Playing, Doing, Thinking, Learning

Dr Christine Stephen

Playing, Doing, Thinking, Learning

• play has the greatest value for the young child when it is really free and his own.

Playing, Doing, Thinking, Learning

• [I] love my classroom because it has a lovely house and I really like making models, stuff for Mum and Dad.

Playing, Doing, Thinking, Learning

• They should try to find out what the children like and try to form a lesson around that. . . If you get to be part of what you are learning you will understand more

Playing, Doing, Thinking, Learning

• Children learn by their fingers . . .without their actual sensory experience of things, what other people tell them means hardly anything at all. . . Even some professional educators do not yet recognise how easy it is to mistake words for knowledge, and how much more vivid and usable is the understanding which children get from immediate experience of doing things, and finding out for themselves, than from being told about them.

Playing, Doing, Thinking, Learning

• Joe said that he had ‘gone off’ design and technology since they started to ‘make things you would not want - like a box that is too small to hold anything’.

Playing, Doing, Thinking, Learning

• Our descriptions and explanations are useful . . . to supplement [children’s] own experience but they are useless as a substitute for it. We may like explaining, but it is not the most useful thing for our children.

Playing, Doing, Thinking, Learning

• How do you learn to add up? – You need to get some cubes and when you

are doing your number work you see what it adds up to.

Playing, Doing, Thinking, Learning

• Active learning . . . engages and challenges children’s thinking using real-life and imaginary situations.

Playing, Doing, Thinking, Learning

Tracking Children’s Progress

Play, work, learning

• [The boy] writing is learning because he is thinking in his head.

• Playing is not learning – we know how to play already.• [At the computer] they are not learning, just playing

games• [On no desk day] today feels like playing!• [The children are learning] because they are all facing

the front and looking at the teacher• You sit nicely on the carpet so that you can get a turn on

the smartboard. The smartboard is activity and work.

Play, work, playfulness

• Play

• Work

• Playfulness ‘an approach to education and learning, rather than a prescription for some tangible, and primarily cognitive, outcome.’ (Rogers & Evans, 2008)

Play and Pedagogy

• Educational settings constrain play, children and practitioners– playing ‘properly’– ‘containing’ play– play as reward – directed play– outcomes from play

Playing, Doing, Thinking, Learning

• No good research evidence about the benefits of ‘play’

• Play engages, motivates, is fun, does not need a product

• Contrasting discourses about play – Play with purpose and cognitive challenge– ‘intense interest’ in the world about them,

‘powers of concentration’ on what ever occupies their attention

Playing, Doing, Thinking, Learning

Problematising Active Learning

• Defining active – what ‘activities’ are active? • Is listening to/watching another active learning?• Does action support learning or give opportunities to

practise skills? Learning about or learning how to?• Power, choice, autonomy, responsibility, teacher as

authority or facilitator• Does active learning foster engagement or a positive

disposition?• Active learning – a developing pedagogy, evolving

activity bank, classroom management technique? • How does active learning relate to learning theories?

Playing, Doing, Thinking, Learning

• Problem solving

• Finding out

• Counting, classifying, matching

• Communicating

• Experimenting

Playing, Doing, Thinking, Learning

• Piaget – changing mental structures

• Vygotsky– acquiring tools of society

• Rogoff– changing participation in the community

• The majority of educational theories relating to learning . . .are grounded in the belief that humans learn best when they are engaged and actively constructing meaning. (Yelland et al, 2008)

Conditions for learning – playing, doing, thinking

• Learning environments that are ‘affording, inviting or potentiating’ provide the conditions for robust learning. (Carr & Claxton, 2004)– Inviting: play, action, authenticity, meaningful,

satisfaction– Potentiating: open, experimental,

collaborative, acquiring tools and skills– Affording: scaffolding, leading, suggesting,

Mediating Learning

• Learning is mediated through playing, doing, thinking

• Actions, objects, peers and adults mediate learning• Actions – internal and external, physical, cognitive,

communicative, social and emotional• Objects/Resources – support &hinder, shape &

‘scaffold’• Practitioners – critical mediating role of interactions,

distal and proximal guided interaction, bridging meaning and mutual structuring of opportunities