual, creativity and expression, empathy and agency, conflict and beauty, democracy and citizenship. The rich neural architecture constructed in these environments isn't always immediately apparent - and certainly isn't captured in standardized exams. That our schools are vital places of joyful theory building in the present is indisputable, but people wonder: What lives bloom from these roots? How do people who grew in these spaces, to paraphrase Loris Malaguzzi, continue to draw from the gem that they hold in their pockets?

Our new film, Becoming Who I Am, illustrates how those learning environments that you are working so hard to create lead people to become the neighbors, coworkers, and changemakers the world needs. We hope that it inspires you and that it is useful to you: we hope that you show it at your back-to-school nights to extend parents' imagination and alleviate their fears; in your teacher education classes to help the next generation of educators see the value of their innovation; to your friends and families so that they can finally understand why you do the work that you do; to advocate for greater opportunities for all young people.

We're awfully excited about this film, made by the extraordinarily talented and generous Opal School parents Irene Tejaratchi Hess and Mark Palansky. Let us know what you think!

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Becoming Who I Am from Museum Center for Learning on Vimeo. People oftentimes ask, What becomes of children after they graduate Opal School? I imagine it's a question that comes up in all of your schools - learning environments that prioritize community and connection, the social-emotional and the intellectual, creativity and expression, empathy and agency, conflict and beauty, democracy and citizenship.

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Developing approaches to learning (ATL)

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This article summarizes how reflections help learners choose how they want to act. It shares a real-time example and utilizes an opportunity to appreciate the beauty of the PYP and how implementing it ties together all the elements!
As a committed PYP practitioner for five years, I keep appreciating the uniqueness of the programme. However, moving from theory to practice is not always an easy journey. The PYP stresses achieving a balance between acquisition of essential knowledge and skills, development of conceptual understandings, demonstrations of positive attitudes, and taking of responsible action. Making this a realty in a classroom and making it meaningful for learners will bring the outcomes of the programme to fruition.

The IB approaches to learning are unarguably the most important to acquire not only in the units of inquiry, but also for any learning and teaching that occurs within the classroom and in life outside the school. The five categories and their respective sub-skills encompass what is needed for a learner in the 21st century. In this dynamic, fast evolving world we need people who are not just knowledgeable but are critical thinkers and problem solvers.

Year after year I work with a new set of learners, each of them unique in their own way. This year I am working with learners who are highly energetic, curious and incredibly open-minded. We often engage in reflection sessions during which we discuss how we are learning in classroom, what is going well and what is not. Learners come up with sincere reflections including that we often fall short at displaying our skills.

Learners reflected that if they could work consciously towards displaying all the sub-skills, they would resolve most of the problems they face in and out of the classroom. In tandem with this thought process we as a class managed to develop a means to help assess our commitment to display these skills in classroom - The skills wheel.

This assessment model is based on Carol Dweck's theory of Growth Mindset and the idea of "NOT YET" (Dweck, 2014).

Learners set up a skills goal for a period of 2 weeks. We display all the sub-skills of that category in an accessible area so that students know what they will be assessed on. After the observation period, the class meets up to discuss how they displayed each sub-skill. Learners provide each other feedback and those learners who have consistently made efforts to display the particular skill will be placed in the pink circle and those learners who have "not reached there yet" will be placed in the yellow part. Gradually, learners who try to work on their goal areas will be moved to the pink area too.

I have experienced a positive change in learners' thinking and learning behaviour in the classroom while utilizing this tool. Learners evidently show more ownership to their actions as they are a part of this solution. It also encouraged learners to show commitment to their choice and be more open minded to feedback.

Although small, I feel this model acted as an effective means for me to make approaches to learning categories and sub-skills more meaningful for my learners. It gave our learners the opportunity to choose to act; to reflect and decide the course of their actions. That, I believe, is responsible action.

References:
https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve

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Rachana Kothapally is a PYP facilitator at Silver Oaks School Bangalore, India. She has been an IB practitioner for 5 years and is passionate about developing critical thinking and problem-solving abilities of learners.

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This article summarizes how reflections help learners choose how they want to act. It shares a real-time example and utilizes an opportunity to appreciate the beauty of the PYP and how implementing it ties together all the elements! As a committed PYP practitioner for five years, I keep appreciating the uniqueness of the programme.

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Insight on Inquiry: Celebrating student work in kindergarten

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In a kindergarten classroom in Texas, 22 children spend their day participating in more than 10 different teacher-led activities in seven hours. They write in journals, do math, practice spelling and phonics, learn to read, and more. They are just 5 years old.

Across the country, kindergartners are being told what to do and how to do it, every single step along the way, all day long. They play less and study more than they did 20 years ago. This is what kindergarten has become, and it's not a good thing.

Besides diminishing children's sense of wonder and their ability to see themselves as learners, this constant push for children to learn academics through routinized activities can negatively impact their learning in elementary school and even through high school.

So why is this happening, and what can we do to make kindergarten an engaging place for learning again?

During the past few years, I and members of my research team have been interviewing education stakeholders: kindergarteners, their families, teachers, school administrators, university educators and researchers, policy analysts, policymakers and lobbyists. We've done our research in Texas, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C., and our goal is to make sense of these changes and how they might alter kindergarten so that it reflects their understanding what really should happen in kindergarten classrooms.

We found that almost everyone we talked to is worried about what kindergarten has become. A principal in Texas told us: "We're killing their joy for school in kindergarten. We have to ask ourselves, 'What are we setting children up for later?'"

To make kindergarten more engaging for children, these stakeholders offered a range of suggestions including "more recess," "more play, more conversation with and among the kids so that teachers build children's creativity, sense of wonder, their inquiry and interest, and their engagement in learning for themselves," "less testing," and ensuring that "kindergarten should never be like first grade. That doesn't make any sense."

While these stakeholders want change, they also know how important having a good year in kindergarten is for children's success in school.

How can we help kindergarteners be little and successful?

To make kindergarten engaging again requires reform of not only the kindergarten classroom but also of how we think about kindergarten itself.

The stakeholders in our study want policymakers and school administrators to put in place reforms that provide more time across the day for social and emotional learning and for the children to have more opportunities to play and interact with one another.

They also want to improve teacher training so that teachers have the professional knowledge to provide all kindergarteners with learning experiences that support their cognitive, emotional, physical and social learning while increasing their academic achievement.

In terms of state and national policy change, they want new content and program standards to be developed and implemented across the entire K-12 education system. The standards should emphasize developing the whole child while limiting the impact of standardized testing on children, teachers and their schools.

Based on our conversations, it would benefit everyone if we all stop thinking that being ready for kindergarten and school success means children must acquire specific academic skills and knowledge.

Instead, we should think about how families, teachers and schools can work together with students to create an engaging learning environment that helps all children become - and see themselves as - competent, life-long learners.
Christopher Brown, Ph.D., is a professor of early childhood education in the College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a faculty fellow with the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis and a faculty fellow of the Center for Health and Social Policy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

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We Need to Make Kindergarten Engaging Again

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In a kindergarten classroom in Texas, 22 children spend their day participating in more than 10 different teacher-led activities in seven hours. They write in journals, do math, practice spelling and phonics, learn to read, and more. They are just 5 years old.

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Positioning play as the 'engine of learning' (Miller & Almon, 2009) early years educators embrace play as a key catalyst to plan and create stimulating spaces where inquiry learning and playful investigations can unfold over time. Like yeast to dough, the 'engine' of play is engaged when supported by materials, participants and environments, all of which allow play to act as an activator of learning and transformation. The idea of playful spaces for inquiry learning has fascinated me for quite some time; not just because play is considered as a self-propelling force for learning, but also because the relationships between purposeful, intentional spaces and children's unfolding play is supportive to the active construction of meaning and experience. In this way I often wonder what sense of agency that space and place has within the realms of play and learning? How do the spaces that we encounter act on our experiences? How do they shape and cue our participation?

This week I watched a couple of nine and ten year old children responding with delight and surprise to the layers of ice that had appeared on the puddles in their playground overnight. I observed as they spend a very long period of time investigating and discussing how best to remove the sheets of ice from the puddle without breaking them. With many different theories afoot, they embarked on a negotiated process to move the ice sheets onto the grass and footpath in order to use them as a lens for research; to compare the textures of different ground surfaces viewed through the magnification and reflection of ice.

Although it was cold that morning, it wasn't long before they proceeded to build a series of 3 dimensional sculptures on the grass and the path. The boys had not walked to school in the early morning chill with an intention to create sculptures of ice, it was the environment that beckoned their participation, offering an invitation too tempting to resist.

In witnessing these moments I came to realise the levels of attunement of the children to their environment seemed to resonate on a different frequency to my own. The environment speaks to children constantly, in ways that adults often forget to see and hear.

I recently heard a colleague speaking about the writings of Carl Jung describing how Jung's view of the world had shaped her own reflections about the practices of education in the early years. My colleague shared a story about a particular moment when a parent in her class had helped her to encounter Jung's theory of synchronicity (Jung, 1973); which resulted in a great leap of understanding as they began to see the connectedness of children, ideas and environments differently. Jung's theory of synchronicity centres around the belief that everything is universally connected; that there is a togetherness and system-ness of things. His theories explored the ways in which the elements of life and the world around us work in connected ways to generate experience and potential. This conversation led me to think about the interconnectedness of 'play' and the learning environment; the synchronicity of learning. It presents a compelling lens for reflection on the contextual relationships between children's learning experiences, their sense of agency and the role of the environment.

What activating forces shape children's experience of learning through play?

What synchronicities exist between agency, learning, environments and play?

Perhaps Jung was onto something there... seeking to understand the synchronous relationships between experience, environments and learning would be a worthy pursuit for all teachers and learners, no matter what age or stage of learning.
Fiona

Jung, C.G. (1973). Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Miller, E., & Almon, J. (2009). Crisis in the kindergarten: Why children need to play in school. Alliance for Childhood (NJ3a)

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AGENCY AS A PLACE OF PLAY AND INVESTIGATION

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Positioning play as the 'engine of learning' (Miller & Almon, 2009) early years educators embrace play as a key catalyst to plan and create stimulating spaces where inquiry learning and playful investigations can unfold over time.

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When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gatherer education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all weekend and all summer long. We had time to explore in all sorts of ways, and also time to become bored and figure out how to overcome boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it, time to daydream, time to immerse ourselves in hobbies, and time to read comics and whatever else we wanted to read rather than the books assigned to us. What I learnt in my hunter-gatherer education has been far more valuable to my adult life than what I learnt in school, and I think others in my age group would say the same if they took time to think about it.

For more than 50 years now, we in the United States have been gradually reducing children's opportunities to play, and the same is true in many other countries. In his book Children at Play: An American History (2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first half of the 20th century as the 'golden age' of children's free play. By about 1900, the need for child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time. But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing children's freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began to replace 'pickup' games; adult-directed classes out of school began to replace hobbies; and parents' fears led them, ever more, to forbid children from going out to play with other kids, away from home, unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children's opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways.

Over the same decades that children's play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. It's not just that we're seeing disorders that we overlooked before. Clinical questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example, have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren in the US ever since the 1950s. Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. Over the same period, the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled, and that for children under age 15 has quadrupled.

The decline in opportunity to play has also been accompanied by a decline in empathy and a rise in narcissism, both of which have been assessed since the late 1970s with standard questionnaires given to normative samples of college students. Empathy refers to the ability and tendency to see from another person's point of view and experience what that person experiences. Narcissism refers to inflated self-regard, coupled with a lack of concern for others and an inability to connect emotionally with others. A decline of empathy and a rise in narcissism are exactly what we would expect to see in children who have little opportunity to play socially. Children can't learn these social skills and values in school, because school is an authoritarian, not a democratic setting. School fosters competition, not co-operation; and children there are not free to quit when others fail to respect their needs and wishes.

In my book, Free to Learn (2013), I document these changes, and argue that the rise in mental disorders among children is largely the result of the decline in children's freedom. If we love our children and want them to thrive, we must allow them more time and opportunity to play, not less. Yet policymakers and powerful philanthropists are continuing to push us in the opposite direction - toward more schooling, more testing, more adult direction of children, and less opportunity for free play.

I recently took part in a radio debate with a woman representing an organisation called the National Center on Time and Learning, which campaigns for a longer school day and school year for schoolchildren in the US. Her thesis - consistent with her organisation's purpose and the urgings of President Barack Obama and the Education Secretary Arne Duncan - was that children need more time in school than currently required, to prepare them for today's and tomorrow's competitive world. I argued the opposite. The host introduced the debate with the words: 'Do students need more time to learn, or do students need more time to play?'

Learning versus playing. That dichotomy seems natural to people such as my radio host, my debate opponent, my President, my Education Secretary - and maybe you. Learning, according to that almost automatic view, is what children do in school and, maybe, in other adult-directed activities. Playing is, at best, a refreshing break from learning. From that view, summer vacation is just a long recess, perhaps longer than necessary. But here's an alternative view, which should be obvious but apparently is not: playing is learning. At play, children learn the most important of life's lessons, the ones that cannot be taught in school. To learn these lessons well, children need lots of play - lots and lots of it, without interference from adults.

I'm an evolutionary psychologist, which means I'm interested in human nature, its relationship to the nature of other animals, and how that nature was shaped by natural selection. My special interest is play.

The young of all mammals play. Why? Why do they waste energy and risk life and limb playing, when they could just rest, tucked away safely in a burrow somewhere? That's the kind of question that evolutionary psychologists ask. The first person to address that particular question from a Darwinian, evolutionary perspective was the German philosopher and naturalist Karl Groos. In a book called The Play of Animals (1898), Groos argued that play came about by natural selection as a means to ensure that animals would practise the skills they need in order to survive and reproduce.

This so-called 'practice theory of play' is well-accepted today by researchers. It explains why young animals play more than older ones (they have more to learn) and why those animals that depend least on rigid instincts for survival, and most on learning, play the most. To a considerable degree, you can predict how an animal will play by knowing what skills it must develop in order to survive and reproduce. Lion cubs and other young predators play at stalking and pouncing or chasing, while zebra colts and other prey species play at fleeing and dodging.

Do we need more people who are good at memorising answers to questions and feeding them back? Who dutifully do what they are told, no questions asked?

Groos followed The Play of Animals with a second book, The Play of Man (1901), in which he extended his insights about animal play to humans. He pointed out that humans, having much more to learn than other species, are the most playful of all animals. Human children, unlike the young of other species, must learn different skills depending on the culture in which they are developing. Therefore, he argued, natural selection in humans favoured a strong drive for children to observe the activities of their elders and incorporate those activities into their play. He suggested that children in every culture, when allowed to play freely, play not only at the skills that are valuable to people everywhere (such as two-legged walking and running), but also at the skills that are specific to their culture (such as shooting bows and arrows or herding cattle).

My own research and ideas build on Groos's pioneering work. One branch of that research has been to examine children's lives in hunter-gatherer cultures. Prior to the development of agriculture, a mere 10,000 years ago or so, we were all hunter-gatherers. Some groups of people managed to survive as hunter-gatherers into recent times and have been studied by anthropologists. I have read all the writings I could find on hunter-gatherer childhoods, and a number of years ago I conducted a small survey of 10 anthropologists who, among them, had lived in seven different hunter-gatherer cultures on three different continents.

Hunter-gatherers have nothing akin to school. Adults believe that children learn by observing, exploring, and playing, and so they afford them unlimited time to do that. In response to my survey question, 'How much time did children in the culture you observed have for play?', the anthropologists unanimously said that the children were free to play nearly all of their waking hours, from the age of about four (when they were deemed responsible enough to go off, away from adults, with an age-mixed group of children) into their mid- or even late-teenage years (when they would begin, on their own initiatives, to take on some adult responsibilities). For example, Karen Endicott, who studied the Batek hunter-gatherers of Malaysia, reported: 'Children were free to play nearly all the time; no one expected children to do serious work until they were in their late teens.'

This is very much in line with Groos's theory about play as practice. The boys played endlessly at tracking and hunting, and both boys and girls played at finding and digging up edible roots. They played at tree climbing, cooking, building huts, and building other artefacts crucial to their culture, such as dugout canoes. They played at arguing and debating, sometimes mimicking their elders or trying to see if they could reason things out better than the adults had the night before around the fire. They playfully danced the traditional dances of their culture and sang the traditional songs, but they also made up new ones. They made and played musical instruments similar to those that adults in their group made. Even little children played with dangerous things, such as knives and fire, and the adults let them do it, because 'How else will they learn to use these things?' They did all this, and more, not because any adult required or even encouraged them to, but because they wanted to. They did it because it was fun and because something deep inside them, the result of aeons of natural selection, urged them to play at culturally appropriate activities so they would become skilled and knowledgeable adults.

In another branch of my research I've studied how children learn at a radically alternative school, the Sudbury Valley School, not far from my home in Massachusetts. It's called a school, but is as different from what we normally think of as 'school' as you can imagine. The students - who range in age from four to about 19 - are free all day to do whatever they want, as long as they don't break any of the school rules. The rules have nothing to do with learning; they have to do with keeping peace and order.

To most people, this sounds crazy. How can they learn anything? Yet, the school has been in existence for 45 years now and has many hundreds of graduates, who are doing just fine in the real world, not because their school taught them anything, but because it allowed them to learn whatever they wanted. And, in line with Groos's theory, what children in our culture want to learn when they are free turns out to be skills that are valued in our culture and that lead to good jobs and satisfying lives. When they play, these students learn to read, calculate, and use computers with the same playful passion with which hunter-gatherer kids learn to hunt and gather. They don't necessarily think of themselves as learning. They think of themselves as just playing, or 'doing things', but in the process they are learning.

Even more important than specific skills are the attitudes that they learn. They learn to take responsibility for themselves and their community, and they learn that life is fun, even (maybe especially) when it involves doing things that are difficult. I should add that this is not an expensive school; it operates on less than half as much, per student, as the local state schools and far less than most private schools.

The Sudbury Valley School and a hunter-gatherer band are very different from one another in many ways, but they are similar in providing what I see as the essential conditions for optimising children's natural abilities to educate themselves. They share the social expectation (and reality) that education is children's responsibility, not something that adults do to them, and they provide unlimited freedom for children to play, explore, and pursue their own interests. They also provide ample opportunities to play with the tools of the culture; access to a variety of caring and knowledgeable adults, who are helpers, not judges; and free age-mixing among children and adolescents (age-mixed play is more conducive to learning than play among those who are all at the same level). Finally, in both settings, children are immersed in a stable, moral community, so they acquire the values of the community and a sense of responsibility for others, not just for themselves.

I don't expect to convince most people, any time soon, that we should abolish schools as we know them today and replace them with centres for self-directed play and exploration. But I do think there is a chance of convincing most people that play outside of school is important. We have already taken too much of that away; we must not take away any more.

President Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, along with other campaigners for more conventional schooling and more tests, want children to be better prepared for today's and tomorrow's world. But what preparation is needed? Do we need more people who are good at memorising answers to questions and feeding them back? Who dutifully do what they are told, no questions asked? Schools were designed to teach people to do those things, and they are pretty good at it. Or do we need more people who ask new questions and find new answers, think critically and creatively, innovate and take initiative, and know how to learn on the job, under their own steam? I bet Obama and Duncan would agree that all children need these skills today more than in the past. But schools are terrible at teaching these skills.

For more than two decades now, education leaders in the US, the UK and Australia have been urging us to emulate Asian schools - especially those of Japan, China, and South Korea. Children there spend more time at their studies than US children, and they score higher on standardised international tests. What US Education Secretary Duncan apparently doesn't realise, or acknowledge, is that educational leaders in those countries are now increasingly judging their educational system to be a failure. While their schools have been great at getting students to score well on tests, they have been terrible at producing graduates who are creative or have a real zest for learning.

In an article entitled 'The Test Chinese Schools Still Fail' in The Wall Street Journal in December 2010, Jiang Xueqin, a prominent Chinese educator, wrote: 'The failings of a rote-memorisation system are well known: lack of social and practical skills, absence of self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and passion for learning.... One way we'll know we're succeeding in changing China's schools is when those scores [on standardised tests] come down.' Meanwhile, Yong Zhao, an American education professor who grew up in China and specialises in comparing the Chinese educational system with the system in the US, notes that a common term used in China to refer to graduates is gaofen dineng, meaning 'high scores but low ability'. Because students spend nearly all their time studying, they have little opportunity to be creative, take initiative, or develop physical and social skills: in short, they have little opportunity to play.

Unfortunately, as we move increasingly toward standardised curricula, and as we occupy ever more of our children's time with schoolwork, our educational results indeed are becoming more like those of the Asian countries. One line of evidence comes from the results of a battery of measures of creativity - called the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) - collected from normative samples of US schoolchildren in kindergarten through to 12th grade (age 17-18) over several decades. Kyung-Hee Kim, an educational psychologist at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, has analysed those scores and reported that they began to decline in 1984 or shortly after, and have continued to decline ever since. As Kim puts it in her article 'The Creativity Crisis', published in 2011 in the Creativity Research Journal, the data indicate that 'children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesising, and less likely to see things from a different angle'.

You can't teach creativity; all you can do is let it blossom, and it blossoms in play

According to Kim's research, all aspects of creativity have declined, but the biggest decline is in the measure called 'creative elaboration', which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. Between 1984 and 2008, the average elaboration score on the TTCT, for every grade from kindergarten onwards, fell by more than one standard deviation. Stated differently, this means that more than 85 per cent of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child in 1984. If education 'reformers' get their way, it will decline further still as children are deprived even more of play. Other research, by the psychologist Mark Runco and colleagues at the Torrance Creativity Center at the University of Georgia, shows that scores on the TTCT are the best childhood predictors we have of future real-world achievements. They are better predictors than IQ, high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve the most.

You can't teach creativity; all you can do is let it blossom. Little children, before they start school, are naturally creative. Our greatest innovators, the ones we call geniuses, are those who somehow retain that childhood capacity, and build on it, right through adulthood. Albert Einstein, who apparently hated school, referred to his achievements in theoretical physics and mathematics as 'combinatorial play'. A great deal of research has shown that people are most creative when infused by the spirit of play, when they see themselves as engaged in a task just for fun. As the psychologist Teresa Amabile, professor at Harvard Business School, has shown in her book Creativity in Context (1996) and in many experiments, the attempt to increase creativity by rewarding people for it or by putting them into contests to see who is most creative has the opposite effect. It's hard to be creative when you are worried about other people's judgments. In school, children's activities are constantly being judged. School is a good place for learning to do just what someone else wants you to do; it's a terrible place for practising creativity.

When Chanoff and I studied Sudbury Valley graduates for our paper 'Democratic Schooling: What Happens to Young People Who Have Charge of Their Own Education?', we asked about the activities they had played as students and about the careers they were pursuing since graduation. In many cases, there was a direct relationship between the two. Graduates were continuing to play the activities they had loved as students, with the same joy, passion, and creativity, but now they were making a living at it. There were professional musicians who had played intensively with music when they were students, and computer programmers who had spent most of their time as students playing with computers. One woman, who was the captain of a cruise ship, had spent much of her time as a student playing on the water, first with toy boats and then with real ones. A man who was a sought-after machinist and inventor had spent his childhood playfully building things and taking things apart to see how they worked.

None of these people would have discovered their passions in a standard school, where extensive, free play does not occur. In a standard school, everyone has to do the same things as everyone else. Even those who do develop an interest in something taught in school learn to tame it because, when the bell rings, they have to move on to something else. The curriculum and timetable constrain them from pursuing any interest in a creative and personally meaningful way. Years ago, children had time outside of school to pursue interests, but today they are so busy with schoolwork and other adult-directed activities that they rarely have time and opportunity to discover and immerse themselves deeply in activities they truly enjoy.

To have a happy marriage, or good friends, or helpful work partners, we need to know how to get along with other people: perhaps the most essential skill all children must learn for a satisfying life. In hunter-gatherer bands, at Sudbury Valley School, and everywhere that children have regular access to other children, most play is social play. Social play is the academy for learning social skills.

The reason why play is such a powerful way to impart social skills is that it is voluntary. Players are always free to quit, and if they are unhappy they will quit. Every player knows that, and so the goal, for every player who wants to keep the game going, is to satisfy his or her own needs and desires while also satisfying those of the other players, so they don't quit. Social play involves lots of negotiation and compromise. If bossy Betty tries to make all the rules and tell her playmates what to do without paying attention to their wishes, her playmates will quit and leave her alone, starting their own game elsewhere. That's a powerful incentive for her to pay more attention to them next time. The playmates who quit might have learnt a lesson, too. If they want to play with Betty, who has some qualities they like, they will have to speak up more clearly next time, to make their desires plain, so she won't try to run the show and ruin their fun. To have fun in social play you have to be assertive but not domineering; that's true for all of social life.

Watch any group of children in play and you will see lots of negotiation and compromise. Preschoolers playing a game of 'house' spend more time figuring out how to play than actually playing. Everything has to be negotiated - who gets to be the mommy and who has to be the baby, who gets to use which props, and how the drama will unfold. The skilled players use tag questions to turn their assertions into requests: 'Let's pretend that the necklace is mine. OK?' If it's not OK, a discussion ensues.

We're not all equally strong, equally quick-witted, equally healthy; but we are all equally worthy of respect and of having our needs met

Or watch an age-mixed group of children playing a 'pickup' game of baseball. A pickup game is play, because it's directed by the players themselves, not by outside authorities (coaches and umpires) as a Little League game would be. The players have to choose sides, negotiate rules to fit the conditions, decide what's fair and foul. They have to co-operate not just with the players on their team, but also with those on the other team, and they have to be sensitive to the needs and abilities of all the players. Big Billy might be the best pitcher, but if others want a turn at pitching he'd better let them have it, so they don't quit. And when he pitches to tiny Timmy, who is just learning the game, he'd better toss the ball gently, right toward Timmy's bat, or even his own teammates will call him mean. When he pitches to walloping Wally, however, he'd better throw his best stuff, because Wally would feel insulted by anything less. In the pickup game, keeping the game going and fun for everyone is far more important than winning.

The golden rule of social play is not 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' Rather, it's something much more difficult: 'Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.' To do that, you have to get into other people's minds and see from their points of view. Children practise that all the time in social play. The equality of play is not the equality of sameness. Rather, it is the equality that comes from respecting individual differences and treating each person's needs and wishes as equally important. That's also, I think, the best interpretation of Thomas Jefferson's line that all men are created equal. We're not all equally strong, equally quick-witted, equally healthy; but we are all equally worthy of respect and of having our needs met.

I don't want to over-idealise children. Not all children learn these lessons easily; bullies exist. But social play is by far the most effective venue for learning such lessons, and I suspect that children's strong drive for such play came about, in evolution, primarily for that purpose. Anthropologists report an almost complete lack of bullying or domineering behaviour in hunter-gatherer bands. In fact, another label regularly used for such band societies is egalitarian societies. The bands have no chiefs, no hierarchical structure of authority; they share everything and co-operate intensively in order to survive; and they make decisions that affect the whole band through long discussions aimed at consensus. A major reason why they are able to do all that, I think, lies in the extraordinary amount of social play that they enjoy in childhood. The skills and values practised in such play are precisely those that are essential to life in a hunter-gatherer band. Today you might survive without those skills and values, but, I think, not happily.

So, play teaches social skills without which life would be miserable. But it also teaches how to manage intense, negative emotions such as fear and anger. Researchers who study animal play argue that one of play's major purposes is to help the young learn how to cope emotionally (as well as physically) with emergencies. Juvenile mammals of many species deliberately and repeatedly put themselves into moderately dangerous, moderately frightening situations in their play. Depending on the species, they might leap awkwardly into the air making it difficult to land, run along the edges of cliffs, swing from tree branch to tree branch high enough that a fall would hurt, or play-fight in such a way that they take turns getting into vulnerable positions from which they must then escape.

Tantrums might work with parents, but they never work with playmates

Human children, when free, do the same thing, which makes their mothers nervous. They are dosing themselves with fear, aimed at reaching the highest level they can tolerate, and learning to cope with it. Such play must always be self-directed, never forced or even encouraged by an authority figure. It's cruel to force children to experience fears they aren't ready for, as gym teachers do when they require all children in a class to climb ropes to the rafters or swing from one stand to another. In those cases the results can be panic, embarrassment, and shame, which reduce rather than increase future tolerance for fear.

Children also experience anger in their play. Anger can arise from an accidental or deliberate push, or a tease, or from failure to get one's way in a dispute. But children who want to continue playing know they have to control that anger, use it constructively in self-assertion, and not lash out. Tantrums might work with parents, but they never work with playmates. There is evidence that the young of other species also learn to regulate their anger and aggressiveness through social play.

In school, and in other settings where adults are in charge, they make decisions for children and solve children's problems. In play, children make their own decisions and solve their own problems. In adult-directed settings, children are weak and vulnerable. In play, they are strong and powerful. The play world is the child's practice world for being an adult. We think of play as childish, but to the child, play is the experience of being like an adult: being self-controlled and responsible. To the degree that we take away play, we deprive children of the ability to practise adulthood, and we create people who will go through life with a sense of dependence and victimisation, a sense that there is some authority out there who is supposed to tell them what to do and solve their problems. That is not a healthy way to live.

Researchers have developed ways to raise young rats and monkeys in such a way that they experience other forms of social interaction but not play. The result is that the play-deprived animals are emotionally crippled when tested as young adults. When placed in a moderately frightening novel environment, they freeze in terror and fail to overcome that fear and explore the novel area, as a normal rat or monkey would do. When placed with an unfamiliar peer they might cower in fear or lash out with inappropriate and ineffective aggression, or both.

In recent decades we as a society have been conducting a play-deprivation experiment with our children. Today's children are not absolutely deprived of play as the rats and monkeys are in the animal experiments, but they are much more deprived than children were 60 years ago and much, much more than children were in hunter-gatherer societies. The results, I think, are in. Play deprivation is bad for children. Among other things, it promotes anxiety, depression, suicide, narcissism, and loss of creativity. It's time to end the experiment.

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Children today are suffering a severe deficit of play | Aeon Essays

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Children today are cossetted and pressured in equal measure. Without the freedom to play they will never grow up

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Preparing kids to be critical thinkers and problem solvers requires teaching a mix of foundational skills and higher-level abstract skills.

Jeffrey Isaac Greenberg 10+ / Alamy Stock Photo

In the early elementary years, educators can sometimes "inadvertently curb a student's enthusiasm for learning by focusing too much on grades and scores and the 'right' answers," writes Fang Gao, a lecturer in the English department at Shenyang Pharmaceutical University in Shenyang, China, for ASCD's Educational Leadership.

To inspire young children to become creative thinkers, problem solvers, and lifelong learners, teachers should lay a strong foundation in early literacy skills like vocabulary and spelling, as well as nurture a set of intangible skills like the ability to make sense of and critically analyze new information.

"The early years of learning (K-3) are an exciting time of rapid growth and cognitive and emotional development, and of building a solid foundation for independence, self-confidence, and self-reliance," writes Gao.

Striking a Balance

In the early elementary grades in particular, Gao says teachers tend to focus too much of their instructional time on teaching students "constrained skills" like "alphabetic knowledge, phonics, and vocabulary rules," and then executing these skills in isolation and within time limits.

While the constrained skills are necessary for students to learn to read, Gao points to research indicating that these skills alone won't make them strong readers or "prepare students for future success with unconstrained capabilities like cognitive flexibility, critical analysis, and contextual variation."

Striking the right balance in early literacy lessons, therefore, involves teaching a mix of essential foundational skills like sentence mechanics, for example, along with helping students develop the abstract skills they need to "engage in and concentrate on deeper learning, take on challenges, and develop effective communicative and critical thinking capabilities," Gao writes.

Nurturing a Broader Set of Literacy Skills

Simultaneously cultivating three types of literacy skills- recognition literacy, action literacy, and reflection literacy -in students is especially important, says Gao, because it fosters their creativity and language development, while encouraging them to "see themselves in the text."

Recognition literacy exercises can include grammar or spelling lessons that help students with their "verbal and visual recognition" through explicit instruction and demonstration, for example.

Action literacy activities, on the other hand, help students develop their "communication and construction of existing established knowledge" by explaining and describing concepts and ideas. As one exercise, a teacher could have students narrate "a story in their own words, linking language usage in certain specific contexts."

Reflection literacy, the third type, focuses on building students' ability to question standards and norms and create their own content, like a story or journal entry. When students "analyze their values and understandings of things in their immediate surroundings," they learn to question "socially constructed meanings and conventions" while building a deeper, more holistic understanding of the world around them, writes Gao.

For an activity that reinforces reflection literacy skills, ask students to be "language detectives" and write down 10 words they frequently hear in different environments in their lives-at home, out shopping, or at school. "By listening to what people around them say, students will learn to look for particular word patterns and actively reflect on the connection between written and oral language," Gao writes.

These three types of literacy education, Gao emphasizes, can be taught simultaneously, but reflection literacy skills should be developed as early as possible because they instill in children the ability to apply previous knowledge to produce something new, allowing students to become creators, rather than just consumers of knowledge.

"The ultimate goal of education is to prepare students to be independent and resourceful, to take action when parents or teachers are not around to intervene or offer help, and to find ways to handle issues or problems that they encounter in daily life," Gao writes.

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Early Literacy Instruction Should Go Beyond the Basics

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Preparing kids to be critical thinkers and problem solvers requires teaching a mix of foundational skills and higher-level abstract skills.

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Australian Council for Educational Research - ACER

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The new school year can be an exciting but daunting milestone for students making the move from primary to secondary, but particularly for young children who are starting formal schooling for the first time.

Educators play a central role in supporting youngsters and helping them to settle into their new surroundings, daily structure and learning activities.

University of Wollongong researchers Lisa Kervin, Jan Turbill and Kathryn Harden-Thew have been studying how early years educators can help smooth the transition from preschool. They say one useful strategy is to view children's literacy learning experiences on a continuum, from invisible to visible pedagogical practices.

Case study

The academics carried out observations in the preschool room of a long-day care centre in New South Wales, looking at the nature of literacy programmes, practices and perspective in supporting children as they prepare to transition to Kindergarten (the first year of formal schooling in the state). The case study findings have been published in the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy (JECL).

Lead author of the paper Lisa Kervin, an Associate Professor in Language and Literacy, tells Teacher the aim of the study was to look at transition from the perspective of the child. 'To think about what it actually looks like for them, in their preschool setting, in terms of the way that their learning experiences and opportunities are framed.

'When I think about my own experiences as a teacher in primary school, it would have been really helpful for me to have a really firm understanding of what the experiences the children had participated in in their prior-to-school setting might have looked like. I think it would have helped me really understand the way that I then framed experiences for children in their first years of school.'

The study explored the different experiences on offer - some planned and some incidental - and how educators guided and facilitated the learning. There were also follow-up interviews with staff working with the four- to five-year-old children. The researchers used the data to create four vignettes of classroom-based experiences, mapped on a continuum from 'invisible' (in a flexible, open-ended learning environment, where the intention of the activity is not known to the child and educator input and monitoring is not explicit) to 'visible'.

'Invisible and visible is a theoretical construct to really help us understand the way that different experiences are framed,' Kervin explains. 'In the journal paper, I talk about those in terms of the way the time is used, the classroom space and resources within the space are used, and the social control in terms of the interactions between the educator and the child, [and] from child to child as well.'

Classroom vignettes

Preschool educators in Australia use the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF). In New South Wales, school educators use the Best Start one-on-one assessment to map students' literacy and numeracy skills at the beginning of Kindergarten.

Kervin says the EYLF is underpinned by a focus on play and this was certainly evident in the case study vignettes. 'That is what was guiding the prior-to-school educators in these interactions with the children. Early years educators are incredibly skilled at being able to interpret [the framework] in terms of what the interests of the children are, but to also target some really intentional teaching to move the children forward. We see examples of that intentional teaching in those more visible pedagogies that are profiled in the journal paper.'

At the invisible end of the continuum, the first vignette describes children creating constructions with wooden blocks freely available on the classroom shelves. They had control over the timing of the activity and often shared their work by putting it on display with self-made signs. Although the educators spoke with children about their creations and used technical language, there was no explicit expectation and they didn't direct the children. A chalkboard activity where children could scribble, draw and write was another non-scheduled experience controlled by the youngsters, with educators demonstrating how to write a letter or word only at the request of the child.

Moving into visible, the third vignette involved a collection of toy dinosaurs. The educators had noticed this was a topic of interest for many of the children and set up an assortment of figurines on a table. Researchers observed the children exploring the area, 'talking about the dinosaurs, role-playing scenarios with the figurines and categorising the figurines in connection with books and a poster also located in this space (with each other and educators).' Educators modelled technical language and suggested plot ideas for role-play, provided connected literacy-focused activities and resources, but the choice of whether to interact with the space was still with the child.

The final vignette, placed at the visible end of the continuum, involved a planned unit of study on planets. Stories about space were read aloud to the children, topic books were left in the classroom library for them to explore and 'read'. The educators named the planets and talked about their specific characteristics, then set a task to create a papier-mâché planet. This was a scaffolded learning activity split into distinct lessons, with explicit modelling and clear expectations for the final product. The children were grouped and rotated through the lessons.

The researchers say the study revealed four key points: children's capacity and confidence in using language in social learning contexts; the diverse range of literacy opportunities available - including dance, music, storytelling, visual arts, listening, reading and writing; the range of roles taken by educators - modelling, monitoring, assisting, allowing children to assume control, and giving them agency and ownership; and, the richness and depth of experiences in all the activities.

Although the research team suggest mapping along a continuum is a useful framework for educators in monitoring a group of children as they move to the first year of schooling, they add a caveat that it should not lead to extra pressure on preschool educators to introduce visible pedagogical practices in order to 'teach' literacy skills.

'I think the more that educators can understand what's happening across the different contexts the more able we are to support children,' Kervin says. 'You know, the educators in the prior-to-school settings and then first years of school, they're working within very different curricular and learning framework structures so opportunities for collaboration of learning experiences might not be feasible. But, I think what is feasible is that understanding and attention to what it is that children are exposed to in the different settings, and ways that we might be able to smooth the pathways for children.'

The academic says, whatever the age group, it's important to look at transition from the perspective of the child. 'In my work I look at what's happening from preschool to the first year of formal schooling in particular, but it's the same for Year 6 - for the end of primary school to the first year of secondary school. If we're reframing the transition perspective and looking at it from the perspective of those who are actually making the transition, then I think that there's some important insight for us into our practices at either end.'
References
Kervin, L., Turbill, J., & Harden-Thew, K. (2017). Invisible to visible: Mapping the continuum of literacy learning experiences in an early years setting. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. 17(4), 465-484. doi:10.1177/1468798416638139

The new school year can be an exciting but daunting milestone for students making the move from primary to secondary, but particularly for young children who are starting formal schooling for the first time.

Educators play a central role in supporting youngsters and helping them to settle into their new surroundings, daily structure and learning activities.

University of Wollongong researchers Lisa Kervin, Jan Turbill and Kathryn Harden-Thew have been studying how early years educators can help smooth the transition from preschool. They say one useful strategy is to view children's literacy learning experiences on a continuum, from invisible to visible pedagogical practices.

Case study

The academics carried out observations in the preschool room of a long-day care centre in New South Wales, looking at the nature of literacy programmes, practices and perspective in supporting children as they prepare to transition to Kindergarten (the first year of formal schooling in the state). The case study findings have been published in the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy (JECL).

Lead author of the paper Lisa Kervin, an Associate Professor in Language and Literacy, tells Teacher the aim of the study was to look at transition from the perspective of the child. 'To think about what it actually looks like for them, in their preschool setting, in terms of the way that their learning experiences and opportunities are framed.

'When I think about my own experiences as a teacher in primary school, it would have been really helpful for me to have a really firm understanding of what the experiences the children had participated in in their prior-to-school setting might have looked like. I think it would have helped me really understand the way that I then framed experiences for children in their first years of school.'

The study explored the different experiences on offer - some planned and some incidental - and how educators guided and facilitated the learning. There were also follow-up interviews with staff working with the four- to five-year-old children. The researchers used the data to create four vignettes of classroom-based experiences, mapped on a continuum from 'invisible' (in a flexible, open-ended learning environment, where the intention of the activity is not known to the child and educator input and monitoring is not explicit) to 'visible'.

'Invisible and visible is a theoretical construct to really help us understand the way that different experiences are framed,' Kervin explains. 'In the journal paper, I talk about those in terms of the way the time is used, the classroom space and resources within the space are used, and the social control in terms of the interactions between the educator and the child, [and] from child to child as well.'

Classroom vignettes

Preschool educators in Australia use the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF). In New South Wales, school educators use the Best Start one-on-one assessment to map students' literacy and numeracy skills at the beginning of Kindergarten.

Kervin says the EYLF is underpinned by a focus on play and this was certainly evident in the case study vignettes. 'That is what was guiding the prior-to-school educators in these interactions with the children. Early years educators are incredibly skilled at being able to interpret [the framework] in terms of what the interests of the children are, but to also target some really intentional teaching to move the children forward. We see examples of that intentional teaching in those more visible pedagogies that are profiled in the journal paper.'

At the invisible end of the continuum, the first vignette describes children creating constructions with wooden blocks freely available on the classroom shelves. They had control over the timing of the activity and often shared their work by putting it on display with self-made signs. Although the educators spoke with children about their creations and used technical language, there was no explicit expectation and they didn't direct the children. A chalkboard activity where children could scribble, draw and write was another non-scheduled experience controlled by the youngsters, with educators demonstrating how to write a letter or word only at the request of the child.

Moving into visible, the third vignette involved a collection of toy dinosaurs. The educators had noticed this was a topic of interest for many of the children and set up an assortment of figurines on a table. Researchers observed the children exploring the area, 'talking about the dinosaurs, role-playing scenarios with the figurines and categorising the figurines in connection with books and a poster also located in this space (with each other and educators).' Educators modelled technical language and suggested plot ideas for role-play, provided connected literacy-focused activities and resources, but the choice of whether to interact with the space was still with the child.

The final vignette, placed at the visible end of the continuum, involved a planned unit of study on planets. Stories about space were read aloud to the children, topic books were left in the classroom library for them to explore and 'read'. The educators named the planets and talked about their specific characteristics, then set a task to create a papier-mâché planet. This was a scaffolded learning activity split into distinct lessons, with explicit modelling and clear expectations for the final product. The children were grouped and rotated through the lessons.

The researchers say the study revealed four key points: children's capacity and confidence in using language in social learning contexts; the diverse range of literacy opportunities available - including dance, music, storytelling, visual arts, listening, reading and writing; the range of roles taken by educators - modelling, monitoring, assisting, allowing children to assume control, and giving them agency and ownership; and, the richness and depth of experiences in all the activities.

Although the research team suggest mapping along a continuum is a useful framework for educators in monitoring a group of children as they move to the first year of schooling, they add a caveat that it should not lead to extra pressure on preschool educators to introduce visible pedagogical practices in order to 'teach' literacy skills.

'I think the more that educators can understand what's happening across the different contexts the more able we are to support children,' Kervin says. 'You know, the educators in the prior-to-school settings and then first years of school, they're working within very different curricular and learning framework structures so opportunities for collaboration of learning experiences might not be feasible. But, I think what is feasible is that understanding and attention to what it is that children are exposed to in the different settings, and ways that we might be able to smooth the pathways for children.'

The academic says, whatever the age group, it's important to look at transition from the perspective of the child. 'In my work I look at what's happening from preschool to the first year of formal schooling in particular, but it's the same for Year 6 - for the end of primary school to the first year of secondary school. If we're reframing the transition perspective and looking at it from the perspective of those who are actually making the transition, then I think that there's some important insight for us into our practices at either end.'
References
Kervin, L., Turbill, J., & Harden-Thew, K. (2017). Invisible to visible: Mapping the continuum of literacy learning experiences in an early years setting. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. 17(4), 465-484. doi:10.1177/1468798416638139

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The new school year can be an exciting but daunting milestone for students making the move from primary to secondary, but particularly for young children who are starting formal schooling for the first time. Educators play a central role in supporting youngsters and helping them to settle into their new surroundings, daily structure and learning activities.

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Earlier this year in April, I was asked by the IBO to create a planner for the PYP. Under the new PYP Enhancements, schools are able to create their own planners. The IB have created a planning document to guide this process - kind of a 'cheat sheet' to ensure your planning is balanced and reflective of the PYP elements. After being asked to do this, I tapped into one of the most valuable resource a school has: its people. Within a very short space of time, I had our principal, math coach, literacy coach, 2 second grade teachers, and a 4th grade teacher ready to help. We met, standing up around a white board table with markers in hand, and we talked. And we listened. At the end of it, I would take our ideas and try and synthesise them into a visual planning tool that both reflected our beliefs about learning and the PYP ethos on learning and planning for learning. And then we'd do it all over again. And again. And again. Until we came up with version six or seven which was submitted to the IB.

The big ideas from this planner:

it is about each individual student

we need to take time to provoke and wonder

we use our observations and conversations to guide next steps

our role is to gently prod and guide kids to their zone of "I don't quite know what I am doing but I know you'll help me learn"

The document is on the PYP Communities page and can be downloaded by schools. I created it on Pages - which I know is not everyone's cup of tea, but it is my tool of choice for projects like these. I still "own" the document and can share it and schools can choose to use it as it is or as a starting point for their own planning journey.

Recently, at the Learning2 Conference in Tokyo, Ben Sheridan shared an L2 Talk titled, "Together We Are Better". And I couldn't agree more with that sentiment.

What could have been a lone endeavor on my part became a collaborative undertaking. I learned a lot about listening, about digging into the intentions behind people's words, about respecting ideas and asking questions to make sure I was understanding what others were trying to say. I am really proud of the work we have done. Is it the best planner ever? Almost 🙂 What it is though, is a reminder to me that we can harness the power within our schools to create great things when we work together.

Last night I recorded a Webinar with Sarah from the IB on the Planning Process. It will be released soon and contains a wealth of information for you if you are planning on embarking on your own planning odyssey. From my perspective, the freedom to do this is a welcome change to the PYP and the learning about learning that occurs as a result is priceless. Give it a go and then share your ideas. I would love to work on Version 67 of this planner we have drafted....but first, Christmas holidays in New Zealand 🙂

A mom, educator, designer, creator. I care about kindness, representation, equality, and making a positive contribution. I began teaching in 1997 in New Zealand and have since taught from G1 through G10 in 4 continents. View all posts by Sonya terBorg

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No need to ask me to send you a copy! Click here and you will Download the pages version of the planner for editing! Earlier this year in April, I was asked by the IBO to create a planner for the P...

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The inquiry approach requires educators to think about their role and their students in a different way. It creates conflict among some educators, as it is a change not only in their practice, but also in their belief (Short & Burke, 1996). It was very enlightening when I understood that my role had shifted from delivering information, to consulting and working with the students on their lifelong learning journey.

During our unit of inquiry People make choices about how they move from place to place, under the transdisciplinary theme Where we are in place and time, the students began to explore the transport systems they used over the holidays. We asked the students various questions to prompt their thinking and they communicated their experiences as well as asked each other questions. It became clear to us that this unit of inquiry was relevant and meaningful to the students, as it tapped into their personal experiences and prior knowledge.

From these conversations and explorations, we created different transport systems in the classroom using recycled materials. The students were active participants in their learning as they investigated different systems and decided how to make parts of a system. In the classroom, the students were seen engaging in dialogue with their peers or with the teachers. This was a demonstration of their commitment to learning and respect for one another.

During the unit, a student told me he had seen a plane crash on TV. I realized that the students are exposed to all sorts of media outside of school, which exposes them to unfortunate events such as the Trans-Asia flight 235 in Taipei. I wondered, "What do they think about this event? How does it make them feel?"

Undoubtedly, it is a sensitive topic and not all educators would agree that we should talk to our young learners about certain events in the world. However, what if our students raised it? Is it right to not explore the new direction of the inquiry with students in the early years?

At many points in our teaching career we find ourselves in the midst of a sensitive conversation and we are uncertain about how to tackle it. What do we say? What if we offend someone? Or we may come across challenging behaviours and realize that there is a cultural context, which we may not be aware of, or we do not agree with.

The TransAsia flight 235 was a real issue for one of the students and I question if comforting my student was the appropriate response. It may be a sensitive topic for educators; however, thinking about the IB mission statement, we need to equip ourselves with strategies to work with our young learners.

At a young age students begin to form their opinions and beliefs; this is evident from the choices they make. Therefore, I wonder if we want our students to be on the path of international-mindedness, should we give our young learners a chance to explore different perspectives? Thinking back to the classroom inquiry and the authentic direction it was going, I recognized that it could have been explored further.

I feel these observations of students and professional reflections raised valuable questions for me. I invite other PYP educators to do the same the next time you face tension in your teaching.

When thinking about the educator's role in approaching different perspectives, I recalled Merryfield's (2002) article on The difference a global educator can make. Merryfield states, "Everyday, teachers make instructional decisions that affect how students perceive their own culture, their nation, the lives of people around the world, and the issues and conflicts facing the planet."

So I ask, how can we, as Early Childhood Educators, make the right instructional decisions in an early years classroom?

Sources:

Davy, I 2011, 'Learners without borders: a curriculum for global citizenship', IB Position Paper, pp. 3-10.

Merryfield, M 2002, 'The Difference a Global Educator Can Make', Educational Leadership, no. 60, 18-21.

Short, K & Burke, C 1996, 'Examining our beliefs and practices through Inquiry', Language Arts, no. 73, pp. 97-104.

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The article was originally published in The Red Dot, Issue 4, June 2015 - a Singapore/Malaysia PYP Network Newsletter.

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Maninder Johal is passionate about the early years and enjoys teaching young learners. Since working and learning about the IB, she has taken a personal interest in international-mindedness and exploring how this looks in the classroom and the school community. She strives towards teachers sharing their practice, extending ideas with students and teachers and encouraging teachers to reflect on their practice.

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An early years approach to global issues

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The inquiry approach requires educators to think about their role and their students in a different way. It creates conflict among some educators, as it is a change not only in their practice, but also in their belief (Short & Burke, 1996).

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The Reggio Emilia approach is a complex education model that, along with parent-teacher involvement, emphasizes the role of the environment that evokes children's curiosity, creativity, and wonder. However, as a third teacher, the Reggio Emilia environment is not alive in a way that a human is - rather it is considered to arise as a result of personal work and imagination.

In cooperation with two other classroom educators, a varied environment at the Reggio inspired preschool aims at supporting and developing children's learning. It serves as a source of inspiration and encourages kids to dive deeper into their interests and learn independently based on their understandings and perceptions.

The role of Reggio Emilia environment

Speaking about the role of the preschool environment, the Reggio Emilia philosophy mainly draws upon the way kids use physical space and facilities to perceive the world. In the Reggio Emilia classroom, focus is made not only on how the surrounding space looks like, but also how it feels from a kid's perspective. According to Reggio Emilia, children do not always need teachers and parents to guide and help, but they need a space to unleash their ambitions and unlock the potential. With this in view, the Reggio Emilia classroom is equipped with varied facilities and materials to foster spontaneous learning, individual study and multi-age groupage project work.

Apart from being an inspiring place to play and develop, the Reggio inspired preschool environment helps parents and teachers grasp how children learn and creates a groundwork for documentation and research. In this context, Reggio Emilia educators' roles are closely tied. Parents and teachers learn from children who engage with a supportive environment specifically created for them.

There are the following key aspects of the Reggio Emilia environment:

* Aesthetics

Reggio Emilia classrooms are equipped in such a way that they encourage self-expression, develop imagination and cultivate a taste of aesthetics in children. In a lovely, pleasant and neutrally colored preschool environment, kids are offered a plethora of opportunities to develop creativity and evoke a sense of beauty.

* Provocation

The only way to keep children interested is to create an engaging and enticing space that kids cannot resist. That is why, in Reggio inspired classrooms, various materials and items are placed by a theme, so that to foster kids' understanding and peak their interest to the topic they appeal.

* Organization

Learning in an organized environment is a key to nurturing a careful and attentive kid. Organization does not revolve around purity and perfection, but rather purpose and functionality. Classroom arrangement guides children. Boxes, shelves and partitions are used to denote an area, where a kid can enter and work comfortably. A groundwork with a table and no chairs means that children are supposed to stand while working here.

* Collaboration

One of the core messages that the Reggio inspired environment communicates is learning through collaboration. Through materials and activities, kids are encouraged to work in small groups, which develops their involvement, creativity and shared thinking.

Through supportive and stimulating environment, kids can uncover endless opportunities to express themselves and present their ideas, so that they become protagonists on their learning pathway.

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Environment in Reggio Inspired Preschool

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The Reggio Emilia approach is a complex education model that, along with parent-teacher involvement, emphasizes the role of the environment that evokes children's curiosity, creativity, and wonder. However, as a third teacher, the Reggio Emilia environment is not alive in a way that a human is - rather it is considered to arise as a result of personal work and imagination.

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Last time Fiona wrote 'Finding time to pull apart ideas with others is a critical part of our work, and can be a true joy when you find that colleague with whom you can really wrestle with ideas, explore sticky tensions and open opportunities for new meaning to emerge. ' Collaborative planning at my school continues to be a precious time where we listen to each other's perspectives, challenge our thinking and explore new possibilities and solutions. Every Wednesday, we have about two hours to reflect on last week's learning, plan in response to the children's thinking and consider other learning engagements such as circle time, number talks, small group explorations and PE. To structure our meeting (and our thinking!), we use protocols to explore the conceptual layers in children's play and discuss our documentation. Everyone first individually identifies prevalent play scenarios and writes these ideas on different sticky notes combined with the underpinning concepts that come to

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Constant Conversations - Unpacking Pedagogy

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Last time Fiona wrote 'Finding time to pull apart ideas with others is a critical part of our work, and can be a true joy when you find that colleague with whom you can really wrestle with ideas, explore sticky tensions and open opportunities for new meaning to emerge.

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Focus on the Planning Process, not the Planner!

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The magic of role-play | SharingPYP Blog

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Thinking about play as an agentic space for learning starts with acknowledging an essential part of play: choice. When children choose to engage with something, that magical moment of engagement wonder and curiosity, they show us what they want to learn and think about.

The above statement makes a strong case for engaging learning spaces, filled with interesting open ended materials that evoke inquisitiveness, awe, surprise and have endless possibilities. I always wonder how we can take more risks in the design of learning spaces to create room for authentic learning situated in the lives of the children. What experiences do the children encounter as they inhabit their learning spaces? What will capture their attention?

I continue to think about the worlds my students encounter as citizens of a densely-populated, inner city neighborhood in The Hague. What connections can we draw between their experience and the learning spaces they inhabit? A sense of belonging and the meanings and understandings that the children have constructed within that place, are important starting points in their learning. A recent walk to the local library made me realize how much the children are part of the community as they greeted relatives and friends along the way and told me all about the shops and parks they go to with their family members.

Last week Fiona wrote: "I came to realise the levels of attunement of the children to their environment seemed to resonate on a different frequency to my own. The environment speaks to children constantly, in ways that adults often forget to see and hear. "

Children are constantly engaged with what is around them, this starts with a sense of belonging within a system of relationships.

As learning is a social endeavour and children construct meaning through relationships and a sense of belonging, we need to create spaces that support the development of relationships. Children need enough time and space to play with open ended materials, interesting books and materials that support them with representing their ideas.

During the year, many of my students have developed a deep relationship with paper. They often use this material to represent their experiences in their community such as going to the playground, shopping, phones and paying with credit cards.

Recently the focus shifted to the transformational power of masks, crowns and wands. Perhaps the fascination of the children revolves around a hidden self behind the mask. Through its expression, the mask gives the possibility of a new identity.

Often a new interest starts when one child offers an initial idea to the group. Quickly several other children will start to extend this concept, influencing each other as they interact, share and communicate. During the day the relationships, time, space and the proximity of an idea all shape the thinking that goes on. It is a joy to be among such avid learners.

How do you create a space where relationships can flourish?

How can we incorporate children's sense of place in the learning spaces?

In what way do relationships influence the learning at your school?

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RELATIONSHIPS AS AN ACTIVATING FORCE IN PLAY

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Thinking about play as an agentic space for learning starts with acknowledging an essential part of play: choice. When children choose to engage with something, that magical moment of engagement wonder and curiosity, they show us what they want to learn and think about.

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This article draws from learning that took place within the transdisciplinary theme of "sharing the planet". Listening to learning within the context of the Reggio Emilia philosophy of the Hundred Languages of the Child resulted in a beautiful and authentic path traveled along this inquiry. "The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking."
At first glance, these lines seem to affirm the beautiful complexities of young learners, and the many capabilities for self-expression they possess. In the PYP context, we may extend this interpretation by reading these words as a powerful reminder of our responsibility to provide creative, dynamic and layered experiences for our students that enable their thoughts to shine in their best light.

This article reflects on the final unit of inquiry conducted in pre-kindergarten at our school this year. Our children were inquiring into the central idea that "we share our local environment with other living things and may affect each other's lives". This was an inquiry into:

The characteristics of living things in our local environment

The role of living things in our local environment

How we may care for living things in our local environment

Our key concepts were form, connection and responsibility. Coming into summer, our local environment was in full bloom with colourful flowers all around us, tall leafy trees shading us from the sun and soft green grass beneath our feet. Caring for plants emerged as a huge area of interest for my students.

We conducted an experiment, spread over two weeks, on whether plants can grow without water or sunlight. We were investigating whether the plants that many of us have in our classrooms and homes can look after themselves, or whether people have a role in helping them to survive. "Look at that sad bucket" said one little boy as we mourned a dead plant. "My mum's buckets don't look like that." After a little questioning, I found he was talking about the plastic, brown pot the plant came in. "You don't like the plant pot?" I probed. A little group of children joined in our conversation, and talked about how easy the plastic pot would be to break. "The flowers are beautiful and they need a beautiful place to grow" reasoned one student. "We could make a better bucket- I mean plant pot!" chimed in one girl. "I've seen them in my home!"

And so it began.

We had a purpose, born straight from our investigation in how we may care for living things. In order to grow a plant in our homes, it needed a durable plant pot to grow in. "Where should we start?" I wondered aloud. But the children were already a few steps ahead. One little group began drawing fierce scribbles and circular shapes using black crayon on white paper. Another little boy, below, headed straight for the shaving foam. "I need to draw it with my finger, not with a paper" he explained.

One little girl headed straight for the watercolours. "I need to think in colours" she explained. She sat and thought for quite some time.

Another group of students decided to mix cornflour with water and oil to see if a "dough" could be made to make a pot. This group worked hard but could not get their dough to hold its shape.

After two days of exploring, I brought out some clay. The children were invited to represent their thinking with their hands if they wished. The kneading and pinching of the clay pots was a sensory feast, and the children had free reign to choose the style, shape and colour of their plant pot. We linked in with our art department in an authentic transdisciplinary moment, and in their support of our project, they made their kiln available to us. We learned all about glazes that strengthen clay pots, how many coats to apply, and how the heat of the kiln gives clay strength.

Our final pieces were "shiny and hard and beautiful and strong" shared one student. This learning, from that first observation to the many beautiful drawings, sketches, etchings and paintings that followed, was a gentle reminder of the importance of listening and trusting in the instincts of my learners. Perhaps, in the greater scheme of things, this may serve as a reminder of our duty as teachers to follow, unafraid, down the shining and gloriously unpredictable paths of inquiry that our students illuminate to us.

My pre-kindergarteners were excited to bring their very own plant pots home, along with a little pack of seeds, so they could continue their explorations over the summer break. Inquiry brings us to places full of wonder and inspiration. With so many languages to explore, so many learning pathways stretching tantalizingly ahead of us, the possibilities are infinite.

Reference:

"The Hundred Languages" by Loris Malaguzzi (translated by Lella Gandini)

Sourced: http://www.innovativeteacherproject.org/reggio/poem.php
Niamh Price is a Pre-Kindergarten teacher at Suzhou-Singapore International School, China. She is in her 7th year at this school. Prior to this, Niamh enjoyed teaching and working with children and families in different areas of Dublin, Ireland. Niamh holds a Master's degree in Drama in Education, with a research specialization in play and creativity in the early years classroom. She believes in the importance of establishing relationships with every student who crosses the threshold of her classroom, and is committed to finding out not just what each child can do, but who they are. Creating environments that invite beauty, curiosity and collaboration is an essential feature of her practice.

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Acknowledging the Hundred Languages of Children

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This article draws from learning that took place within the transdisciplinary theme of "sharing the planet". Listening to learning within the context of the Reggio Emilia philosophy of the Hundred Languages of the Child resulted in a beautiful and authentic path traveled along this inquiry.

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Imagine you are looking after three young children. They discover a pile of discarded bread crates, office chairs and wooden planks, and want to play. How do you react?

Whatever your decision, you probably won't get it 100 per cent right - parents, teachers and others who work with children never can.

If they intervene, they are overprotective. If they don't, they are negligent.

In the scenario above, most adults would either stop the play or be very directive about how the play can occur, and what objects can be used.

Stopping or restricting play might seem reasonable in the short term, but research shows that, in the longer term, excessive safety can hinder children's opportunities for learning.

So, what's the best solution when children want to play with objects we would not normally think of as toys?

We've all heard the saying that one person's trash is another person's treasure. The adult who discovers the treasure might see beauty or functionality in the trash that wasn't apparent to the original owner.

For children, the trash-to-treasure transfer is a trigger for endless possibilities.

Child development researchers like me, and others who work with children, refer to the trash as "loose parts".

Research has revealed clear physical benefits as well as some social and some creative benefits of loose parts play.

With so many benefits and so much trash available, it seems an easy, fun and cost-effective way to promote children's development.

The main barrier is that adults often see this kind of play as too risky.

Where children imagine building boats and houses, adults imagine catastrophes.

Fostering creativity and breaking down barriers

As part of the Sydney Playground Project, we have introduced loose parts into school playgrounds and included risk-reframing workshops that brought parents and teachers together to consider the benefits of risky play.

Teachers are often concerned they will be seen as neglecting their duty of care if they allow children to take risks, so they restrict play that they know is beneficial for children.

That's why knowing that parents are in agreement about the importance of risky play is important.

Our results and those of a Melbourne-based study both showed an increase in children's play and physical activity, which is important because Australian children generally don't meet daily physical activity requirements.

In the Sydney Playground Project, teachers observing play commented on children's creativity.

What's more, some children who previously had difficulty getting involved in play with their peers, such as children with limited English, were able to join in.

Loose parts play is often discussed amid calls for parents to be less protective and allow their children to roam free.

There is evidence that overprotective parenting and helping children too much predicts child anxiety.

But that doesn't mean we must go to the other extreme of "free range", which doesn't suit all parents or children.

Count to 10 before you intervene

In the Sydney Playground Project, we recommend the 10-second rule.

Let's say we see children stacking some car tyres and climbing on top. The alignment isn't perfect and we can see potential for the tyres to fall and an injury to occur.

Our immediate response is to either tell the children to stop or help by holding the tyres in place.

But, if we do a slow count to 10 and watch what happens, we might be surprised.

Most likely, the children will manage the risky situation they have created.

We have seen some kids place mats under structures to ensure they land on a soft surface or take turns holding unstable structures in place to provide additional support.

Sometimes children ask for adult assistance. Children know that adults are generally stronger and taller, and that's a good opportunity to be involved without interfering.

It's also important to remember that risk-taking is relative to the child.

For one child, a small climb and jump may feel risky. Another child may need climb stacked objects above their height before they start to experience the feelings of uncertainty associated with risk taking.

Importantly, in loose parts play, all children can play together.

Unlike traditional play structures such as climbing frames, there are no clear goals to achieve. There is no pressure to take risks that children would prefer to avoid.

If there is potential for a serious accident, then of course it is important for adults to intervene.

But injury rates were monitored during the Sydney Playground Project loose parts play interventions and although the play was perceived as riskier by adults, it didn't actually result in an increase in injuries compared to play in normal playgrounds.

It's also important to remember that while we want to avoid anything serious, minor injuries that lead to cuts, scrapes and bruises are important in learning the consequences of actions.

There are very few flat, soft and predictable surfaces in the world.

Skills acquired on the playground can build the foundations for enjoying the pleasures of life, such as exploring old and modern cities, rural landscapes and the Australian bush.
Dr Shirley Wyver is a senior lecturer in child development at Macquarie University.

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Adults struggle to ignore risk in outdoor play, but kids may surprise us

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Imagine you are looking after three young children. They discover a pile of discarded bread crates, office chairs and wooden planks, and want to play. How do you react? Whatever your decision, you probably won't get it 100 per cent right - parents, teachers and others who work with children never can.

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Inquiry learning in play spaces, An early childhood teacher shares how she plans for and implements a structured inquiry program working from students' interests to achieve curriculum goals. The teacher is highly organized and has clear intentions for children's learning. She structures and sequences children's 'investigations', maintaining their engagement and scaffolding their learning. She builds in reflection with individuals and the class, enhancing their metacognitive capacity and retention and transfer of what has been, The two hour block called 'Investigations' operates four mornings a week and integrates literacy and numeracy, creative construction and arts exploration with Science Understanding and Science Inquiry Skills. The five and six year old students, who are highly motivated and self-organised, elect to work at different learning environments during the session. They build constructions and solve, inquiry skills; literacy and numeracy understandings; and foundational dispositions for learning

https://www.aitsl.edu.au/tools-resources/resource/inquiry-learning-in-play-spaces-illustration-of-practice

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Inquiry learning in play spaces, An early childhood teacher shares how she plans for and implements a structured inquiry program working from students' interests to achieve curriculum goals. The teacher is highly organized and has clear intentions for children's learning. She structures and sequences children's 'investigations', maintaining their engagement and scaffolding their learning.

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I still remember the first time a student refused to step into my classroom. Initially ecstatic to start school, Truman was now red in the face from crying while my teaching assistant and I practically pried him off his mother's leg.

We were a few weeks into my first year teaching kindergarten and I had begun to think of my classroom as a warm and inviting space. The walls were painted sunshine yellow and covered with student artwork. I played smooth jazz in the background to help ease the kids into the day. Every morning I neatly placed a worksheet in front of each child's chair, following the example of my colleagues. I never imagined those same worksheets would become what made Truman dread the classroom so much.

Truman's mom shared how anxious he was even at home, having nightmares each night before school; in class he had become quiet and reserved, distancing himself from his peers. To Truman, the worksheets, which were meant to fill a bit of time in the morning, had become a form of timed testing, presenting him daily with a task he couldn't complete. With his fine motor skills still developing, even holding a pencil was difficult for him, and he would anxiously watch his peers completing their worksheets well before our morning meeting. This anxiety would build and build each day to the point that he stopped wanting to come to school at all.

Something had to change-just not with him.

The New Kindergarten

In an increasing number of schools, teachers of very young students are pressured to pack every moment of the day with structured, academically rigorous tasks. One recent whitepaper linked the practice to preparing kids for the long road of schooling ahead, in which progress is measured through standardized testing starting in third grade.

Friedrich Froebel, a pedagogue of modern education, coined the term "kindergarten" in 1840 after recognizing the importance of play in the development of young children. Inspired by the idea of a garden, he designed a classroom where the teacher presented children with objects, which they were allowed to play with in any way they could imagine. When they lost interest in one object, they would be presented with a new one to spark curiosity and creativity. Children were encouraged to grow and flourish in this free form, play-based environment.

By contrast, most kindergarten classrooms today look very different. Across the country, kindergarteners are pressured to meet academic standards that both teachers and experts say many kids are developmentally not ready for. In an era defined by high stakes testing and rigorous state standards, children in kindergarten are held to such high standards that one academic paper called it " the new first grade." Its findings indicated that both playtime and dedicated spaces for playing had significantly decreased between 1998 and 2010 as federal regulations put more emphasis on high stakes testing. The same analysis found kindergarten teachers were about 15 percent more likely to use math and reading workbooks at the end of the decade. All of these findings were often more pronounced at schools serving low-income and minority communities.

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At my school we are required to teach and test five sight words a week (along with an introduction to phonetic markings), greatly exceeding the 20 to 40 sight words recommended for the average kindergartener. At the same time, tools such as art centers, sand tables and dress up clothes, which encourage curiosity, critical thinking and social skills, get used less in order to emphasize academics. Even snacktime has disappeared in favor of extra reading practice.

Yet all this focus on academics may not matter much in the long run. Some studies suggest that exposing young students to rigorous academics early in life has little effect on later performance. In Tennessee, Vanderbilt University researchers found that academic gains made by students in the state's scaled-up pre-K program had vanished by third grade. Worse, all this rigor may actually have negative impacts on students' self-esteem and overall well being. Meanwhile, kindergarten teachers are feeling the strain, leading some quality teachers to launch protests or else change schools, retire early or quit altogether.

The Importance of Play

Play might not be a top priority for school administrations these days. But play within the classroom takes on many forms and should be valued. Free play is unstructured, spontaneous and filled with children tapping into their unencumbered imaginations. A bedsheet suddenly becomes a bridal veil or a stick becomes a magic wand. Guided play, on the other hand, takes place in a prepared environment purposefully set up with materials to stimulate and support children's curiosity and creativity. As the students move about, teachers observe, record, confer, participate, push extension questions and use this information to plan next steps. Both are essential, and a wealth of quality research has found both free and guided play are critical for helping a child develop into a whole child.

Up to age eight, prioritizing time within the classroom to play with developmentally appropriate options has multiple benefits:

Children develop the ability to self-regulate their emotions and their responses to others. During unstructured play in my classroom, I witnessed one student go to our "dramatic play" corner, which was full of students. Instead of getting upset, she turned her attention to the tea set we had set up where kids brew their own herbal tea and sat with her friends for a few minutes. Afterward, she helped clean up the space and washed her cup before moving on to the next activity. Without time for this unstructured play, children lose important opportunities to develop critical motor skills, social skills and life skills like cleaning up after oneself.

Play provides an outlet to practice empathy. After one student worked tirelessly on a flower motif made out of shape blocks, he was devastated when a friend accidentally toppled it. Recognizing the hurt she caused just by looking at his face, she immediately responded with, "I'm sorry. Can I help you rebuild it?"

Play promotes the development of language. One year, I had a new student from Sweden who didn't speak English. He was afraid to speak for three months, but opportunities to build with blocks and other forms of play became an unspoken, universal language between him and his classmates. One day, frustrated because his friends did not understand the vision he had for the block tower, he took a risk and began to explain out loud what he wanted. During our guided and free play time, I started giving him sticky notes to label the parts of structures.

Play provides a safe and nurturing environment to explore gender and gender expression. By giving students access to many types of dramatic play props, children have the freedom to explore and develop their own sense of gender and gender roles. At the kitchen center, one boy always took the role of a mother, carrying around our class stuffed animal mascot as his "baby." Instead of chastising him for playing a role traditionally reserved for girls, his peers gathered some loose fabric and together made a dress and a baby carrier to add to his play.

Opening the Door

As a new teacher five years ago, Truman's reactions to my classroom left a big impact. Researching the benefits of incorporating more play in the classroom helped me discover what I needed to change to make the classroom a safe space for him again. I scrapped the morning worksheets and began dedicating the first part of our day to unstructured play. All of the blocks, dinosaurs, paints, puppets and dominoes the class hadn't had time to explore were now fair game. Within days, Truman was excited to come to school again; he was finally allowed space for the types of learning that might otherwise get left behind.

Choice time in my classroom affords children the opportunity to try out ideas, build strengths, seek answers, test predictions and navigate social interactions in both structured and unstructured ways. This time is fueled by imagination and creativity. Yet due to the pressure to keep a tightly managed, academically rigorous schedule, my door is always shut for fear that I will be told dedicated time for play simply isn't a priority. On days when I know I will be observed, the magical momentum of playing, learning and interacting comes to a halt and I grab a pre-rehearsed lesson to demonstrate a specific academic purpose for every minute of the day. In truth, my evaluation score-and job security-depends on it.

As educators, we cannot allow this to continue. An obsession with assessments, and the pressure for children to meet lofty academic requirements years before they're ready, have all but eliminated playtime from our schools. The opportunities to develop the social-emotional skills necessary to become compassionate, considerate and curious problem solvers are disappearing. However, play and academics are not mutually exclusive. They go hand-in-hand, multiplying opportunities for learning and childhood development. It's time to open our classroom doors again and proudly display play as a crucial part of supporting the whole child. Our kids-and our teachers-will thank us for it.

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Play Is Disappearing From Kindergarten. It's Hurting Kids. - EdSurge News

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I still remember the first time a student refused to step into my classroom. Initially ecstatic to start school, Truman was now red in the face from crying while my teaching assistant and I practically pried him off his mother's leg.