Adult Learning at Play
What comes to mind when you hear the word play?
Having been an art teacher for many years, I was hyper-aware of what people might think of play.
“Oh are you guys playing with clay today?” Teacher friends would ask as they came into my classroom for lunch, noticing slip, canvas and clay tools arranged on the desks.
“We’re working with clay today, thinking about gravity, tension, and three-dimensional figures in space,” I would clarify. I had a chip on my shoulder and everyone who was going to meet me as an art teacher was going to learn about play and its vitality to academic and creative success as well as its contributions to social emotional and cognitive development for students. While I was creating conditions for play and learning in my classroom, my take on the frivolity of this word encouraged me to remove it from any conversation about art education.
When I started teaching math to high school students, play began to take on a new role for me. I found myself stressing the importance of play, in trying to figure out numerical relationships and different approaches to solving and coming up with problems. In working with my co-teacher and our math coach, we openly discussed and tried different approaches, acknowledging that we were playing with different strategies to teach quadratic expressions, seeing how students responded and implementing necessary changes.
There is an area of study called the Pedagogy of Play. In “Playing to Learn”, Grace Tatter explains that in purposeful learning can incorporate play as long as the activities are oriented towards specific learning goals. Tatter sums up some findings of the researchers at Lego’s Project Zero, which exists to investigate and share learning about the pedagogy of play. According to researcher Ben Mardell, quoted it Tatter’s article; agency, curiosity, and joy are fundamental to learning as play.
In this context, play seemed so natural and so vital to thinking like mathematicians and helping students build confidence to solve problems on their own. I began to see play for what it was, a challenging endeavor that requires courage, authenticity, curiosity, and a level of skill.
Does play work for adults and should we be incorporating it into adult learning?
Fast forward some years and I’m planning professional learning experiences for teachers. I’m not going to sugar coat it. A lot of professional development that I’ve participated in and even some that I’ve planned, is boring. Sometimes it’s interesting, relevant and even useful (although who decides is hardly democratic).
That this why this year, my goal is to bring in authentic ways of playing.
Play appears to have great cognitive, emotional, physical, and social benefits in adults. But is it really important for adults to play at work, can’t they play on their own time?
Well, we adults can and should play on our own time. The benefit of playing at work is being in a state of mind that allows for learning and authentic connections to happen.
Playing at work can take different forms. The Anti-Problem is a playful activity for new teachers who are experiencing the challenges of classroom management. Based on Donna Spencer’s “Reverse It,” this activity asks teachers to work in groups of 3-4 for 15 minutes, in order to generate ideas on how they can disengage students from paying attention and participating in a class activity. Once this brainstorm is complete, each group shares their anti-problem. This can be done in through a share, a gallery walk, or any number of ways.
The final time is spent on participants discussing discoveries and insights they make.
For educators, play leads to a dual purpose in learning. Playing games that are enjoyed by our students helps us experience and better understand the interactions between children. This kind of play reminds us what it is like to be a young person and awakens our own inner child. This helps us empathize with our students and understand the experience of children in our care.
There are a great number of ways to create circumstances for learning through play and many benefits that play offers. So let’s play!
References
Grace Tatter, Playing to Learn, https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/19/03/playing-learn, March 11, 2019
Lawrence Robinson, Melinda Smith, M.A., Jeanne Segal, Ph.D., and Jennifer Shubin, The Benefits of Play for Adults, https://www.helpguide.org/articles/mental-health/benefits-of-play-for-adults.htm#:~:text=You'll%20learn%20a%20new,trust%2C%20and%20intimacy%20with%20others, July 2021
Dave Grey, The Anti Problem, https://gamestorming.com/?s=anti+problem, October 27, 2010