Why should play be prioritized in school?

Gillian and Joelle talk about the importance of including scheduled time to play in the school routine.  Recess is unstructured child directed play and offers students a time for movement, fresh air, social connection, creativity, and a break from responding to task demands.  Elementary school students also have semi-structured child directed play in which the teacher creates stations in the classroom and children choose among play options.  These times are often called “choice” or “explore” time.  Choice time includes the presence of the highly skilled regular educator who can model and teach emotional regulation and social cognition in situations that are typically highly motivating and quite natural.  Joelle and Gillian wonder together if a noted reduction in semi-structured child directed play in the past few years is contributing to an increase in student dysregulation, low stamina, and overreliance on adult support to engage in the routines of school.  If so, isn’t the solution well within our reach?

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Joelle: https://www.instagram.com/joelle.vanlent/

Transcript

Hi, everybody. Welcome back to A Stance of Curiosity. I'm Gillian Boudreau. And I'm Joelle van Lent. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us again. We have a very fun topic today. Yeah, go ahead. Yes, we do have a fun topic today. So we wanted to talk about; both of us have been psychologists that have spent a lot of time in schools. For me, Gillian, I would say 20-ish years. Would you say the same for you? I would say, yeah, I first really entered a school in a clinical way in about 2008. So 16 years, I guess, for me. Okay. And that's probably about the same time for me, like in a more regular way. Prior to that, much more of my time was in inpatient and outpatient settings.

So I would say, yeah, around 2008, I shifted to spend a lot of my time in school. So that's like 16 years. And so I think that we probably have both noticed a change over those 16 years related specifically to how much time students, and I guess maybe we were going to specifically focus today on elementary school, but then I think we could link that up to middle and high school for sure as well. But let's start thinking about what have we noticed over the past 16 years in terms of how much time students have for what like different types of child-directed play. So there's unstructured child-directed play, which is recess. They're outside. There is a playground and there is usually like Gaga Pit, Foursquare. Maybe some balls and different things.

Usually there are a lot of children and a few adults and the children are deciding on their own. So child-directed, they're deciding on their own what they're going to go and do. And there would hopefully be some co-creative imaginary play. There would be a lot of movement. There might be some spontaneous games with like kickball or Gaga ball, things like that. So child-directed unstructured play. Then there is child-directed semi-structured play, which is in the classroom, the teacher creates maybe three or four stations. So today during our, it's often called choice time or explore time. And there is it is in addition to recess and it is an opportunity to open three or four stations where there might be like Play-Doh, Legos, math, literacy games, board games. There might be blocks.

There might be other crafts, things like that. And the teacher would choose kind of four areas. Usually the teachers say you can go wherever you want. And you can change what you're doing however many times you want. But each station would be full when there's like four or five people there. Yes. So if you come to a station and there's four or five people, then you need to make a different choice. Then, there is the classroom teacher who is a highly skilled elementary educator present, as well as sometimes other adults as well, sometimes not, who would be moving around. Primary learning target, if you will, is social competency, social cognition not competency, social cognition and emotional feelings identification, labeling of emotions, emotional regulation so you're practicing with a high highly motivated for most students opportunity.

You are practicing labeling your emotions, putting them into words, um, sharing, taking turns, tolerating frustration, tolerating disappointment. So if the station is full we don't solve that problem by bringing over another chair; we teach to how do you cope with that? You feel disappointed that this station is full and you have to make a different choice so that's there's fewer children. The ratio of adults to kids is lower. And the primary learning target is social emotional skill development. And that is a time where I have always felt preschool, kindergarten, first, second, third, fourth grade, I have always noticed that that is where students are learning, you know, in real life scenarios. a lot of

important skills and it's also a time where if a student was perfectly capable of doing math or literacy and avoided procrastinated refused you can put that in a folder and say now we're gonna we have an opportunity to circle back and do that activity that you weren't up for earlier and you can do that for a few minutes now so a few of those items and then move on to a choice Or if a teacher noticed that two students were arguing and the teacher didn't have time, you know, 20 students to one teacher, I don't have time to sit and really model with them how they could have talked that through and problem solved. You can park it in a folder and come back to it as a teacher and say, 'I would like to pull the two of you and we're just going to redo what happened earlier in line or whatever and practice that.' So the teacher is both.

Has a time in the day that they can circle back to tasks or you know opportunities to process as well as there's this opportunity to learn all this stuff so it's very very rich I noticed it in almost all elementary classes for the first many years that I was in elementary school and I would say currently in the past two to three years especially this year it's the unstructured child directed play outside is still happening but it can be as short as 20, 25 minutes in a day And I see that's it I don't see any other child directed play time even as young as first grade So I wanted to talk about that with you in terms of what we know about child development and what would be the benefit of that time being prioritized and what would be the cost of fading that out in the effort to expand literacy and math instruction minutes Yeah because I suppose that's like what we're seeing or at least that's what we're assuming we're seeing right?

Is that, you know, if the question is what's happening instead of that, and the answer is probably like maybe more whole group instruction on, you know, math and literacy curriculum stuff, or maybe even more small group, right? Or maybe more time for like, you know, a push-in or extra help instruction on those things. It's still the prioritization probably specifically of math and literacy over leaving space for something less structured. Would you say that that's the case? That's absolutely the case. The day is the day there's a lot of transitions and I'm seeing this in, and I've been, you know, in many schools, I'm going to say last year in this school year, I'm going to say that I was easily in, in 40 plus elementary schools in Vermont elementary schools.

And I see a very busy schedule. I don't, and I see math and literacy blocks as young as first grade, as long as 90 minutes. And the teachers are really good. So that's not like full group instruction for 90 minutes. You know, they're doing, you know, we're all on the carpet and we have a full first instruction. For maybe 10-15 minutes and then we're moving to small partner work or small group work or stations so they're really good, but it is, it is still um, I think what's happening during that time is what's being offered to the students during that time is beautiful, um, I think that the students are having a hard time with stamina, perseverance and and um self-regulation during that time.

And I think that what I'm noticing when I look at the full day is that, is that I just don't see explore choice, you know, anymore kind of at all. Yeah. That's it, and I'm not, I'm less worried about what is happening. Yes. I'm more worried about what, what seems to have been faded out. Oh, no, that makes sense to me. I I'm just thinking about what we're then asking people to do less of. Right. If, if one thesis statement of this podcast episode, after we explore, it turns out to be that we think folks should be doing more of this. Right. So, I mean, I so often go back to that thing you say about, you know, going at the pace of the humans in front of you, because I, I suspect that the reason, you know, we might call it explore time.

I might. In my like New York state-trained way, I might call it like centers, right? So we're not really doing centers or at least we're not really doing play-based centers as high up into development as we used to, right? Let's say we used to see that more up to fourth grade and now we really don't. My guess is that we're not seeing that anymore because of time. And I could think of two possibilities about that. So one is that each year, right? It can feel like as each new curriculum rolls out, um, with it is, um, increased time poverty for classrooms and for teachers, right? Because it's like, well, now we got to actually get to more benchmarks and there's more items you got to show that you've, you know, exposed kids to.

Um, so for one, I think math and literacy are expanding, you know, sometimes I use that physics metaphor of like a gas will expand to the size of whatever container it's in. Right. So we just keep sort of expanding the container for math and literacy and that pushes other things out. The other thing I'm thinking about is, so I talk to and consult with tons and tons of educators and families all the time, right? So I am definitely, in my position, in my work right now, I am hearing about school situations all day, every day, right? As much as I ever was. Though I myself am physically in classrooms less often since I've moved to Oregon.

But I am very often physically in like the play therapy space, or even just in my office with even one child where the, you know, the, the situation of those is often child-directed play. And so one thing I'm also just sitting with, you know, in having spoken to many, let's say a preschool and a kindergarten teacher, and also just in my own experience as a play therapist, it takes forever. To set up, break down and clean up from child-directed play because child-directed play is chaotic and very messy. Right. So like I do have to have longer in between my play therapy clients because who on earth knows where a Lego might have ended up. Right. And so I think it comes back to speed and urgency.

And how would we build back in like the orange traffic cones around the time it would take for. Child-directed play to be offered in the classroom, yeah I mean, I think we always have to operate in the real world and so, I would you know my question would be how could teachers have bins that they bring out a bin of coloring, a bin of Play-Doh, a bin of Legos, and blocks, and how could they swap those out with each other or in some, you know, way, like every month or two with like, now we have a new set of bins. So, so what would be the most realistic way to create a setup and a, and a takedown at how, as the students get older, they are increasingly capable of helping pick up and they're really motivated.

to have time. So if the responsibility of picking up equated the time. Yes. You know, the more, the quicker we pick up, the less time we have to, you know, from that time to do it. So I think it's, you know, you can teach, there's so many opportunities, just that alone, like we have to take care of our materials and our property as a group. It's not the teacher, it's everybody's responsibility. You could put students in charge of choosing, helping be on a committee to choose the next months for, you know, center options. Oh, I love that. That's such good. Choice too, yeah, there's there's so many options and I think that um I'm just I'm worried that we're increasing our effort around explicit teaching of SEL social emotional in in a um by something like the school counselor or the classroom teacher doing an SEL lesson.

But when you teach social emotional and executive functioning skills you have to do clarity which is explicit teaching, this is the skill and here's how it what it is and how it is important for all of us, and then you have to model that skill what does it look like and then you have to repeatedly practice it in various scenarios in order for the child to actually develop it and generalize it so I'm worried that we're doing clarity, explicit teaching, and then we're not doing any modeling or practice that's intentional in any way. And then we feel like we've checked that box. Well, I taught empathy because the school counselor came in and read a book on empathy and I taught. And that's really beautiful that that's happening.

And I love that it's even happening with more of a curriculum or intentional in some school districts. No one will do anything with that lesson unless you model and practice, model and practice. So if we, I just feel like there's a lot going on that is contributing to more students being dysregulated in school. And there's no one thing that you could point to that's causing that. But one of the things on the list, I feel, is that we are fading out a time that maybe was thought of as downtime like maybe people thought child directed semi-structured play was downtime and it and they think recess is movement recess is movement and a thousand other things it's fresh air and movement a thousand other things but that that child directed semi-structured play was I think where a lot of human development was happening that allows you to build

very foundational skills that would allow you to engage in a rigorous math and literacy instruction that would allow you to be more self-reliant in launch and recess where we expect people to need less, you know, Of an adult ratio and everything else. And so I think we might have thought it was fluff. And, and now I think part of what we're seeing is that there's a cost of fading it out. I think that's absolutely right. And, you know, so now my gears are turning as far as like, you know, what do we know are the cognitive and psychological benefits of play? Right. And I mean, play is really, you know, as I mentioned, I'm a play therapist. I play a lot, you know, play is really where kids work. Right.

Like they, they totally can do the clarity thing. They can receive information and hopefully encode it when it's just told to them by an adult, but, you know, really where they are doing the work, where they are learning about problem solving, you know, where they are, you know, figuring out gaps in their own knowledge, just as far as, you know, how to be in the world and then filling those own gaps, you know, pretty, pretty organically is in the world of play. So certainly I think we will, just like we say, regulate to educate. I think we could also easily say counterintuitively, if we carve the time back in for semi-structured play. We will probably see kids make the academic gains that we're hoping for faster, right?

Because play is actually a more efficient way for kids to build executive function and consolidate their problem-solving skills because there's so much intrinsic motivation in it. And also they can just see very clearly when a strategy worked versus when it didn't because they know and care about the outcome that they're trying to affect, right? So, you know, cause and effect on the world, planning and organizing, right? Like, you know, kind of predicting the future, all of those things, literally just about how the material nature of reality works. Kids are working that out through play over and above anything related to the other humans, right? Which of course, from an SEL perspective, that's exactly where they're practicing, tolerating frustration, taking turns, even, you know, a little bit more existential stuff.

Like it's only through play, I think that kids really begin to see, oh, Sometimes I'm on this side of a certain type of situation, right? Like even just as simple as sometimes I feel like I'm the only one with no markers. Other times I have all the markers and I, you know, what does that mean? Like, you know, I think that's really how we ultimately build empathy is we experience ourselves on both sides of a given coin enough times. And then I'm also thinking about, you know, I work a lot with neurodivergence, especially kids, you know, autistic kids and ADHD years. And sometimes that in general, sometimes those forms of neurodivergence, you know, I have adult and child clients who will describe getting tired of being perceived and certainly reaching a level of fatigue of receiving outside direction.

And so I think child-directed play. What if it is downtime? Would that even be such a big problem? If the downtime is filling up a person's, you know, cognitive and executive functioning and regulatory bucket, because they're just not being so aggressive. I don't mean aggressively, like meanly, right. But they're not being so pointedly perceived by an adult, right. They're being supervised, of course, but they're not being scrutinized. They're not being given directions, those sorts of breaks in the day. I mean, if I have kids who are bolting, It's often because they've reached their limit of the adult directions they can handle. And if there were some downtime that day where there just simply weren't as many adult directions, we'd see less bolting and that kid would then learn more math. Right.

And like, I think that a few things, like a lot of the clients that I work with that. Are um neurodivergent? Like at recess, they might just walk um around the the playground in loops and thinking in their minds about topics that they're fascinated by or they might play many of them find each other and play the same imagined co-created routine over and over and they just are are thriving and love it and regulate it and their bucket is filled in many ways during that time and and then I would imagine in the classroom they might sit and draw, you know, if that, you know, maybe drawing a certain thing like a unicorn is like the thing that they love to do. And now they're doing that.

And it gives the teacher an opportunity to come over and join their world a little bit or just give them some space. So I think you're, and I think that not that I'm really interested in this being mostly extrinsic motivator, but I do think that that's also a side benefit. If you see if you absolutely see no point in learning math or. reading or and you absolutely don't want to write and we're trying to get you to write but you're really motivated for lego time then it's like if you can't intrinsically engage in the learning because it's interesting to you or fun, you might extrinsically find motivation because if I don't write those sentences now, I'll have to do it during the time in which I would otherwise be doing Lego.

And it allows the teacher to be like, it's really up to you. It's okay if you're not feeling it right now. We can also do this when we have our choice time. I can put it in your folder and we can do it then. It's not meant to be punitive. It might feel, feel punitive; it’s not meant to be but it allows you an opportunity; it’s now or then, which might it gives the teacher something else to motivate the child because we know that all of us sometimes need external motivation to do things that are good for us and so that's like another benefit. But yeah, I, I think that like three of the skills that I'm hearing about a lot are the capacity to wait, like self-regulate while waiting.

I've never thought of waiting as a skill that I had to teach prior to the last couple of years. I think it's been created because it's been handed a device all the times that they had to wait for like so many years at waiting. In line for a rest a table at a restaurant, riding in a car that's for a drive that's boring, waiting at the dentist's office for your turn like any time that you had to nothing was happening and we were waiting for something to happen. You're handed a device so when you're when you have to wait and a device is not handed to you kids literally don't seem to know what to do yes and and then problems develop and the other skill that's related is delayed gratification and then the third one is impulse control so play is an incredibly great time to learn how to wait your turn.

You're in line for the slide out here you know you have to wait your turn or whatever you want, you know, and then um and then delayed gratification and impulse control so they're so motivated to be engaged during this time that they're going to want to work on. What does waiting look like right now when I'm in line for the swing or the Lego table is full? What, how, you know, what could I do? And we're on purpose, not going to solve the problem by reducing the weight. It makes me think of the phrase, like, what's worth waiting for. This might seem kind of cheesy, but it's like, you know, certain parents who I work with.

I, you know, I, I think the devices can often come out if there's a sense that, yeah, we're kind of asking this kid to wait for something that they wouldn't, they don't really want to do anyway. You know, right. Like, have I had to bring a kid to a dinner party that isn't necessarily that developmentally like, you know, of course they don't want to like wait for some dinner that they're not going to want to eat anyway. So maybe we bring out the device. That's, you know, there's nothing about that situation. And I still agree that when we had to wait, right. Like when you and I were kids, that was probably better to build that muscle, but I can understand why parents are like, they didn't ask to be here anyway.

Nothing about this is motivating to them. You know, I'm just going to, but yeah, we, it's easier to wait. If we think something is worth the weight, like the Lego table or like the swings. And it also, I think can feel more reasonable to ask a kid to wait or to ask a kid to develop that skill. Right. If, if, if it is kind of in their best interest, like this is something that you want. It's just, it's not available quite yet. Right. And I, it's, I've been pretty successful with like fourth and seventh graders. I can think of examples right now, a fourth-grade classroom and a seventh-grade classroom, both of whom finished something and the next thing didn't start for about four minutes.

And in both cases that it was complete chaos and the teacher was looking at me like 'help.' So, so we started in both cases, fourth graders and seventh graders, the next day we, we just circled up, you know, at morning meeting or whatever. whatever it was. And we said, what would waiting look like? Let's decide as a group, what topics would you bring up? Cause you're still in school. What kinds of things would you talk to each other about? If you wanted to play in a physical way, would that look like WWF wrestling or would it look like thumb wrestling? Like what would, what would play, like what would physical touch look like during that time?

What, um, if you wanted to express excitement or frustration or silliness what kinds of words would you use because like there was a lot of swearing words and so it's just like could we that's one way to express frustration excitement and etc what kinds of jokes would you tell Because you're in a mixed group of people and you're not, you might tell a joke to your buddy and you know it's going to land with them. But there's a lot of other ears around. So we actually, like we answered these questions. I wrote a list of questions. We answered them as a group. We came up with the norms of waiting. And then we set a celebration. If we can be like, follow our own norms for waiting, we'll have a classroom celebration on Friday.

And waiting. Went went really well so but it's just like yeah we just I think we need it's like but I don't honestly think that teachers are like I don't think I had to teach that before. Why do I have to teach that? And so I was just thinking, I don't know, I'll blame it all on technology because I love to blame everything on technology. I agree with you. Like, I think it's lovely that kids when they're waiting for the dentist or in their car, in a car ride for five hours, I think they should have technology for some of these times. The problem is it's like they're given it every time. No, I agree with that. I do. And shoot, I had something and I lost it.

When I was talking about the group, the groups coming up, the classrooms coming up with the norms. Yes. Oh, no, that I think I think it actually does make sense. You know, I tend I tend to be not super anti-technology, because especially for neurodivergent kids I work with, sometimes the sometimes the benefits can outweigh the costs, not always. And, you know, based on what I know about, especially what social media is trying to do, right? Only because of how clicks relate to capital, right? Social media is trying to train the human brain not to wait, right? Like we get really reinforced to like jump from thing to thing to thing to thing. So we just do more clicks and more clicks and we see more things and more things.

Like that's not necessarily what the- the point of social media started out as, but that's just what's going to get favored because of how social media is funded. So I think you are right that it is, especially for our kids who have done a lot of social media, their brains, just like our brains as adults with these devices are specifically being trained out of waiting. And that is why we need to specifically define it for one, like what kind of time is a waiting time? And then what are the type of norms of a waiting time? And how do we practice those skills? Just like you did. That's so cool. And that it, you know, I'm not surprised that it worked, but that it did is so hopeful. Right.

And I think that like, that I have a, I have a, I have some concerns about what act like the actual content of video gaming and, and social media. I have some concerns about the content. especially like developmentally in, you know, aligned content. Mostly, I think in terms of the impact on child development, my concern is about the imbalance of time with other face-to-face, like, you know, just with varied opportunities. It's really maybe less about the tech itself and it's more about what they're not doing. Ooh, yes. And the imbalance. With other things and so then I guess like more recently I've started to feel like maybe if it's true that there's cohorts of kids that are immature from what we used to think was like developed along generally developmental aligned like if you think of like the yardsticks, you know, brochures and books.

Like if you think of like what we think was developmentally, you know, kind of like these yardsticks, if we feel like it's true that there might be cohorts of kids that are now not where we would expect them to be with self-regulation, executive functioning, and social cognition, I am more recently getting a little bit more passionate about one of the reasons for that immaturity is that they are not playing. I think so too. It circles right back around, doesn't it? I agree. Yes. That to some degree, we now do have to teach waiting, but to another degree, the play would naturally build that back in, in a very beautiful, organic, intrinsically motivated way. This is why humans were evolved this way kind of way. Because play is, we were evolved to play and to learn through play.

Right. And then when I think about middle schoolers and high schoolers, they love when adults play with them. Yes. Oh, my gosh. And they they love opportunities to play with each other during school in groups that they wouldn't self-select towards through organized activities or like their friend group. So, you have the opportunity to play with people that you wouldn’t self-select toward outside of school. And all of the adults are playing with them. And all of the belonging and the connection and the, again, continued executive functioning and social skills that build during that time. And so I feel like we should be prioritizing some – it’s not a huge amount of time. Like, when you actually looked at a school day, what I’m asking for is about 40 minutes a day.

I was thinking that too. I was thinking half an hour, 40 minutes, twice a day, 15 or 20. Yeah. And I feel like what would happen, yeah, middle and high school, half an hour, great. I mean, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I just feel like a lot we would see, I'm worried. I'm worried that we're going to have a lot of kids with behavior plans, a lot of kids who are referred for special education evaluations, and that we're sort of part of what is increasing those numbers is this fading of play. So I'm worried, but I also feel so hopeful because if we created that problem and it's just, it's about 30 to 40 minutes, then we can solve that problem. And this also sounds like a great answer. Sorry.

I'm sorry. Please go. I totally spoke over you. Yeah, I was like the teacher. I think all the teachers that I interview, they know that this is what their students need and they just need permission to do it. And even when I ask, would you need help figuring out how to use that time? No. Do you need help on how to coach students in those skills during that time? No. What do you need? Permission to do it. And if you don't have permission, what are you doing? I'm either doing it anyway, defiantly, or I'm pushing through with the schedule that I think I'm supposed to do. And they're very, very stressed that, and we're losing some, not to get overdramatic, but we're losing some young educators because of this exact, I think.

Yeah. So one thing listeners can do is forward episodes like this, right to your admin. Let us do the legwork for you. Because that's one thing I always really try to remember is that folks would love to do this stuff and folks do know how to do this stuff. And sometimes there are mounting pressures in the culture of a school that don't seem to make that possible. But admin is really well-meaning too. It can just be really easy to get caught up in all of these things that we all feel like we have to do, usually for someone else, usually for another adult, and forget about things that we know are right for kids. Yeah, I mean, I think curriculum directors, special ed directors, I partner with them a lot.

They're incredibly hardworking, thoughtful, ethical, responsible people. But they've developed, especially curriculum directors, have developed a lot of plans in abstract. So what I would love is for classroom teachers to sit down with curriculum directors in October, November and say: Thank you for this beautiful curriculum. Thank you for these incredibly well-thought-out pacing guides and other minutes and all this. Thank you for these beautiful humans that you've charged me with. They don't line up. Yes. What's the solution? And if the solution is as simple as 40 minutes of adjustment, how could that not be a great? Solution and then we adjust and move forward like I don't think it's that hard because everyone at the table-admin and teachers, everybody cares about the kids and wants to do the right thing, and it's working so hard and things like this I think are just so clearly the right thing, right. Like it's it's what kids would naturally gravitate toward, it's what adults would naturally gravitate towards because you know we humans are naturally moving toward development um yeah Beautiful. Thanks, Joelle. Yeah. So play, play with kids. Play with kids of all ages. Well, this has been our stance of curiosity for today. Thanks everybody. And we'll catch you next time. Thanks everyone.