I was reviewing an Op-Ed
piece written in the New York Times
by Susan Engel, a senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the
teaching program at Williams College, almost two years ago. I wrote about it in this blog at the
time: http://bit.ly/14q37VV You can find the link to Engel's essay there too.
Toward the end of her
essay Engel mentions the importance of play. She writes: “During the
school day, there should be extended time for play. Research has shown
unequivocally that children learn best when they are interested in the material
or activity they are learning. Play — from building contraptions to enacting
stories to inventing games — can allow children to satisfy their curiosity
about the things that interest them in their own way. It can also help them
acquire higher-order thinking skills, like generating testable hypotheses,
imagining situations from someone else’s perspective and thinking of alternate
solutions.
“A classroom like this would provide lots
of time for children to learn to collaborate with one another, a skill easily
as important as math or reading. It takes time and guidance to learn how to get
along, to listen to one another and to cooperate. These skills cannot be picked
up casually at the corners of the day.”
Engel wrote about what children need to
know, or need to learn in elementary school. I’ve recently been reading John Medina’s book, Brain Rules. He talks about his teaching at the college level. His mother talked about seeing a movie
showing how Strasbourg Geese were force-fed. It reminded me that I had referred to those same poor geese
when I commented on Engel’s essay.
“It points us away from stuffing our children like
Strasbourg geese for test success, and toward an education that values
listening, collaborating, following their curiosity, and creating things…”
Medina writes: “My mother would often related this
story to me when she talked about being a good or bad teacher. ‘Most teachers overstuff their
students,’ she would exclaim, ‘like those farmers in that awful movie!’ When I went to college I soon
discovered what she meant. And now
that I am a professor who has worked closely with the business community, I can
see the habit close up. The most
common communication mistakes?
Relating too much information, with not enough time devoted to
connecting the dots. Lots of
force feeding, very little digestion.
This does nothing for the nourishment of the listeners, whose learning
is often sacrificed in the name of expediency.”
I believe that the
digestive process is play. What’s
good for the goose is good for the gander. College students, adults, third graders, learners all along
the spectrum of life learning need play: stories, the invention of games, the
opportunity to collaborate, practice, sit back to dream and imagine, to make
connections between new ideas and old information, to fashion something from
the information they’ve been given, to build connections that go beyond short
term recall.
We need to worry as much about how we
consume information, and for what purpose, during the course of our lives, as
we do about how much we consume meat, soda, and corn.