If a child learns but isn't tested, does anyone care?

Chair-less classrooms?

Here's a news story about a chair-less classroom.

I'm all for teachers and schools who make play and physical activity a priority. I've seen classrooms use core stability balls in really cool ways. But let's examine this story a little closer.

Did you notice the trifolds?

I'm less impressed with the "core stability balls" and more concerned about the trifolds on the desks. Don't get wrong, I think the core stability balls are kind of cool. I enjoyed watching the kids exercise and play with the balls.

However, if I had to choose between a chair-less classroom with tri-folds on every desk and a trifold-free classroom with chairs, I'd keep the chairs.

So what's wrong with the trifolds?

Alfie Kohn explains that when we say to children, "I want to see what you can do, not what your neighbour can do", this turns out to be code for "I want to see what you can do artificially deprived of the skills and help of the people and resources around you. Rather than seeing how much more you can accomplish in a well functioning team that's more authentic like real life."

Of course, we shouldn't have to choose between trifolds and chairs.

I think my point here is that we need to be careful about how we justify play for our elementary children. I have three points:

1. We shouldn't have to justify play for young children. Jean Piaget told us a long time ago that "Play is a child's work". We borrowed the term kindergarten from Germany where it literally translates to "children's garden" which is suppose to focus on playing, singing, practical activities and social interactions. There is something very wrong with our elementary schools when we have to include a defensive list of play's practical benefits. If we have to track academic progress in order to justify play, we are doing it wrong.

2. Developmentally inappropriate activities separated by brief moments of play are still developmentally inappropriate activities. Should grade one students have spelling tests? Should grade one students be isolated from their peers by trifolds? Is it progress if we can get young children to do developmentally inappropriate activities by providing them with brief moments of activity?

3. Sometimes ADHD is a symptom of a developmentally inappropriate classroom. Misbehaviour in the classroom is rarely ever the problem -- it's usually a symptom of a much larger problem. Show me a class with chronic misbehaviour and I'll likely be able to show you a boring curriculum.

Sometimes we are really good at improving school by changing nothing. Sometimes it is easier to focus our attention on whether children should be allowed to chew gum, wear hats or sit on balls, but then never talk about how children learn. Superficial change is comforting because it gives the impression that we are improving while distracting us from having to make any real progress.

This is precisely why progressive schools are so hard to find.

Half-Day Heaven: Afterschool with Finland's 1st and 2nd Graders

This was written by Tim Walker who is an American teaching in Finland. Tim has an insightful blog titled Taught by Finland. Tim tweets here. You can find this post on Tim's blog here.

by Tim Walker

“We just think seven- and eight-year-olds should have free-play in the afternoon. There’s no need for them to do an eight-hour workday.” As I listen to Juulia, an afterschool leader at my Finnish school, I’m shuffling my feet to keep warm in the bitter cold. Iltapäiväkerho (IP-kerho), “Afternoon Club”, has just ended and she’s about to head home. It’s 4:00 PM.

Juulia is introducing me to a strange new world where seven- and eight-year-olds spend hours afterschool engaged in free-play, pursuing their interests with friends. These children are welcome to complete their homework during this time, but this is never required of them. They get to choose what they want to do and when. Nearly 70% of the first and second graders at my school attend IP-kerho.

This afternoon club is subsidized by the City of Helsinki and parents only pay 80 euros (a little more than $100) per child each month. That’s about $5 each day for nearly four hours of childcare and a snack.

The IP-kerho model is common throughout Finland and municipalities often subsidize these clubs. Not all afternoon clubs emphasize free-play, but many do. IP-kerhos can offer special programs to the children, too. At my school’s afternoon club, drumming, astronomy, and drama classes have been offered for a small additional fee. Private clubs also exist in Finland.

At my school, IP-kerho begins at 12:15 PM every day. Why so early? First graders often finish their school days by 12:00. Second graders have light schedules, too.

In Finland, first and second graders typically spend just four hours at school each day. At my American school, this would have been a half-day schedule! For Finland’s youngest students, I’ve argued that half-days happen every day.

Since having this realization, I’ve been on a mission to understand the other half of the day for these first and second graders. I decided that I needed to see my school’s afternoon club in action.

Inside the IP-kerho

Chaos. That’s what I’m thinking when I take one step into one of the playrooms. It’s loud and crowded. Sprawled around the small room are more than 20 first and second graders, chatting and moving around boisterously. What I’m noticing contrasts sharply with my observations in a Finnish first grade classroom.

But the longer I stand and watch, the more I’m seeing that there is a sense of order here. Several first and second graders are huddled around a table, playing an Angry Birds board game. There’s another table where a handful of students are coloring and drawing. A couple of second graders are leaning against the wall and humming as they leaf through a large atlas. Below them, two girls quiz each other on math, scrawling addition problems on a small blackboard.

There’s a door along the back wall that leads to the “quiet room “, a place where students voluntarily choose to go if they need a peaceful spot to play. I find three girls whispering as they snap legos together.

The IP-kerho leader is hanging back and supervising from a distance. He’s available to the students, but he’s not dictating what they should be doing.

It may be loud and busy, but this is truly the kind of deep engagement that teachers and parents long to see. No one’s complaining of boredom. I’m not hearing bickering among the children. And there’s a refreshing absence of screen-time, too.

These are young children who are exercising their creativity, collaborating with each other, and naturally developing their blossoming academic skills. And to think, no one has forced them to do any of these things. They’ve made their choices freely.

Free-Choice: Time, Space, and Materials

Earlier this week, I asked Ritva, a bilingual first grader, if she liked IP-Kerho. She nodded. When I pressed her to say why, Ritva didn’t miss a beat, “I get to do what I want.”

Choice is at the heart of what I’m seeing during this afternoon club. These young children are given freedom to pursue their own interests when they play.

Although the act of providing time to play is important, it’s not enough in and of itself. The play-space matters and so do the materials. Imagine the response of these children if they were told that they could only play in a completely empty room. Would anyone expect to see them engaged in deep play?

At this IP-kerho, the children have three different places to play and each spot has its own set of materials. They can go outside to run around on the playground or the soccer field. Another option is the gym where students can shoot hoops, swing on gymnastic rings, and play floor hockey. As I described earlier, the children can also choose to spend their time in one of the well-stocked playrooms.

There are eight IP-kerho leaders who spread out across these locations. The children choose where they want to go and when. It’s free-play in the truest sense.

As a first and second grade teacher in the Boston area, I never saw students this young look so refreshed after 12:00. The balance of academics in the morning and play in the afternoon must be nourishing them.

This afternoon club is providing them with the time, space, and materials to pursue their interests freely. These children are glowing on this half-day. It’s heavenly.

First Grade in Finland: Every Day is a Half-Day

This was written by Tim Walker who is an American teaching in Finland. Tim has an insightful blog titled Taught by Finland. Tim tweets here. You can find this post on Tim's blog here.

by Tim Walker

When I was teaching first grade in the Greater Boston area, my Finnish wife, Johanna, loved to tell me about schools in Finland. Most of what she told me sounded mythical.

According to Johanna, Finnish children started first grade at age seven. Their school days were often just four hours long. Her close Finnish friend, a first grade teacher in Helsinki, worked about 30 hours each week, including planning time.

For years, I refused to believe my wife. My reality as an American first grade teacher was just too different from the one she described.

Many of my first grade students were a full year or two younger than their Finnish peers. Our school days lasted seven hours. Unlike Johanna’s friend, I was pulling in 50-hour weeks of teaching and planning. I just didn’t believe that another way was possible until I started teaching in Finland.

The Afternoon Blues

In the hallways of my Finnish school, I often observe first graders packing up their backpacks to go home at 12:00. Even though the school year began in August, this is still a strange sight for me. This would have been the sign of a half-day at my previous school. In Finland, this is normal for first graders.

As a first grade teacher in the States, I found that the afternoon was the toughest part of the school day. When my students returned from lunch and recess around 1:00 PM, I noticed a sharp drop in their energy levels. And they weren’t the only ones who were tired. I was exhausted, too.

During the afternoon, I often felt the urge to give my young students time for unstructured play. Sometimes I’d hear them wistfully recall how there used to be free play in kindergarten. On the rare half-day, my students were always brimming over with excitement.

Even though my American first graders craved unstructured time, I would feel guilty about providing it in the classroom. In my mind, free play was babyish. It was non-academic. Although my students and I found ways of coping with the afternoon blues, I always wondered about the Finnish model that my wife would rave about. Was there a way for first graders to have enough time for both work and play in a school setting?

More Opportunities for Play

Although I’m a fifth grade classroom teacher in Finland, I’ve been able to spend several hours observing and co-teaching first grade classes at my school. I’ve found that first grade in Finland is actually quite academic. I’ve yet to see first grade teachers who use class time for unstructured play.

What I have seen, however, is a school structure that provides children with more opportunities to play. Each lesson is one hour long, but according to Finnish law, students are entitled to take a 15-minute break every lesson. On almost every occasion, younger students spend these breaks outside with their friends.

In Child and Adolescent Development for Educators (2008), professors Judith Meece and Denise Daniels praise the wisdom of structuring regular breaks for social interactions and physical activities during the school day. Research has shown that these breaks work to improve concentration and attention during classroom times.

Although first graders in Finland usually spend just four hours at school, these break times obviously reduce the total number of hours that they log in the classroom. All told, they only spend about three hours in class each day. Even on a half-day at my previous school, my American first graders would still put in more classroom hours than their Finnish peers on a full-day schedule.

Heading home at 12:00 or 1:00 PM gives these young Finnish students more opportunities to engage in deep play. This is the type of play that helps children to develop creativity and analytical thinking.

According to Myae Han, assistant professor of human development and family studies at the University of Delaware, deep play starts to emerge at about 30 minutes. Researchers have found that children actually stop trying to achieve this higher quality of play if they anticipate interruption. Giving children lots of time for free play will foster this deeper level of play (Blair, 2014).

Of course, this is a difficult task to accomplish in most elementary schools, even in Finland. This is why shortening the number of school hours for young children is sensible. It provides them with more time to access this deeper level of play afterschool.

When Less is More

There is mounting pressure to increase the amount of time that American students spend in school.

In his recent State of the State speech, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said, “It’s time to lengthen both the school day and the school year in New Jersey. This is a key step to improve students outcomes and boost our competitiveness.” According to Governor Christie, the current school calendar is “antiquated.” He seems to believe that increasing the quantity of school hours will improve the quality of a student’s education (Morones, 2014).

Governor Christie is misguided. It’s not the length of the school year that is antiquated, but the length of the typical school day for America’s youngest students. Why do most American first graders put in the same number of hours as upper-elementary students? In Finland, students in the younger grades have less hours of school than the older ones. Ironically, my fifth graders in Helsinki have less class time each day than the first graders I used to teach in the Greater Boston area.

Every day I see first graders who thrive with shorter school days in Finland. They can (and often do) spend hours engaged in deep play long after the school day has ended, developing their creativity and analytical thinking skills.

How children's play is being sneakily redefined

This was written by Alfie Kohn. His website is here and he tweets here. This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum in Providence, RI, on Nov. 12, 2011 and was originally found here.

By Alfie Kohn

* Children should have plenty of opportunities to play.

* Even young children have too few such opportunities these days, particularly in school settings.

These two propositions — both of them indisputable and important — have been offered many times.[1] The second one in particular reflects the “cult of rigor” at the center of corporate-style school reform. Its devastating impact can be mapped horizontally (with test preparation displacing more valuable activities at every age level) as well as vertically (with pressures being pushed down to the youngest grades, resulting in developmentally inappropriate instruction). The typical American kindergarten now resembles a really bad first-grade classroom. Even preschool teachers are told to sacrifice opportunities for imaginative play in favor of drilling young children until they master a defined set of skills.

As with anything that needs to be said — and isn’t being heard by the people in power — there’s a temptation to keep saying it. But because we’ve been reminded so often of those two basic contentions aboutplay, I’d like to offer five other propositions on the subject that seem less obvious, or at least less frequently discussed.

1. “Play” is being sneakily redefined. Whenever an educational concept begins to attract favorable attention, its name will soon be invoked by people (or institutions) even when what they’re doing represents a diluted, if not thoroughly distorted, version of the original idea. Much that has been billed as “progressive,” “authentic,” “balanced,” “developmental,” “student-centered,” “hands on,” “differentiated,” or “discovery based” turns out to be discouragingly traditional. So it is with play: “Most of the activities set up in ‘choice time’ or ‘center time’ [in early-childhood classrooms] and described as play by some teachers, are in fact teacher-directed and involve little or no free play, imagination, or creativity,” as the Alliance for Childhood’s Ed Miller put it.[2] Thus, the frequency with which people still talk about play shouldn’t lead us to conclude that all is well.



2. Younger and older children ought to have the chance to play together. Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College, points out that older kids are uniquely able to provide support — often referred to as “scaffolding” — for younger kids in mixed-age play. The older children may perform this role even better than adults because they’re closer in age to the younger kids and also because they don’t “see themselves as responsible for the younger children’s long-term education [and therefore] typically don’t provide more information or boosts than the younger ones need. They don’t become boring or condescending.”[3]



3. Play isn’t just for children. The idea of play is closely related to imagination, inventiveness, and that state of deep absorption that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi dubbed “flow.” Read virtually any account of creativity, in the humanities or the sciences, and you’ll find mentions of the relevance of daydreaming, fooling around with possibilities, looking at one thing and seeing another, embracing the joy of pure discovery, asking “What if….?” The argument here isn’t just that we need to let little kids play so they’ll be creative when they’re older, but that play, or something quite close to it, should be part of a teenager’s or adult’s life, too.[4]



4. The point of play is that it has no point. I didn’t know whether to laugh or shudder when I read this sentence in a national magazine: “Kids need careful adult guidance and instruction before they are able to play in a productive way.”[5] But I will admit that I, too, sometimes catch myself trying to justify play in terms of its usefulness.

The problem is that to insist on its benefits risks violating the spirit, if not the very meaning, of play. In his classic work on the subject, Homo Ludens, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga described play as “a free activity standing quite consciously outside ordinary life as being ‘not serious’ but at the same absorbing the player intensely and utterly.” One plays because it’s fun to do so, not because of any instrumental advantage it may yield. The point isn’t to perform well or to master a skill, even though those things might end up happening. In G. K. Chesterton’s delightfully subversive aphorism, “If a thing is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing badly.”

Play, then, is about process, not product. It has no goal other than itself. And among the external goals that are inconsistent with play is a deliberate effort to do something better or faster than someone else. If you’re keeping score -- in fact, if you’re competing at all -- then what you’re doing isn’t play.

Implicit in all of this is something that John Dewey pointed out: “ ‘Play’ denotes the psychological attitude of the child, not … anything which the child externally does.” As is so often the case, focusing on someone’s behavior, that which can be seen and measured, tells us very little. It’s people’s goals (or, in this case, lack of goals), their perspectives and experiences of the situation that matter. Thus, Dewey continues, “any given or prescribed system” or activities for promoting play should be viewed skeptically lest these be inconsistent with the whole idea.[6]

Such is the context for understanding well-meaning folks (like me) whose lamentations about diminishing opportunities for play tend to include a defensive list of its practical benefits. Play is “children’s work!” Play teaches academic skills, advances language development, promotes perspective taking, conflict resolution, the capacity for planning, and so on. To drive the point home, Deborah Meier wryly suggested that we stop using the word play altogether and declare that children need time for “self-initiated cognitive activity.”

But what if we had reason to doubt some or all of these advantages? What if, as a couple of researchers have indeed suggested, empirical claims about what children derive from play — at least in terms of academic benefits — turned out to be overstated?[7] Would we then conclude that children shouldn’t be able to play, or should have less time to do so? Or would we insist that play is intrinsically valuable, that it’s not only defined by the absence of external goals for those who do it but that it doesn’t need external benefits in order for children to have the opportunity to do it? Anyone who endorses that position would want to be very careful about defending play based on its alleged payoffs, just as we’d back off from other bargains with the devil, such as arguing that teaching music to children improves their proficiency at math, or that a given progressive innovation raises test scores.

5. Play isn’t the only alternative to “work.” I’ve never been comfortable using the word work to describe the process by which children make sense of ideas — which is to say, adopting a metaphor derived from what adults do in factories and offices to earn money.[8] To express this concern, however, isn’t tantamount to saying that students should spend all day in school playing. Work and play don’t exhaust the available options. There’s also learning, whose primary purpose is neither play-like enjoyment (although it can be deeply satisfying) nor work-like completion of products (although it can involve intense effort and concentration). It’s not necessary to work in order to experience challenge or excellence, and it’s not necessary to play in order to experience pleasure.

But there’s still a need for pure play. And that need isn’t being met.


NOTES

1. See the work of the Alliance for Childhood, statements by theNational Association for the Education of Young Children, and such recent books as Deborah Meier et al.’s Playing for Keeps , Dorothy Singer et al.’s Play = Learning , Vivian Gussin Paley’s A Child’s Work , and David Elkind’s The Power of Play .

2. Miller is quoted in Linda Jacobson, “Children’s Lack of Playtime Seen as Troubling Health, School Issue,” Education Week, December 3, 2008. A few years later, Elizabeth Graue, a professor of early childhood education at the University of Wisconsin, made exactly the same point: “What counts as play in many classrooms are highly controlled centers that focus on particular content labeled as ‘choice’ but that are really directed at capturing a specific content-based learning experience, such as number bingo or retelling a story exactly as the teacher told it on a flannel board” (“Are We Paving Paradise?”,Educational Leadership, April 2011, p. 15).

3. See Gray’s article “The Value of Age-Mixed Play,” Education Week, April 16, 2008, pp. 32, 26.

4. One of many resources on this topic: the National Institute for Play (nifplay.org), founded by Dr. Stuart Brown. Also, if you ever have the opportunity to see Saul Bass’s short documentary film Why Man Creates (1968), don’t miss it.

5. Paul Tough, “Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?” New York Times Magazine, September 27, 2009.

6. John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1915/1990), pp. 118-19.

7. For example, see the reference to work by Peter K. Smith and Angeline Lillard in Tom Bartlett, “The Case for Play,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 2011.

8. Alfie Kohn, “Students Don’t ‘Work’ -- They Learn,” Education Week, September 3, 1997.

Everything I know about engagement I learned in kindergarten

This was written by Doug Johnson who is a K-12 teacher who is the Director of Libraries and Technology for the Mankato, Minnesota Public Schools. Johnson blogs here. This is an excerpt from a post found here. For an entertaining read, check out Johnson's freely admitted personal biases.

by Doug Johnson

In kindergarten you get:

• Show and tell. You got to do something or bring something and then tell others about it. Secondary skill attainment measurement needs to be less about testing and more about show and tell performance-based assessment. Oh, and listening to other students is a lot more involving than listening to the old person in the room.

• Choices. As a little kid you often got to choose - your library book, your reading buddy, your activity, the subject of your drawing. People tend to choose things that interest them and interesting things are engaging. How often do we let older students choose?

• Play. Elementary teachers can make a game out of almost anything - and make just about every task feel like play. The older we get, the less we get to play and more we have to work. Just why is that? Gamification is a fancy term for putting play back into the curriculum. Look it up.

• Naps. Most adolescents I know are tired - and not because they've been up all night texting. (Well, maybe that's part of it.) We've long known that teens do better when school starts later in the morning. Tired people have a tough time staying engaged.

• To go outside. The best learning takes place in the "real world" not in the classroom. Whether it is studying bugs and leaves in first grade, marching with the band in junior high, or doing service learning as seniors, we all are more interested when it is the real world with which we are dealing.

• Colors. A blank sheet of construction paper and some crayolas have always let young learners be creative. Creativity is inherently engaging. What's the high school classroom's equivilant to scissors and paste? 

• To do it together. Reading groups. Play groups. Science groups. It's better with other kids. Social learners are engaged learners.

• Reading for enjoyment. Our elementary teachers and librarians want us to practice reading so much they let us read what we like! Do our secondary teachers want us to write so much, know so much, experiment so much, and solve problems so much that we get to do it for enjoyment?

• Learning that's important. Nobody needs to convince a little kid that learning to read, to add and subtract, or to know about firemen is important. And that you should pay attention when being taught these things. Calculus, world history, the Romantic poets, the atomic structure of non-metals, not so much. If you can't convince me what you are teaching should be important to me, teach something that is.

• Care. OK, this should have been the first one. I really believe a lot little kids are engaged because they know someone cares that they are. Yeah, the littlies are cute and cuddly and all that, but the gangly, awkward, homely teens need to know adults care too. When someone else is paying attention to you, you pay more attention yourself.

There you are - 10 simple steps to keep the engagement level from tanking.

Play is the work of the child

"Play is the work of the child." Maria Montessori

"Play is a child's work." Jean Piaget

Thanks to Kevin McBride for sharing this cartoon.

Children need to grow up

When we allow children to swing on the swings and slide down the slide we lie to them by allowing them to think that when they get a job they can screw the day away.

When we ask children how they feel or care about what they are thinking, we set them up for failure because in the real world no one will care about their well-being.

Parents who give their children training wheels on their bikes are forgetting that adults don't use them.

Why do we send kids to school at all when we could send them to work in the real world? We could call it the Department of Child Labour.

Parents who let their young children pretend to read forget that adults who do this are ridiculed.

Parents who allow their infants to babble on free of grammatical correctness & pronunciation are infantalizing their infants.

Children don't pay taxes. In the real world, everyone pays taxes. See the problem?

T-Ball is a joke. They don't use Ts in the Major Leagues.

Children who skate while leaning and pushing on a chair need to grow up.

Water wings encourage kids to swim when really they can't.

How are babies going to learn how to walk and talk if we don't grade them?

If we don't give zeroes to babies who are late walking and talking how will they ever learn to be accountable?

Too many people use crutches as a crutch.

Demanding children to take on the responsibilities of adulthood before it is developmentally appropriate is irresponsible.

Before children can grow up, they need time to grow up.

Holding K-12 Hostage

When I ask people to think about why we grade students, they tend to provide three reasons:

1. Motivate students
2. Rank and Sort students
3. Provide feedback for students

In short, we have no business using grades to do number 1 or 2 and grading has never done a good job of 3. I've written more about this here.

A fourth rational for grading comes up regularly. In fact, you might have even made this argument:

We need testsandgrades in K-12 so our children can get into post secondary education.

I have a couple responses:

• Some of the worst forms of teaching and learning exist in post secondary colleges and universities. The only anecdotal evidence we might need to prove this is for those who attended post secondary to remember their experiences in lecture halls that could fit 50 to 400 students at a time. Holding K-12 hostage to such pathetic standards seems irresponsible.

• While it's true that some universities look at some of the grades from a student's high school transcript, how many universities look at a student's grades from elementary? Middle school? or even grade 11? Because the only grades that post-secondary institutions look at is from the final year of high school, K-11 can and should be liberated from the clutches of post-secondary's obsession with testsandgrades.

• I know more than a couple university professors and I know a president of a local college, and I know that they would all far rather K-12 focus less on testsandgrades and more on inspiring students to have a love for learning. In other words, university folk understand that "a preoccupation with achievement is not only different from, but detrimental to, a focus on learning." (Alfie Kohn). The research confirms that an orientation towards improving your learning, rather than proving it sets children up for the most success. In learning oriented classrooms, students are less worried about looking smart and more about becoming smart. The most successful teachers and students understand that proving how good you are over and over again is an inferior use of your time especially when you could be using your time getting better.

• We have a dangerous pre-occupation with preparation. College does not begin in kindergarten -- kindergarten begins in kindergarten. Children in middle school are not simply miniature versions of high school or university students. Children of all ages have their own unique, individual needs. What might be appropriate for a high school student might be developmentally inappropriate for a middle or elementary student.

• In Alberta, only one-third of students attend university. Does it make sense to mold K-12 public education, which is for everyone, in the image of post-secondary education where  two-thirds of our students will not attend.

To sum up, I'm sick and tired of being told I can't innovate and improve my assessment practices in K-12 because of post secondary's archaic grading practices.