Teach Wonder
Teach Wonder
Risky Play: What We Can Learn from Early Childhood.
Ashley and Julie are hear talking about what Risky Play has to do with Curiosity in the classroom. They highlight the need for educators to shift from replication to genuine learning, valuing respectful relationships and deeper skills. Ashley reflects on her experience with a homeschool group, noting the challenge of balancing student agency with personal expectations.
Intro Music: David Biedenbender
Outtro Music: Music by Christoph Scholl from Pixabay
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The themes in today's episode are curiosity, agency and sustainability. And you may be thinking, Whoa, agency. You spent all last semester talking about this, and here it is again. Why? Well, honestly, it might be time to rename this podcast, because the more we dig into teaching practices and work, the more this keeps coming back as both attention and an opportunity. So much of student behavior, not all of it, but a decent amount, comes back to them craving this or not knowing what to do when it's thrown at them suddenly, or the tension for who gets to exercise their autonomy. We had an interaction with an individual this summer, and that we had this task that was pretty open ended, and it was personal, and we provided people with time and space to do some reflections and create something meaningful, but we didn't put a more specific container around it on purpose. And several folks response was, man, I really wish you would just tell me the right answer. Give me an A plus example that someone did yet last year, and unlike and then I could copy it, their discomfort was palpitable. First, that's really honest. And second, we need to be honest about what that is. It's replication. It's not learning. And in this time and place, when it feels like there's less time and more to cover, and there's all these hacks and tips and tricks out there about maximizing your time to get everything done, we have to stop and consider what is the cost of that pace and that race. So we stay here in alignment with our values and what we know to work for kids, and it's rooted in building respectful relationships, which takes time, and it's rooted in working with kids develop to develop these deeper skills that are built at a much slower and less easily tracked and monitored way. So today we're bringing up an article written by a researcher we met on our trip to Iceland. It's about risky play, and so much of this podcast episode is at the intersection of risky play, which brings up curiosity and agency, all words we've talked about a lot this semester. We're also bringing our episodes back to the observation and reflection tool that teachers drafted for us this summer. If you remember, in our first episode, we laid out the work our educator Institute is doing to help prepare our future teachers in our STEM education Scholar Program, the teachers and our scholars are testing out this tool so we couldn't miss out either. In this episode, we close by having me talk a bit about my experience teaching my first day this fall our four to seven year old group and using this tool to reflect on my time.
Introduction:Okay, now we're recording so welcome to teach Welcome to teach wonder, a podcast hosted by Ashley O'Neil wonder. Yes. and Julie Cunningham.
Julie Cunningham:Are you recording?
Ashley O'Neil:I just started. That's probably a good idea. In case. We say, right? In case, yeah. As we work through some of this, there might be some nuggets in here. I mean, that almost seems like, or at least the why for that is the, almost the easiest place to start, right? Like for me, because, okay, if I think about curiosity, whether it's informal or formal education or play like, if we don't allow students to have curiosity and not even just allow but if we don't support that scaffold, it expect it from students, I feel like we are not creating problem solvers. We are not creating we are creating students who are going to isolate themselves in the future because they haven't learned how to ask questions. They haven't learned that they can interact with the world around them. They haven't learned that they can problem solve. They haven't learned that they can fix things, that they are that they have agency in this world if we don't teach them and expect them to be curious.
Julie Cunningham:So if for me, curiosity seems like the simplest place to begin and not terribly difficult to have it be actionable. I mean, and that I think adults mostly just need to step back again and encourage students children asking questions or reward. Maybe that's a really great question. Let's figure it out together. Or it doesn't take a lot of like, oh my gosh, I have to plan for this in my day, or a ton of time, or just more of like, a recognition that students are doing something really interesting or that before solving it for a student ask a question back, or expect them to ask a question, or expect them to ask a question of their peers, or expect them to interact with something in a different way. So it seems like now I'm not saying there's not time involved, but I'm saying that i. Uh, it doesn't seem in my head like this extra thing you have to do so much as you have to take the time as an adult to think about the decision you're going to make and how you interact with the situation.
Ashley O'Neil:Yeah, I think it does come with a bit of a shift or intentionality in all the subversive or quiet ways that we reward behavior or encourage something in our classroom, just by a way of celebrating it, acknowledging it, ignoring it, right, making room for that type of thing. I remember in my undergrad, there was a lot of like, like encouragement that you'd thank the child who was doing the thing that you wanted them to do, or you would acknowledge the child that was doing the thing that you were hoping you know would happen in the classroom. And from that behavior standpoint, which you can have a lot of complicated feelings about. But I think we've been we've grown we grow up like it's the tea, it's the stew that the soup that we're in is that behaviorist model a little bit. And so I think inherently, we're all kind of whether or not we realize it or not, we are encouraging or kind of diminishing certain things in our classroom, just by way of, like, the language that we use in the board for like, what's the leaderboard for, what is the gold star of those student for like, what, what monthly like, behavior tenants or character tenants are we kind of encouraging for students, and what messages did those send? And so I think for me, yes, like, what you said? Like, that's a great question. Let's go investigate. That is a really great example of acknowledging a student's curiosity. But then, like, it would be interesting for a teacher to sit and kind of catalog what are the ways that I like, with my actions, with my face, with my gestures, with my words, kind of like, modeled that behavior that I was looking for, and was it rooted in clients? Was it rooted in whatever? Like, where did it come from? I think that would be interesting.
Julie Cunningham:It also feels to me like one of the places in which, again, this comes with stepping back right, like, Oh, tell me more or what. What leads you to think that, or what leads you to believe that? Or how could we, you know, it doesn't even always have to lead to an investigation or another question. But just like, instead of just fixing and solving but asking questions back, and expecting students to do that with their peers and with you, rather than just accepting something as status quo, right? And I'm sure that you have to pick and choose your times that you do that. But if that was your default, instead of fixing something for a child, it seems to me that would have an awful big payoff, yeah, like for a pretty small non costly change. We're really talking about time, right? Not that anyone has an infinite amount of time, but we're not talking about a new curriculum. We're not talking about a really huge shift in pedagogy,
Ashley O'Neil:a new Yeah, like, like, we need to spend an extra amount of time on science, or ELA or whatever.
Julie Cunningham:It just feels like, like, no matter the content area, that it just would really have a big shift in classroom dynamics, in how students encountered the world around them, in how they got through second grade and moved to third grade, and how they interacted with their peers and how they did informal play on the playground, right? If they had this curiosity that was nurtured rather than what we tend to do, which is solve things for kids,
Ashley O'Neil:for sure. So we read an article, we did this, and just to give you a little bit of context, when we went to Iceland, we met a lot of interesting folks, and one of the individuals that we met is the author of this article. She is a researcher who works a lot with early childhood and kind of the the intersection of early childhood outdoors. And so she talked a lot about risky play with us in Iceland, but then she wrote an article that we both found and have read. So I guess one of my questions for you is linking, yes, yes, we'll absolutely link it in the show notes for you, you should absolutely check it out. Check out her stuff. It's very interesting. Why did we bring up risky play? Or how do we see risky play as relating to in a classroom curiosity, when inherently I think risky play, we think of outside we think of maybe early childhood, and we're talking to K 12 educators.
Julie Cunningham:Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. And I even if we just left the playoff of that statement, even if we just said that, like life should have some amount of calculated risk that that we shouldn't again, bubble wrap kids and solve everything for them, I think even if we left that word play off, which does tend to probably speak to shouldn't only speak to early childhood educators, but probably does speak more to early childhood educators. I think, when we don't have some sort of risk or vulnerability, or even perhaps like failure built in, right? If everything just always goes well for children, and there's no they don't know what to do when they have failure, right? They don't know what to do with iteration. They don't want know how to problem solve if they haven't encountered any sort of like calculated risk, any sort of their ability to try something, and we're not saying don't keep kids safe. That's not what we mean by risk, but the ability to try something for themselves in a safe environment, which presumably a classroom is right, safe for failure, safe for being vulnerable, then they don't learn how to do that as they go through life. And again, life is going to throw things at people right that could be hard or could involve more risk than they're comfortable with, and then that's going to lead to anxiety. And I think one other thing to consider is as educators, is that learning something new involves some amount of risk. It involves being vulnerable to a certain extent. So if you can't do that, or you can't allow children to do that, it's pretty hard for them to learn and grow. And so while Nikki's article was more about play outside and young children's play outside and the value in allowing them risk in their play. I think it does translate directly and it, I think it goes a little farther than just having children be curious, but I think it does tie directly to the curiosity.
Ashley O'Neil:Yeah, I think I felt similarly, and I thought, I thought that risky play was a good way for us to talk about what happens for us as teachers when we get in situations with students, when we're a little uncomfortable and we're not totally in control, like if I have a young child climbing a tree, or a young child kind of balancing on, you know, a concrete barricade And walking, and there's a fall on either end, right? And I think about how my body would want to go react, to be within arm's reach, I'd want to say, be careful, right? I think we can think that when it comes to risky play, we have them practice so they can learn to trust their body. They can learn both the proprioceptive right and the vestibular input that they're getting is so valuable, but they're stretching their own limits. They learn to rely on themselves. They learn like, How high do they feel comfortable going? They learn like, how to pay attention, to get themselves up and down. And those are the same skills that we want to see from students in schools, right? We want them to learn their limits, to know how to push themselves just a little bit to stretch themselves, to rely on themselves, to trust their brain, to trust their body, right? All of those things translate into the classroom. And I think sometimes teachers, or we as teachers, can have a similar gut reaction when we see those moments that feel a little bit out of control, when we want to, like, do the Be careful, or the school version of be careful, right? Or don't go that high. And if we keep everyone kind of in these safe, confined spaces, and we can control all the variables, right? And we think we know where kids are going, I mean, the cost of that is that they're doing more replication and mimicry than they are true learning, right? And so to me, I see that translation, like risky play, is the physical manifestation of what learning in the classroom is, and when we want that curiosity and agency, it's going to be the cognitive equivalent of risky play.
Julie Cunningham:And I his laugh that I went to a conference once, and I was a high school science teacher, so it was for you know, I went to a conference that had to do with high school science teaching, and somebody once told me that they purposely built in failure to their high school science labs. And I was like, I'm sorry, what? You don't have failure that just happens. You have to control this lab. Are you working in here? Because, by nature of collecting data and doing some sort of research and investigating. In a question. I don't know how you couldn't have some sort of failure built in, right? But if all you do is a worksheet lab that everybody gets the same answer, and you sort of prove that that's the answer, right? That you already really knew was the answer because your textbook told you it was the answer, then yeah, you probably have to manufacture some failure, like so that there's some risk, so that students understand that science might potentially come with not always having the correct answer, and your data doesn't always work out nice. But if you're in a classroom, whether it's science or not, and you're investigating some question where there isn't necessarily only one right way to get to the answer. It feels like risk is inherently built into that, and that if your students can't get past that frustration level, right that comes with maybe having to do it again, or maybe having to share data, or maybe having to look at what went wrong, or maybe not having the perfect outcome, then feels like you're not setting them up for success in either the classroom or later in life, which is what Nikki's article was getting at with In terms of the risky play outside. And I think she also had some research that suggested, probably not suggested, but they made a correlation between children's anxiety levels and not being able to determine for themselves how they could get through whatever risk it is that they're taking.
Ashley O'Neil:Yeah, and I think it comes back with that, like, all the time in school, do you see the like, the Grow mentality, or like we're working toward right, like, flexible thinking and like the the power of yet we see all of those kind of phrases in schools, growth mindset, thank you. That's the one I was looking for. But how much of our work actually practices that with children? Because the language itself is a little meaningless. If everything else is very outcome oriented, is very like, follow these rules to get to this right answer and like, that's how we know you'll be fine. How much of this is metrics oriented, where everything has a value assigned to it. Because if they're living in the space where everything is that way, it doesn't matter if we say like, we believe in the power of yet we believe in our growth mindset, if we're doing some sort of like, if we're not practicing that for them and undermining it really, yeah, yeah. And we talk all the time about the things that students remember are these kind of visceral, emotional experiences from school, like they remember the big field trips, they remember the experiential learning. They don't particularly remember unit two, Lesson five, you know, chapter one, whatever it is, they remember those big ideas, and this is that big idea for them. And so not to get too far into the weeds, but with that anxiousness, right? If you see, students are anxious about these ill constructed tasks because of the open ended stuff or the process oriented thing, it's time for us to take a beat and say, Okay, what are we missing here? How can we provide supports to make them successful, and not just go, Well, my kids can't do this because then we're just one more voice saying, Nope, you're right. You can't do these difficult things, which is then confirming their own anxious thought.
Julie Cunningham:So if we get back to actionable ways to work on this, you're saying scaffold the experiences for students so that they can be successful. Start with something that's maybe not quite as risky or not quite as apt to fail and work your way towards yeah and then yeah, perhaps we always say celebrate failures, which maybe isn't really the right way to say it, but just don't undermine the idea that
Ashley O'Neil:acknowledge the thought, acknowledge the curiosity, acknowledge the stretching, acknowledge the pause that They took. And I think also, if we think about capacity for kids, if we can make portions of it a known quantity, like, if they know when it's starting when it's ending, if they know the materials they'll have available, if you can reveal or, like, make portions of it explicit so that the learning part is ambiguous. But some of those other things are taken away, then you've increased their capacity to kind of flex in that area. Because, you know, sometimes I think we want to throw kids into this place where we say, okay, we're doing to do this open ended thing. And I'm just encourage you along the way, and we've left a lot unknown. And I think if we can be really strategic to say this is where we're leaving places unknown. This is where I'm giving explicit supports for kids, because I know this is new for them. Right in early childhood, there is a little bit more of that universal, like they've only been on the planet for three years, and so they've only had three years of data in their heads. By the time we have 1112, 13 year olds, they have a lot more experiences. In their bodies, in their heads that we're competing against when it comes to doing some of this stuff that is more agentic, that does expect them to be more curious. If that makes sense.
Julie Cunningham:It does make sense. And I think you bring up another good point about kids start out very curious about the natural world. All we really have to do is support that and not take that away from them, for them to continue to be curious about the natural world. And then I think maybe this goes without saying, but in a classroom, getting back to this idea of if everybody can get to the answer without there being a right answer, right? Then the assessment can't be based on the right answer. So, because that's another stressful thing, right? Like, well, if my lab failed, so to speak, and I'm using air quotes for failed, right, then it can't be that I don't get my full complement of points based on whatever that failure was, right? It needs the the assessment needs to be based on my understanding of what happened and my understanding of how it could be differently if I change some parameter of it, rather than,
Ashley O'Neil:yeah. Otherwise, you're just sending those mixed messages again, of like, no, no. We want failure. We want failure. You'll get a C, but we want failure like, that's that's not really, that's not setting the students up for success either. Oh, there was one.
Julie Cunningham:Well, that kind of gets back to even why we ended up in this space, in informal education, space going away from the fastest car or the tallest structure or whatever the engineering challenge is where there's somebody who's going to win, right? Because that is not how we want to be, how we want to define success.
Ashley O'Neil:And I know I can hear it, that there are people, and myself included, who say, well, like, there are like, deadlines, there are things like at work. And I'll say, yeah, that's totally fair. That's really valid. And like, there is enough of that in school anyway, right? Like, we're not saying throw everything and I'm saying, if we talk about this and encourage you to do this, we might get 10% of your school week this way. So fear not, they will still have plenty of practice living in that kind of expectation coded world, like it's the soup that we're all in. For sure, we're not just like, we're not getting out of that, but this is an alternative opportunity to build some of these other school skills. The other thing that I was thinking about is it can be really easy for us to, you know, say, like, it's okay. We like failure. It's okay. This is perfect. And like, when we talk about students being anxious, which just article also brings up an important aspect of that is to acknowledge the feeling that that child is having right to say, like, I recognize this is difficult. You're right. I can see that you're feeling anxious. This is really tricky. Let me reassure you or remind you of what our goal is, but you're right. This is going to feel a little uncomfortable. I'm a little uncomfortable too, and just kind of sitting in that with students is a really important SEL character skill building. Thing also right, to not diminish and say, no, no, we don't care. It's a good this. Everything's great. Everything's great. This is perfect. Because then, once again, you're kind of confusing students to say, like, what they're feeling inside, like it doesn't match what they're supposed
Julie Cunningham:to be. The risk they're taking, right, is, like, overwhelming, and that's too much risk for them, and you're downplaying the idea that they're taking a risk, yeah? And we build instead of analogy that, yeah, sure, you are being vulnerable, you are taking a risk, and that can feel uncomfortable. And then, I mean, you couldn't probably say this to really young kids, but that's where the learning happens, is in that being
Ashley O'Neil:uncomfortable, yes, yes, they should feel like that, acknowledging, like, yeah, this does feel like my belly is feeling a little bit nervous. Also, that's totally real, because stretching yourself requires that part. But if we teach students to fear that, because it shouldn't be there, like, no, no, this is fine, then it's confusing, because they are feeling this anxiousness, and we're saying, no, no, this is the point, right? And so to acknowledge that that's part of the deal helps you kind of face that part, I think. And that really translates to when kids are outside, because we don't want them freaking out at the top of a tree. No, we want them calm and problem solving and
Julie Cunningham:knowing how to get themselves down, because they got themselves up there. And the only pushback I would give on the for people who would say, well, we need schools to have these structures for deadlines in the way that real life is, we all get plenty of real life practice with deadlines and schedules and pain, bills and all the other things. Right? What we don't get practice at in life, in regular life, that I think what we don't often give ourselves the opportunity to practice is doing hard things, and life can be hard. So if we don't acknowledge that, and I'm not saying that, like go back to school and make everything hard for kids, but if we don't acknowledge that life can be hard, and that you practice how to problem solve through the hard you practice what to do with those risks and that vulnerability, then when you get. There because you're 1819, 20 and going off to college, or you're 2526 27 graduating from college and looking for your first job, you don't know what to do with that, because life isn't always going to be easy. So yes, sure, there's things like deadlines and schedules and group work and communication and all those things that are unlikely to go away. But can't we also practice this? Let's have some I don't like, safe risk, I
Ashley O'Neil:don't know, and position ourselves like next to instead of in front of, like, going we know all the answers, or behind them, shoving them into the great unknown. Of like, come on this. You got to try this. You got to learn how to be an adult. This is what it means, like, like, there is a coming alongside them to say, like, Hey, we're right here with you. We're providing support. You know, talk to us. We're with you in this, but we're not going to tell you the right answer, because there may not be one. There's a cost to this. All these decisions, right? They're all kind of sticky. And I yeah, I think giving students enough of that, like just the critical thought and the time and the space to work through some of those things with a supportive adult is not going to fix it or demean them.
Julie Cunningham:Is huge, and it's almost like safe failure, I guess, right, like we're not going to let you fall all the way, but yeah, maybe just enough to experience again uncomfortable
Ashley O'Neil:yeah and yeah, being that reassured, reassuring, sturdy adult, I think is important. Can we talk about my observation tool as our final closeout? Sure. Okay, so this semester, we talked about it in our first episode that we are working with our educator Institute. We've created, and interrupt me if I'm getting some of this wrong, we created an observation tool, the purpose of which is for our STEM education scholars, our undergrads at CMU who are training to be teachers, to kind of have a way to think through the observations that they're doing in our MakerSpace, one of the bonuses of being a STEM education scholar is they get this time doing informal education activities in our space with all of us staff kind of leading the events, but giving them some intentional ways to ask themselves questions specifically about interactions that they're observing, with the hope that that then kind of helps them train their language in their own head for how to think about their classroom in the future. And to that end, our practicing classroom teachers from our educator Institute are using this tool also and kind of finessing it and refining it. And then we in the makerspace are also using it with our students, and we have student programs in here, just for the purpose of reflecting ourselves and practicing that. So this past Monday,
Julie Cunningham:I would just add that we were really intentional to have a lens of equity when in our conversations for creating the tool in the professional learning community, and additionally, that like not necessarily driven just by us, the conversation of, how can we be curious about the students that we interact with as we think about our reflections? So we chose a lens of both a, equity and then B, curiosity,
Ashley O'Neil:perfect, perfect. So for our sorry, last Monday, yes, yeah, homeschool group, I have the four to seven year old students, and we, I chose to do this that day. I reflected using the observation tool, and it's basically four different questions. You don't always do all of them, depending what the interaction was. So for the purposes of this, my first the first question, asks for a description of the interaction that I had with the student. And so for me, we have this interesting mix of students. Some are have been here with us before, and some are brand new, and some of the siblings that I had last year have now graduated to the older group, so there's just a different dynamic. And sometimes they're seeing their friends or their siblings kind of go to this other group, and then they're staying with me in the younger group. And I noticed this, maybe reticence, this kind of, I'm too cool for school, dynamic change that happened with a couple of the students because they'd been here before. I think they noticed some of their friends were in a different group, and they had this like deep sense of comfort from the space, like they knew where things were. They knew where the sink was. They kind of knew how to move through the space, and
Julie Cunningham:so they knew what your expectations were at some level.
Ashley O'Neil:They knew my expectations were at some level. But they also kind of knew, like, hey, like, yes, we're supposed to do this act opening activity here. But like, I also know the fort boards are over here. And like, if things are out, we're allowed to use it. And technically, that's out, so maybe I can try to use it. Like, there just was this interesting re establishing of relationships that had to have, had to happen for them. And. So I just noticed myself like wanting to go over and redirect them a lot, which is something I'm trying not to do so much without a pause in between. But there were two other adults in the room with me. I had these new students that I kind of wanted to set the rhythm for and also make sure that they had the space. And so it challenged my expectations, because my outcome of kind of engaging with them and talking with them and playing with them was not an increased participation in the activity, right? And so yes, I built relationships with them and we did some special things, but like I realized that my personal goal was still to have them come comply and come back and do the activity with me, and they became more engaged and started doing something that was meaningful to them, for sure, but it helped me. It challenged myself. Because while I went into it saying, Yeah, this is about me being open and I'm building a relationship, when it didn't result in them coming back to the group, I had to go, oh no, you really did hope that this would, like, secretly, make them want to come and join you and make this a little easier for you. Um, so I thought that was that was an interesting reflection for me that I would not have realized had I not sat and, like gone through these questions.
Julie Cunningham:That's interesting. Do you know which question specifically allowed you to realize that? Or, or, yeah, just a combination.
Ashley O'Neil:So the third question says, what about this interaction met your expectations, and then what did not meet your expectations? And that's not a question I would typically ask myself. What I would typically go is like, what was happening, right? What happened next? I would do some sort of like, FBA, antecedent, behavior, outcome thing, but I wouldn't think about, like, my personal expectations, I would think about, like, the classroom's expectations. And oftentimes, there is nothing inherently wrong with what a child is doing, but it is challenging something for me personally, and so recognizing like, Oh, I'm disappointed that they didn't find this activity super fun and interesting, like I hoped they would, and it's okay that they're doing something else. Took me a beat
Julie Cunningham:Interesting, yeah, and not necessarily an easy part of the reflection right to ask to think about your own sort of whether explicit or implicit, goals.
Ashley O'Neil:That also just makes me think about when you have all these different things going on, you kind of have to flit a little right, like if all these students are doing these different things. And so how do you keep your pace the way you like, slow things back down again when all the kids are happening at different speeds, and the temptation can be to match their energy and taste, and then you get really frenetic. How can you kind of keep things slow and steady when you have a lot of student agency in a room? That's kind of our goal for this homeschool group. But the cost of that is noticing, like an art project, a building project, a science observation, a messy play something else, right? All happening in a not very large room with pretty young kids, with quite young children who have mixed comfort levels or familiarity with the physical room that they're
Julie Cunningham:in that day, right? Nothing easy about that. No. Thank you. Thanks for sharing that, yeah, and for testing out the observation tool.
Ashley O'Neil:Any final thoughts for us today,
Unknown:go, be curious. Perfect.
Ashley O'Neil:This has been another episode of teach wonder, and we're really glad you're here. If you like this episode and are new to us, you can find more episodes and never miss another one by following our show. Teach wonder, wherever you get your podcasts. You.