[00:00:15] Jon M: I’m Jon Moscow. Amy won’t be able to join us today. Our guests are Dr. Beverly Falk and Lauren Monaco. Bev Falk is director of the High Quality Early Learning Project, and professor and director emerita of graduate programs in early childhood education at City College of New York’s School of Education.
Lauren Monaco is an experienced early childhood center head teacher and New York City public school pre-K teacher. Note that she’s speaking for herself and not for the New York City Department of Education. I am also delighted that we’ll be joined as well by Gil Schmerler, former director of the Educational Leadership Program at Bank Street College of Education, and Renee Dinnerstein, early childhood educator and author of Choice Time: How to Deepen Learning Through Inquiry and Play.
We will be talking about the centrality of play to cognitive, social, emotional, and ethical development in early childhood. Welcome, Bev and Lauren, Gil and Renee.
[00:01:13] Bev F: Thanks for having us.
[00:01:17] Jon M: How would you describe play’s defining features?
[00:01:21] Lauren M: That is a great question. I mean, play is multifaceted, and I think one of the most important things to make sure that something is actually play is that it is self-chosen, that there’s agency in the choice of activity. So any activity could probably be considered play with that as a caveat, right? that you have to be able to choose what you’re doing, and it should be enjoyable. And that doesn’t mean that it’s fun necessarily, that joy is part of it, but it’s also problem-solving. Your whole body and mind is engaged when you’re in a play state. So I think that that’s what I would say is, is play.
Bev, what do you think?
[00:02:06] Bev F: Well, I think there are many types of play. It can be child-initiated play, but play can be used in a guided way as well with an educator or an adult to offer materials that will engage children with information and other content areas.
But I think the most important thing is that play fosters critical thinking and communication and other executive function skills as well as social emotional skills that are needed for us all to be functioning participants in our democracy.
[00:02:53] Jon M: How do you define early childhood in your work?
[00:02:56] Bev F: Oh, that’s great. I mean, I think what’s interesting is that if you go and get a degree in early childhood, it’s birth through grade two, right, in the United States, I think. It’s age eight, birth through age eight. Too often in schools when people talk about early childhood, they limit their understandings to preschool, but it’s a much larger span of development than that.
[00:03:22] Jon M: How does play relate to what we know about how children learn and develop cognitively, social emotionally, and morally?
[00:03:33] Bev F: Well, from the early 1800s or maybe even the late 1700s, different researchers and theorists talked about play as the way that children learn. But in recent decades, from neuroscience, we have learned that those quote, theories that people talked about from their observations of children are actually been confirmed as the way the brain works.
So the brain is built through neural connections, and when children are playing, the brain is creating more neural connections, and that happens throughout early childhood. In the first five years of life, approximately 95% of the architecture of the brain is built, and it’s still building throughout our lifetimes, but even more so in the early childhood years, kindergarten, first, second, third grade.
So when kids are deeply engaged in play, their brains shift into a high-efficiency mode. They produce dopamine and endorphins, which are the good-feeling hormones. Stress hormones drop, and new connections in the brain form faster and stick longer. So some of the studies that have shown that play can create brain connections with 95% fewer repetitions than traditional teacher-led teaching.
[00:05:23] Lauren M: And I would also piggyback on that, that real play is different than games, right. So sometimes when we think about play in schools, we might think about, oh, I’m gonna do this literacy game with my classroom, and that might be fun, but it is different than the biological state that happens when we are freely engaged and curious and absorbed in activity for its own sake, right.
So if we think about… Jon, you could even think about a time in your life that you were, you lost your time because you were so invested in something, and that’s what happens in play. It’s not really what we’re doing, but how and why we’re doing it, and then when we’re playing, that experience itself becomes its own reward, right. And so children who have been explicitly taught letter names and sounds, they might be trying that out when they’re in dramatic play and writing out who’s going to be which character or what’s the story going to be, or I’m making a menu for our restaurant, or I’m gonna make the sign, or I’m gonna label my block structures.
So this is also a way that children can, I think Vygotsky said, “act ahead above themselves,” right. That they can test out and try out things that they might not in other contexts.
[00:06:47] Jon M: And that’s Lev Vygotsky.
[00:06:50] Bev F: Yes. According To a study from the National Institute for Play, sustained moderate to severe play deprivation during the first 10 years of life is linked to diminished impulse control and fragile interpersonal relationships.
[00:07:05] Jon M: Could you talk about that?
[00:07:07] Bev F: I think we see that if you go on social media or read any articles, like you’ll see there’s an increase of people talking about children’s inability to handle their feelings, right. There’s this emotional regulation piece that comes up. We see children having a hard time focusing and their executive functioning. That’s directly related to the loss of play in school and the academic push-down that’s been happening in early childhood, and again, early childhood meaning birth through grade two, and also I would even say upper elementary years. when we push down some of these top-down academic things, maybe even they’re well-reasoned, what we end up pushing out is we push out these opportunities for the children to develop social opportunities with their peers, their emotional regulation piece.
The idea that you can be persistent happens when you are investigating in something and you’re building a block and it keeps falling. You’re building a block structure, it keeps falling over, but you’re motivated to try again. Those opportunities are real and need to be present in order to develop the things that we need to help us manage our emotions and also be able to cooperate and coordinate with our peers. So I think that there’s a strong connection with the rise of expectations of our youngest students and our inability to provide them with the experiences that they need to do their best work and develop these skills.
[00:08:46] Jon M: I have a historical question, which is over time, how central a role has play assumed in early childhood education? Have there been times when it’s been recognized as more critical and times before now when it has been diminished? Is there a pattern?
[00:09:07] Bev F: I think that early childhood from its… and please our other colleagues who are listening and participating with us on this podcast, please do chime in if you have other things to add. But I would say that early childhood from its inception has been an understanding that children learn through action, through engagement with materials, with relationships and through movement. And while educational philosophies throughout the decades and even the centuries have swung back and forth as a pendulum about how people learn, early childhood has consistently remained focused on the fact that children learn by doing, by engaging with materials and people and having a desire and a joy in that engagement.
And as I mentioned before, the last several decades of neuroscience research have just confirmed these theories and these understandings that people have developed from observations of children because the brain actually lights up more regions to make more neural connections, and this has been confirmed through magnetic resonance imaging, that it lights up multiple regions of the brain when children are engaging in play. It strengthens learning from every angle. And in fact, when children are forced to not move, the brain has to work twice as hard because movement is, kids– people perform, especially children and especially boys, perform better cognitively when they’re allowed to move. Forcing stillness actually increases anxiety and stress. When kids are told to sit still and focus, their cortisol, the stress hormone levels rise. So movement isn’t the opposite of focus. For a developing brain, it’s the prerequisite.
[00:11:46] Jon M: Absolutely. So I just had a quick follow-up, which was when you were referring to early childhood, I understand that you’re talking about the field of early childhood and how it views play. But I was just curious, since one of the things that we’ll be talking about is the decrease in emphasis right now in, for example, New York City schools. And I’m just curious, over time, you were saying, Bev, that educational theory about how people learn has changed. Has the early childhood field, or even perhaps before it was defined as such, had to fight with educational bureaucracies in the past over, how quickly should children be learning their ABCs versus having a chance for free play, or is this a new conflict?
[00:12:37] Bev F: I think that this has been happening since No Child Left Behind, and even probably before. So there’s been a long road of corporations and politicians creating alarm around well, we need our children to be able to keep up with the Joneses, and the Joneses would be other countries, right? And we’re looking at our test scores, and some of these things are hyperbolic reactions, and some of them might even have some truth to them, but the solutions that people have chosen are counter-productive, right. So what they do is they say, “Oh, we need to teach our kids to read when they’re two, and teach sight words in 3K,” or, “Teachers obviously don’t know what they’re doing. We need to have these heavily scripted curricula, and we need to test, test, test.” And those things are counter to the research that shows how people learn, and then they seem surprised when they’re getting results that are, less than positive.
So I think that No Child Left Behind, even Obama’s ESSA Act, all of these things have resulted in corporate influence and an emphasis on product and not pedagogy. And when we do that, we’re doing a disservice to our teachers and also to our children, and we need to make a shift back and really advocate for pedagogy and what we know about how humans learn, and make that a stronger focus in our schools rather than giving curricular companies or testing companies the free access and making decisions that have a negative impact on teachers and children.
[00:14:28] Renee D: Can I jump in, and say something from my personal experience as a kindergarten teacher?
[00:14:35] Jon M: This is Renee Dinnerstein who’s speaking.
[00:14:37] Renee D: Yes, I’m sorry.
[00:14:38] Jon M: No, go ahead.
[00:14:39] Renee D: In 1968, when I first taught kindergarten, it was half day. It was a half day program, okay. Basically, the children were there, I think two and a half hours or some small amount of time, and, it was play. It was mostly play and singing and reading stories to them, and then they went home.
Then in 19, I think it was 1981, in New York City when they started the all day kindergarten. At that point it was a lottery to get into it, and kindergarten was a full day. And that’s when the confusion started, from what I observed. So now the children are in there for the full day, all right. They took a nap at a certain part of the day. We had cots that they, mats that they brought out. But we were then, “Well, they’re there all day, so they really have to have some kind of academic work brought in, and they have to have some, homework.”
And each year it got worse and worse. Well, no, we can’t have rest. They don’t need rest. Why do they need nap time, all right. These are the same five-year-olds, basically. They’re five years old, just like they were in 1968. But no, they don’t need this. So no more nap time. They had no more nap time. And then it was more and more, bringing in academics. And I think what happened at that point was a confusion. What is kindergarten? It was very clear before what kindergarten was, but now what is it? Is kindergarten more like pre-K, or is kindergarten more like first grade? And as from my point of view, that’s when the downward trend started. Less and less and less play in kindergarten. But that, that’s my two cents, right? Thank you. Thank you.
[00:16:23] Lauren M: I think it was even made stronger with the No Child Left Behind Act, which was, I think, 2002, where the whole idea was that yearly tests were used to “prove,” in quotes, how much they’re learning, and it was tied in with equity concerns allegedly. But people without knowledge about how young children learn were making these decisions that if you start earlier, kids will be able to do better. But it’s actually false, because the brain, the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is the part responsible for that kind of cognitive learning, is not fully developed when children are five. And the way that it can get more fully developed is through active engagement with materials and relationships. And so we’re really doing harm to children.
The children that people who are concerned about equity issues are most concerned about, those children, probably kids who live in cities, kids who don’t have access to the outdoors, kids who don’t have opportunities for that kind of engagement, don’t get it in school anymore either.
And so we’re really setting ourselves backwards, and it’s especially difficult for boys because boys develop the prefrontal cortex later, and especially for young boys in New York in particular. We have very young children entering school in kindergarten. Most states, the cutoff date for entering school is September. In New York City, the cutoff date is December 31st. So you have children who are really only four years old in kindergarten for half of a year, and their brains are not ready or able to focus. And so many of those children, particularly the boys, get referred as having special needs problems, as having ADHD, and they get labeled, and they get identified in ways that harm them, sometimes for many years of their lives.
[00:18:50] Gil S: If I could jump in for just one second
[00:18:53] Jon M: Sure. This is Gil Schmerler?
[00:18:54] Gil S: Schmerler, yes, formerly from Bank Street. The mention of No Child Left Behind is very significant in response to Jon’s original question, how have things changed? So testing has become more and more and more important in all grades, in all schools. So that’s what we’re seeing right now. So play, early childhood is mainly devoted to learning how to read and write so that the test scores can be higher. That’s the big difference, and it’s becoming more and more prominent.
[00:19:28] Jon M: Renee, I think, were you about to say something?
[00:19:30] Renee D: I was going to chime in a little bit just because my child is one of those boys who was four entering kindergarten and didn’t turn five until the end of December. And my child entered kindergarten curious and happy and joyful. A little nervous. But soon after we started seeing these behaviors come up at school and at home, and then they grew in frequency, in extremity and in duration. And to the point where after three months of my child being in school, he was coming home crying saying, “Mommy, I don’t know how to learn.” A four-year-old in kindergarten coming home and saying he didn’t know how to learn. It was heartbreaking. He just became a variety of just melting down to the point where he was, it took him a really long time to regulate.
And there was absolutely zero play in his kindergarten classroom. There were no blocks. There’s no dramatic play. Maybe once in a while he would get, a teacher would choose a tabletop activity for his table, and there was no agency. And we know that is harmful to children.
And I think that there’s this idea, going back to what everyone else has already articulated, that there’s this idea earlier is better, that children need direct instruction, so that must mean we’re lecturing and making these children sit down for a long time. But there are so many longitudinal studies that show that children who have these academic experiences as young children are outperformed by their peers who have developmentally appropriate ones. Because the focus on testing, we end up looking at these short-term gains, but we don’t measure the long-term loss. And that’s what these longitudinal studies show, is that short-term gains are outpaced by actual learning, things that actually need to stick, not just long enough for you to be able to take the test, but to really apply it into what your brain carries with it and can apply to new situations. And that happens best when children have explicit instruction paired with lots of opportunities for playing, exploring, experimenting. That experiential learning needs to be present for true and real learning to happen and to stick.
And that has been lost in the sauce because we tend to focus too much on testing. What are we measuring? Why are we measuring it? And what are we forgetting when we choose to put our focuses on these particular tests? There’s something called Campbell’s Law, which is, if you aren’t familiar, you should look it up. It’s this idea that when we’re measuring things, we end up shifting the focus so far away from what we’re actually measuring that we lose the plot, as it were. And I’m going to have to look it up because I’m not doing a great job explaining it. But Campbell’s Law was developed by an American psychologist, and I think his name was Campbell. Dr. Campbell, maybe? And it’s sort of like when there’s a quantitative indicator used for decision-making, the more corrupt pressures will sort of distort what it’s intended to monitor. And I think that we see that strongly in our schools right now. This focus on testing has distorted and disrupted what we know to be true about early childhood education and how children should be taught.
[00:23:23] Bev F: I just want to say there have also been studies that show that a child who reads at an earlier age independently reads at four or five, and a child who independently moves into reading at six, by the time they’re a few years older, there is really no difference in their abilities. And I experienced that as a mom. I had one child who was reading at three and a half, and another child who didn’t read till she was six and a half, and they’re both adults today who are deep thinkers and productive citizens and engaged in meaningful, purposeful work. And that was with just following and supporting and nurturing their development.
[00:24:15] Jon M: So following up on what everyone’s been saying, what is the current status of play in early childhood education in New York City and in New York State?
[00:24:27] Lauren M: Well, I would say sadly in New York City especially since Mayor Adams, and probably well-intentioned, we’ll say he was well-intentioned, mandated three heavily scripted curricula onto our public schools. It has pushed out play, and if it exists in kindergarten at all, it’s an afterthought that happens at the very end of the day. So children’s entire days are focused on sitting and top-down instruction.
And we’re seeing a disappearance of block areas from classrooms. There are not dramatic play areas in classrooms. There are not art areas in classrooms. That a lot of the instruction is top-down, and that’s in kindergarten, so like it’s definitely not happening in first or second grade where choice time was a part of first grade and second grade. At one time, second grade classrooms had blocks, and that I think is part of the past, sadly. And I think we’re also starting to see these pressures happening in pre-K classrooms as well. There’s “Well, well, they need to get ready for kindergarten.” Well, aren’t you doing Heggerty? Aren’t you teaching them sight words and teaching children like letter names and sounds and teaching reading in pre-K?
And we’re seeing those pressures as well. And Beverly, like I wonder, because you work with pre-service teachers, what are your students saying about what they’re experiencing in different schools?
[00:26:06] Bev F: Well, exactly what you’re talking about. Even in the pre-K and 3K classrooms, there was a mandated scripted curriculum that teachers were being forced to use. The early childhood team in New York City has been responsive to the concerns expressed by early childhood teachers in many ways to allow for a greater variety of curricula to be used just this last year. But for a period of time, teachers were supposed to follow a script with four-year-olds. So if a child asked a question or if a child had an idea that was outside of what the curriculum and the script said, they couldn’t follow up on it.
And of course, what good responsive teaching is for anybody, but especially young children, is to follow their interests, to follow their questions, to make sure that you’re making connections to their cultural and linguistic backgrounds, community backgrounds, and that wasn’t possible to do. There’s a little more wiggle room now in early childhood, although the deputy chancellor who was in charge of early childhood, who made this opening a little bit, just announced that she’s leaving, and no one knows quite why or what’s going to happen with that.
But the concern for kindergarten and the primary grades, which are early childhood years, is that they are part of a team in New York City of kindergarten through 12th grade, and those curricula are being designed outside of teacher knowledge and community knowledge and children knowledge, and there are no early childhood specialists within those K through 12 teams. And we’re very concerned about that, that there’s not enough differentiation for anyone throughout all those grades, but particularly with a focus on the needs of young children. Throughout New York State, I think there’s a similar pattern going on and really around the country, but we’re most familiar with what New York City is about.
[00:28:36] Amanda Denti: Hi, this is Amanda, Ethical Schools editor and social media manager. I want to tell you about our new video, Penalty Kick. A student threatens to report a classmate’s family to ICE. What should the school do? That’s the question at the center of Penalty Kick. As always, the video and discussion guide are free. After you listen to this episode, go to ethicalschools.org and click on Videos, or find the link to Penalty Kick in the description of this episode. Now let’s go back to the importance of play.
[00:29:10] Jon M: Are there different patterns in community-based early childhood centers and public schools?
[00:29:17] Lauren M: They are all under the same… When the New York City Public Schools started universal pre-K, they took over the regulation of the early childhood centers that used to be administered by the Department of Health and the agency for ACS, Administration for Children’s Services. So now everything is under the Department of Education, now called the New York City Public Schools. And there used to be a Department of Teaching and Learning, and under Eric Adams, that sort of dissolved, and I wonder if that leads, adds to the confusion because there is not opportunity to really have some of these discussions. And I would say that there are plenty of wonderful schools that are really doing right by children, but it’s a struggle to do so when there’s so much emphasis on things that aren’t connected to child development, like what Beverly was saying. The people who are making some of these decisions either don’t have that information, they don’t have that knowledge, they don’t have that expertise, nor do they trust the expertise of educators, right. So if education is a, a right and a public good, and we have stopped trusting educators to do what they know is best or having conversations around how to im- improve your professional life, right, again, I think this is the emphasis on product and products and not pedagogy and process, and I think we need to make that shift because there are wonderful educators who want to do right by children and feel limited or, and unable to utilize what they know and because of these external pressures or the pressures of their superintendents or their principals. But there are wonderful, wonderful schools that are doing right, and it shouldn’t be difficult for them to be able to do those things.
[00:31:36] Jon M: What do you want to see done by the city and the state to reinstitute the right levels of play in early childhood education?
[00:31:42] Lauren M: Well, we want play to be understood and protected as part of the instructional day. I think that, first of all, that needs to happen, and that should be happening in every single early childhood classroom, and again, that is from pre-K to grade two. And then it should also be present in the form of experiential learning in all grades, all the way up to, all the way up through high school. Hands-on learning and opportunities to be curious and, and dive into a topic of study should be available to all children, because that’s what education is really about.
[00:32:25] Bev F: Just to be clear, I think we, some of us here have not only been in classrooms as educators, but as leaders of schools and as leaders of large scale educational organizations and movements, and we understand that there needs to be some oversight and accountability for large systems so that all children and educators throughout a very large system are somehow going to be meeting the same goals and standards. But there are ways to do that without dictating every act and every word that an educator uses in a classroom. There can be big ideas that are presented and big goals that are presented that teachers can use their professional knowledge to get kids toward and to achieve. So we believe that the system doesn’t need to be teacher-proofed.
It needs to be teacher-supported, and one of the things we’re asking for also, in addition to protecting active experiential learning in classrooms throughout our district and our state and our country, is to also support educators to have further professional development for how to nurture that kind of learning in children. Teacher preparation programs mostly, and for sure in early childhood, are nurturing those kinds of educator skills and understandings, but we wanna make sure that teachers get support for that throughout their careers. And so we are proposing a bill that we would like to see introduced into the legislature of our city and our state following the lead of a number of other states that have actually passed laws to protect play in the early childhood years and to allow for it and support active experiential learning as the children move up in the grades.
Massachusetts has done this, Illinois has done this, Montana has done this, Nebraska. There are a few others that I can’t remember quite off the tip of my tongue. Do you know any?
[00:35:06] Lauren M: Oklahoma? Oklahoma, yeah. Oregon, I believe also. I think Oregon, yeah. And those have been passed by the state to protect play and experiential learning, and we wanna see that happen for the sake of Our children who are going to be the participants of our society in the future, we want to make sure that they have opportunities to problem solve and think things through and work with other people and find creative ways to solve new kinds of problems, because that’s what the children who are living today are going to be confronted with in their future. And we want to make sure that they have those skills and understandings to protect our democracy and our country in the future
[00:36:06] Jon M: How are you organizing? What are ways our listeners can get involved?
[00:36:12] Lauren M: Well, one of the things that we have done is that we have written an open letter to the mayor and the chancellor of schools really advocating for these same ideas, like that we really want to make sure that teachers are able to utilize their professional knowledge, that children are able to use their whole brains and their bodies and really have these opportunities to become their best selves through play, and that play would be protected.
And one of the other things that we’re doing is that we’re having a play-in. We’re inviting people to come, and we’re gonna have playful activities. We also want to make sure that we’re helping people understand the connections between play and brain development as well, and that’s going to be in lower Manhattan on September 26th between 11:00 AM and 1:00 PM. And we will be able to advertise the location as we get a little bit closer to the event, but we need to secure our park permit first.
[00:37:14] Jon M: And when you say we, who does the we consist of at this point? I understand that a number of organizations are involved.
[00:37:21] Lauren M: Yes. We, Beverly, Gil, Renee, Debbie Meier, there’s a, been a group of us. We were calling ourselves POP, the Protectors of Play, so we’ll be there. But then also the Alliance for Quality Education has signed on this project. Racially Just Public Schools has signed on for this project. Black Children Play have signed on to this project. The National Institute for Play has been supporting this project, as has the International Play Association as well. And I believe there’s probably even some other groups supporting us as well.
So every day more people are joining in and are very excited about this because, I mean, this is joy. This is fun, and I think we’re also going to be helping people understand the connections between real learning and academic achievement and play and the brain. So yeah.
[00:38:20] Jon M: Is there a specific contact method that people can use if they wanna get involved?
[00:38:26] Bev F: Sure. We’ll send you our website, and on the website there’ll be a place where people can contact us, and they can also sign our open letter, which would be another way to get emails from us and find out more about the activities and actions that we’re having to advocate for play, and we welcome people’s ideas, and join us. Lauren, do you wanna tell everybody the URL for the website?
[00:38:55] Lauren M: Sure. It’s nycplays.org, correct?
[00:38:59] Bev F: Correct.
[00:39:00] Jon M: Nycplays.org.
[00:39:03] Lauren M: And on that is a little bit of information about what we’ve been talking about, as well as the opportunity to sign our open letter to the mayor and to the chancellor.
[00:39:13] Jon M: Great.
[00:39:14] Lauren M: And there will be additional, we have a whole list of resources of the different laws that have been put into place around the country, as well as research studies and articles and other kinds of resources that people can use to support the ability to nurture play and experiential learning in children’s classrooms.
[00:39:41] Jon M: Is there anything that anybody would like to add that we haven’t talked about so far?
[00:39:45] Gil S: Yeah, I’d like to say that in addition to the institutional changes that Beverly and Lauren mentioned, which are necessary but might take some time, it would be very helpful in the immediate moment if a few courageous voices, such as the chancellor, district superintendents, principals, even the mayor, spoke up and talked about the value of play.
[00:40:10] Bev F: Yes. There was just an article published in, I think it was New York Magazine, an interview with the mayor, about how he loves to read and how because he’s the mayor now, he doesn’t have time to read a lot of books, but he hopes his goal is for every child in New York City to be able to read books and enjoy them.
And I think it would be really helpful if he were to take a deeper look at the kind of literacy support that’s going on in the schools and the way it is crowding out the powerful learning that takes place through experiential active learning, for him to speak up about that.
[00:41:05] Jon M: And didn’t he attend the Bank Street School for Children?
[00:41:08] Bev F: Yes. He should know it because he went to a school as a child that really supported that kind of learning. And I might like to add for some of the naysayers who say play is a break from learning, and but what about the literacy rates? That the studies really, really do show that explicit instruction, like yes, children do need to be taught what a letter shape, its name is, and it’s the sounds that they make, and when they team up, what the different sounds are.
That does need to be remain explicit and systematic, but that it doesn’t mean that their whole entire day should be dictated by lecture. The, and studies really do show that it is through inquiry paired with this explicit instruction that people do learn best. And we also need to think about, I challenge people to think about when we’re measuring things, we need to look at what things are important to us, and it’s not just literacy rates.
[00:42:10] Lauren M: Yes, that’s important, but we also need to look at how humans are able to form our community and be informed by their community, actively participate in their community with collaboration, problem-solving. All of these things are important, and they’re just as important as learning how to read.
[00:42:31] Jon M: So I think that what you’re actually emphasizing now, as you have throughout this, is that we’re not just talking in general terms, but we’re talking about the social, emotional, and ethical development that takes place in early childhood and during play.
[00:42:47] Renee D: Right. I, I also think that all of this that we’re saying, parents need to hear this, you know? Because they are getting such mixed messages, right and I can understand their confusion, you know. And one message is, well, your five-year-old needs to be able to read before they go into first grade, otherwise they’re going to be lagging behind in first grade, so don’t take that time away from reading instruction.
And if they’re hearing that, and then they’re hearing what we say, I can see the confusion that they’re feeling. That’s why it’s so important that we get support, that we get the support of the people who make decisions in the schools, to help parents understand better that this is important for their child.
We want their child to read. We want that. I mean, I had my class for two years, right? So I had these children for kindergarten, and I had the children in first grade, the same children. We just went up together. And I had a very inquiry- and play-based kindergarten. We still did, we did … My school was connected at the time to a Teachers College reading and writing, so we did writing workshop, we did reading workshop, but play was the core of my classroom.
And at the end of the school year, some children were reading and some children weren’t reading, and that didn’t really bother me. I assured the parents not to worry, and by the time when they went into first grade, then they really wanted to start learning how to read. “Oh, we’re first graders now.” I could see that it was, the play was so important for them, and not that we didn’t play in first grade, but they had a different headset when we got into first grade.
[00:44:37] Bev F: I think what, what you’re saying, Renee, is that you can’t rush neurological maturity.
[00:44:44] Renee D: No, absolutely.
[00:44:45] Bev F: And as we are focusing, the schools now are focusing on the, quote, “science of reading”- They’re not focusing on the science of learning, because the neuroscience is saying that active experiential learning is the way the brain is built cognitively, as well as impulse control, as well as emotional regulation, as well as resilience.
So the next time you hear someone say that children are, quote, “just playing,” we all have to remember to say, “That’s the most advanced learning system evolution ever designed, and it’s the best educational instrument ever made.” It isn’t in a device. It’s in the joy of engagement
[00:45:47] Jon M: Thank you, Dr. Beverly Falk of the High Quality Learning Project and Lauren Monaco, New York City pre-K teacher, and experienced educators Gil Schmerler and Renee Dinnerstein.
[00:45:06] Bev F: Thank you.
[00:45:08] Jon M: And thank you, listeners. If you found this podcast worthwhile, please share it with friends and colleagues. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or review. This helps others to find the show. Check out our website for more episodes and videos and to subscribe to our monthly emails. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews to make them easy to use in workshops or classes.
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