Play as the foundation

I get to see the richness of play on a daily basis with the 3, 4 and 5 year olds I work with. They learn through this play, even though it often looks very different to many an adult's idea of learning. It's through this play that their understanding of themselves and the physical and social world around them develops. They also learn what their powers are, how they can arrange things, make things happen, create important moments with others.

I've been thinking about how this is the perfect course to set off on to develop the kinds of abilities, or "competencies" that they will need as adults.

Play is notoriously difficult to define, but I think Peter Gray's definition makes sense. Play is:

1. Freely chosen & directed by the players
2. Intrinsically motivated 
3. Structured by rules within the player’s mind
4. Always creative & usually imaginative
5. Conducted in an active, alert, relatively non-stressed frame of mind

He elaborates on this, to show the power each of these characteristics for children's development and learning (my emphasis, in bold):

1. Because it is freely chosen and directed by the players, play is a major force for children’s learning how to take initiative, direct their own behavior, negotiate with and get along with playmates, and solve their own problems.
2. Because it is intrinsically motivated, play is how children discover, pursue, and become skilled at what they love to do.
3. Because it is guided by mental rules, play is how children learn to plan, structure, and create the boundaries (rules) for activities that engage them.
4. Because it is always creative and often highly imaginative, play is how children exercise and build their capacities for creativity and imagination.
5. Finally, the mental state of play—active and alert but relatively non-stressed—has been shown in many studies to be the ideal state of mind for learning anything new or doing anything that requires creativity or the generation of new insights.

I also came across this 'Learning Compass' from the OECD:

"Developed as part of our Future of Education and Skills 2030 project, the Learning Compass puts forth a shared vision of what students should learn to be ready for tomorrow."

There's some other important elements around the compass, which I've taken off; I wanted to focus on the compass circle itself.

Looking at the dark cyan ring - the 'transformative competencies' -

• Taking responsibility
• Reconciling tensions and dilemmas
• Creating new value

- I'm struck by how similar these are to the Gray's elaborations of aspects of play.

Just to make it clear, let's put them side by side:

Play	Transformative Competencies
play is how children learn to plan, structure, and create the boundaries (rules) for activities that engage them	Taking responsibility
take initiative, direct their own behaviour, negotiate with and get along with playmates, and solve their own problems	Reconciling tensions and dilemmas
play is how children exercise and build their capacities for creativity and imagination.	Creating new value

Play is developing the kinds of competencies with which we might hope students finish their schooling, those with which they not only know about the world, but can make positive changes to it.

It makes me think that play could be right in the middle of that compass! Play develops skills, knowledge, values and attitudes.

I'm thinking about play for young children here, but I'd like to see playful learning continuing beyond that age to maintain the self-directed approaches children have learnt so much from.

I think it's always useful to think about what that learning is like in the specific case. Luckily, I've blogged about some of these concrete examples. Here's a couple of links to earlier posts:

Arranging things - "What I’m trying to get a grip on doesn’t seem to simply reduce to dispositions though. It is a more disorganised-seeming, less direct way of obtaining knowledge about what daring and playfulness can achieve, what can be done with freedom and within necessity, how the social and physical environment can be remixed. It centres around agency, and uses whatever is at hand to achieve its undefined aims. It achieves its goal of developing capable and skillful being and making in the physical and social world, but its means are more indirect than what comes to mind when we think of theory-building: curiosity -> question -> search -> answers."

Folding, cutting, sticking, drawing - "...it's really not necessary for me to be adding anything in to this process: there's so much happening already: theories being refined, interests pursued, skills honed, and much more."