Far from a distraction and time waster, play contributes to student learning, but incorporating play in schools is not always easy. 

In May 1954, Walt Disney wrote in Kappan that “Fun and having fun is vital; it makes life with its inevitable burdens tolerable. Often I think it may provide the closest of all human bonds” (“Humor: An international sixth sense,” p. 328). Indeed, Kappan authors have generally agreed that having fun and playing in school are important. When play comes up in our pages, it’s usually depicted positively, as important to students’ mental health and as a means to promote student learning. Even so, articles dedicated to the topic of play are relatively rare.  

But it’s interesting to note that most of the articles that we have published on this topic appeared in the 1980s and later and tended to discuss the imperiled status of play in school. For example, in June 1982, Barbara Iverson bewailed the rigidity of contemporary classrooms: 

Look around at today’s classrooms. How much do they encourage playfulness? Most teachers post admonitions urging students to be neat, be quiet, work at their desks, be good listeners. How many signs urge students to daydream, play, imagine, reflect? Student artwork usually is carried out in response to a teacher’s directive. Rarely do students propose the idea, choose the medium, or do much more than tinker with design. There are rules in art, students learn, just as in soccer or football.  

When play is actively discouraged in modern classrooms, the rigid regulation that replaces it often turns out to be as unproductive as chaos. Moreover, such rigidity frequently breeds a stultifying boredom. (“Play, creativity, and schools today,” p. 693) 

Play is important to the creative process, Iverson continued. When a person attempting to create something is stuck, they tend to abandon whatever logical process they had in place and freely play with ideas by daydreaming. In school, assignments that incorporate play are likely to hold students’ interest longer without being significantly less effective than direct teaching: 

When free play is routinely discouraged and assignments are always predetermined by teachers, children’s flexibility of thought and action is severely limited, and little creativity exists. This is not to say that all limits on students are useless and unnecessary. However, just as students are now taught to follow rules, play fixed roles, and defer to their elders, they might also be taught to break rules, step out of roles, and assert their own ideas on occasion. (p. 694) 

Play for play’s sake 

Even when educators recognize the value of play, they may not agree about what it looks like to incorporate play in schools effectively. In May 1984, Peter Gray and David Chanoff (“When play is learning: A school designed for self-directed education”) noted that the education pendulum had, for most of the 20th century, swung between traditional teaching methods and those relying on children’s spontaneity and natural curiosity. Those on both sides of the debate shared the assumptions that schools needed to have a curriculum, deliberate pedagogy, the ability to motivate students, and personal achievement standards for students. Even approaches that claimed to be child-centered often relied on adult direction: 

It is probably fair to say that much of the impetus behind progressive education, the open classroom, and the Montessori method derived from efforts to accommodate children’s natural drive for learning. But these approaches were never intended to bring about fundamental changes in the distribution of responsibility for learning. Despite what students may have been told about being “responsible” for their education, they saw clearly that such was not the case. Teachers and other educational planners still set curricula and standards and still struggled mightily to entice students to achieve. (p. 609) 

They went on to describe a school that had broken free of the adult-centered model, yet still managed to guide students to interact with the wider culture (something they claimed other student-centered models, such as A.S. Neill’s Summerhill, were less successful at). The Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts (where Chanoff was a founding member and instructor), gave students the freedom to set their own rules, schedules, and learning plans. Students of all ages learned alongside adults who could provide expertise and guidance as needed and desired. According to Gray and Chanoff, Sudbury Valley went far beyond the usual approaches to play in schools: 

It is important to understand that what happens at Sudbury Valley is not play for the sake of learning but play for the sake of playing. Sudbury Valley is not part of the “learning can be fun” tradition in education, in which games, toys, and enjoyable activities are explicitly planned for the function of teaching certain skills or knowledge. Students spend most of their time pursuing immediate interests (play), and the long-term learning that results is incidental. Of course, . . . it is no accident that the kinds of activities children enjoy are precisely those from which they learn a great deal. (p. 610) 

Gray and Chanoff explained that students’ interest in Dungeons and Dragons might lead them to learn about probability, fantasy literature, and mythology. A Sudbury Valley graduate’s obsession with science fiction novels sparked an interest in physics and mathematics. And a skilled machinist who graduated from Sudbury Valley had, as a student, spent hours building clay models. These and similar examples showed “that play for the sake of play — unguided and without unsolicited adult intervention — entails the acquisition of skills and knowledge and often matures quite directly into professional pursuits” (p. 610). 

A cautionary note 

However, the Sudbury Valley example might seem out of reach for many educators, if indeed such an approach is even advisable. In May 2012, David Wong (“Curiosity is not good — but it’s not bad either”) mused on the pros and cons of encouraging students to pursue their own curiosity: 

On one hand, we have recognized children’s curiosity as a natural and vital quality of good education. Every year, students across the country spend hours observing how plants grow in a dark closet, investigating how to use trigonometry to measure the height of the school flagpole, or learning more about the president of their choice. Although we can certainly debate the value of these activities, educators can hardly be faulted for trying to foster student curiosity.  

But, wait. There’s a contradiction here. Educators spend just as much effort, if not more, managing the problems of student curiosity. In the name of safety and order, we make explicit rules to regulate curiosity. From the first day of the school year, we make sure students understand that they can’t explore certain things on the Internet or experiment in any way they want in science class. We even have rules about when and how they should ask questions during class. (p. 62) 

The same curiosity that might lead a child to seek out videos of exotic animals on the internet might also lead them to violent videos of animal suffering, to use an example from Wong’s article. For Wong, this is no reason to stifle curiosity altogether, nor is he advocating completely abandoning the curriculum to allow students to play and follow their curiosity wherever it leads. Instead, he recommends giving them space to pursue their curiosities, while also encouraging them to set aside one curiosity for a time to follow another.  

Play with guidance 

For teachers in schools focused on academic standards and standardized tests, the idea of making room for free exploration may seem impractical. Finding that balance between standards and freedom was the subject of Kappan’s May 2015 issue on “Play and the Common Core.” In that issue, Karen Wohlwend and Kylie Peppler noted that: 

Play is losing to rigor in American classrooms as more and more structured reading and math replaces traditional playtime, thanks in large part to pressure to meet the Common Core State Standards. Young children, in particular, are losing out because this increasing standardization of the curriculum restricts the variety of ways they could and should be learning. (“All rigor and no play is no way to improve learning,” p. 22) 

Also writing in the May 2015 issue, Jill Bowdon (“The Common Core’s first casualty: Playful learning”) elaborated on the problem by discussing how raising academic standards in elementary school was making kindergarten more academically rigorous: 

Students are studying content now that is more advanced than that covered in 1998 and spending more time on two subjects tested in 3rd grade: reading and math. Changes have been especially dramatic in reading. In 2010, 77% of students received more than 90 minutes of reading instruction daily, compared with only 32% in 1998. (p. 34) 

Bowdon encouraged kindergarten teachers — and their leaders — to listen to early childhood experts and incorporate more play-based strategies.  

Such strategies need not be completely led by the child, nor do adults have to take control of every step, as Deena Weisberg and colleagues explained in “Making play work for education.” They suggested that adults look to guided play, which is adult-initiated and child-directed:  

In guided play, it’s crucial that children direct the action because it gives them the autonomy to make decisions about what to do in any given moment. They are in control of what happens next and in what they wish to explore and how. Children do not just perceive that they are in control; in guided play, they truly can decide what to do next and how to respond. This is an important feature of guided play because even children are sensitive to the difference between circumstances where they lead and those where they are given an educational experience disguised as play — what one might call “chocolate-covered broccoli.” (pp. 9-10) 

In guided play, adults prepare the environment (for example, by choosing toys to make available) and they provide scaffolding during play (for example, by asking questions about what the children are doing). But the children themselves decide what they are going to do during playtime. 

As I write this at the end of March, students across the United States are out of school as part of the effort to combat COVID-19. For many of these students, there’s no set curriculum to follow or lessons to complete — play-based learning may be the norm for a while. Perhaps, as destabilizing as this feels, it is a comfort to know that there is research showing that such learning is beneficial. How to incorporate this kind of learning into the classroom is a challenge for another day.