The Best Part of the Day is Recess
Why Play IS Learning
School started recently and as my new class sat in front of me, an administrator walked in. She started talking to the students and asking them questions. “How are you doing? How is your first week going? Did you have a good summer?” So on and so forth. Then the question was asked that always makes me laugh: “What are you most looking forward to this year?” If you’ve ever worked with kids or even just met a kid, I bet you can guess the answer… recess! While this answer may seem silly, it is pretty telling from an evolutionary standpoint.
Go Back In Time
I want to stress what learning looked like for the vast majority of human history. Recall that we are talking unfathomable amounts of time. In the tribes of our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors, the adults were busy with tasks essential to survival and the kids formed groups and played. From really early ages on up, kids were essentially left to fend for one another. While doing this, they played. They explored. They played. They watched the adults. They played. They helped one another. They played. See where I am going with this? For most of evolutionary history, learning and play were inseparable. Kids learned the skills necessary for success in their adult lives through collaborative, hands-on, mixed-age play (see Gray, 2009).
Say your hypothetical ancestor at seven years old wanted to learn to hunt. They would have grabbed other kids, some older and some younger, found a spear and some open space, and took turns throwing it. Odds are it would have become a game or friendly competition. If anyone needed a model, they could go watch an adult. Kids with slightly more experience would have aided more novice kids to grow bit by bit. To teachers, this probably sounds a lot like scaffolding in education theory. That is because it’s exactly the same thing, only it happened naturally.
Primary and Secondary Knowledge
The skills our ancestors needed to learn to be successful as adults in hunter-gatherer societies would have been directly related to survival and reproduction. As a result, the ability to learn these skills would have been shaped by natural selection. Consequently, these skills are able to be acquired without any explicit instruction through play and experience. David Geary (1995) refers to these skills as biologically primary knowledge. Some examples of primary knowledge includes awareness of social relationships, nonverbal cues, spoken language, group schema, navigation in the environment, etc.
Biologically secondary knowledge, on the other hand, is more related to cultural advances and came much later in evolutionary history. This includes typical school subjects (think math and literacy). These evolutionarily novel skills are not as closely tied with survival and reproduction. Therefore, the acquisition of these skills does necessitate some form of formal instruction. Understanding the distinction between primary and secondary knowledge can play a critical part of deciding how much explicit instruction is needed for different subjects in school.
What CAN’T Be Learned Through Play
I plan to go more in depth on this topic soon, but for now I will say that most academic skills cannot be learned exclusively through play. This includes literacy skills like reading and writing. While play does provide a wonderful opportunity to practice literacy skills, kids need high-quality, explicit phonics instruction to become successful readers and writers. “A says /a/ like in apple, B says /b/ like in bat, C says /c/ like in cat,” would have been a foreign concept for our ancestors. Forget digraphs, blends, open syllables, and inflectional endings! Written language is novel in evolutionary time and therefore does require at least some explicit instruction. No one would expect you to teach a baby to talk, but we know children must be taught how to read. That’s primary vs. secondary knowledge at work! The same can be said for higher order math skills, content-specific vocabulary, etc. In these cases, formal schooling and teaching does serve an important purpose.
What CAN Be Learned Through Play
The above said, I could go on forever about what kids can learn through play! For the sake of this article I will talk about just one example: social-emotional learning (SEL). Kids learn about social skills through play. While SEL topics are typically considered “soft skills,” they are nonetheless essential to success as an adult and something that teachers strive (and often struggle) to adequately teach their students.
So what SEL skills can kids learn through play? Kids learn to share. They learn to take turns. Kids learn to effectively communicate, read nonverbal cues, modify behavior based on the needs of others, take/understand the point of view of a playmate, and more through play. They also learn about themselves including their self image and their strengths and challenges. Think how many targeted social-emotional learning (SEL) lessons it would take for mastery of these skills!
How Does This Impact Schools?
Consider a game of tag on the playground. I’m sure we have all seen it. It typically goes well for a while, but also typically ends in argument. “HE PUSHED ME!!!!” When this happens, a well-meaning teacher will often step in and break it up for the sake of getting along. Or even worse, the whistle will blow and recess is over. Then you have twenty moody eight-year-olds sitting in your classroom unable to focus on the math lesson.
But, what would happen if the teacher didn’t step in? One possibility is the game would end. The kids would refuse to play with one another and move on to different playmates or games, quickly forgetting about the game that went south.
The other possibility is more powerful. Since kids typically don’t want games that they are enjoying to end, they would be forced to come to some sort of compromise or agreement to keep the play going. They must work together to understand and respect the point of view of those involved or risk ending the play. Essentially, play puts critical SEL skills into a highly engaging and meaningful context. Given enough time and the freedom from adult intervention, kids will independently learn these skills. It may seem messy at first, but I promise they’ll get there. No role-playing, anchor charts, or peer mediation can live up to what is possible with ample time for play.
The Takeaway
Speaking broadly and from experience, the current trend in schools is to move away from providing time for play in favor of more rigorous academic tasks. We are so concerned with testing and data that we forego the less structured activities. But, what we are really doing is taking away the opportunity for students to learn critical social skills organically in the way that matches our evolved learning preferences.
This has lasting impacts on education. As kids grow and the learning and classroom tasks get more complex, we hope and expect that kids will be able to interact with one another and collaborate positively. We are seeing more and more that kids in upper elementary and beyond are not able to do so successfully. They lack the social skills. They simply don’t know how to get along. Well of course not! In early childhood we are taking away the most crucial opportunity for students to learn these skills.
So this in mind, here are three things I think are important to do as a teacher:
Allow time for play! It’s not just taking away from the academics, play is still learning.
As much as possible, allow that play to go on for extended periods of time. Short bursts on the playground may be great for getting out the wiggles. But, longer time allows for problem solving and learning to occur.
Hands off! It may be hard to watch kids struggle and argue. But, as long as basic standards of safety can be maintained, this is a productive struggle. Kids are experimenting and learning these crucial SEL skills as they go.
Children have evolved to learn though play and need the opportunity to do so. In my opinion, recess in elementary school is just as important as reading or math. It is a critical time for the development of social skills that kids will need in order to have successful adult lives. I will never be offended when a student tells me that their favorite part of the day is recess. Tricks on them - they’re still learning!
References
Geary, D. C. (1995). Reflections of evolution and culture in children’s cognition. Implications for mathematical development and instruction. American Psychologist, 50, 24 –37.
Gray, P. (2009). Play as a foundation for hunter– gatherer social existence. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois.