April 4, 2011, 9:40 PM
Hard Times for Recess
By DAVID BORNSTEIN
More than 150 years ago, Charles Dickens published “Hard Times,” a novel centered around the students of an English schoolmaster named Thomas Gradgrind, who had no use for play or any sort of imaginative pursuit. For Gradgrind, if something did not demonstrably add to the productive capacity of the nation and could not be justified with facts and statistics, it had no place in a child’s education.
Dickens invented Gradgrind (and introduced him in a chapter entitled “Murdering the Innocents”) to dramatize what he saw as the soullessness of utilitarianism, a school of thought prevalent in England during the Industrial Revolution that emphasized rational pursuits and quantitative measures over all else.
Over the past century and a half, we’ve learned a great deal about child development. In spite of this, in recent decades the major thrust in U.S. public education has forced educators to behave more like Thomas Gradgrind than many would like to admit. For example, in response to the No Child Left Behind act, nearly half of all school districts in the country have shifted large chunks of time to math and reading instruction in order to improve student test scores. What’s been cut? Art, music, social studies and recess. The last has been particularly hard hit. On average, American kids get only 26 minutes of recess per day, including lunchtime — and low income kids get less than that.
No Child Left Behind requires that efforts to improve education be based on “rigorous scientific research.” However, nothing about the decline of school-based play is backed up by research. In fact, the benefits of play have been well-documented. There is strong evidence that school-based physical activity improves children’s cognitive skills, concentration and behavior, possibly by influencing their brain’s physiology. [1] At the same time, studies of “social and emotional learning” programs indicate that students do better socially and academically when they learn how to understand their emotions, empathize with others, and make good decisions. [2]Both of these processes are very much at work when children are playing well with others — which is why recess is a uniquely valuable resource — if it is well-run.
The pressure to maximize instruction time is not the only reason principals have cut back on recess. Close to 90 percent of disciplinary problems occur during recess or lunch or the transitions before and after. Principals say recess is not what it used to be. Many children spend much of their time in the schoolyard standing around idly or playing free-for-all games that get out of control. Recess has always been a time of teasing, bullying and scraped knees, but principals report that injuries and fights in elementary schools are more prevalent and more serious than in the past.
“Recess is meaner than it used to be,” one Oakland principal told me. That’s why some educators have decided they can do without it. Others have instituted “zero tolerance” no-fighting policies, with mandatory suspensions for schoolyard altercations, sending home perpetrators — predominately African American boys — who are as young as six years old. Others have dealt with the problems bybanning games like tag.
Today, I’d like to explore what educators might gain if, instead of viewing recess as a liability — a drain on teaching time and a behavioral headache — they saw it as an opportunity to make the school a happier place, contribute to children’s healthy development, and maybe even boost academic performance. In order to do this, many schools would need to transform the way they manage recess.
One approach that has been advanced successfully comes from an Oakland-based nonprofit organization calledPlayworks, which operates in nearly 250 urban schools serving low-income students in 15 cities and has a long waiting list of principals who are willing to spend $25,000 to bring the program to their schools. One Baltimore principal told me: “I will get rid of the computer room before I get rid of this program.”
Playworks sends trained, full-time play coaches into schools who organize an array of play opportunities for children during recess and lunch, as well as in class and after school. The coaches — typically recent college graduates who are delighted to come to work in sneakers every day — become like faculty members. The kids call them by their first names — “Coach Joe” or “Coach Eunice,” for example — and teachers say they often become the most popular adults in the school.
It may seem intrusive or overprotective to enlist coaches to help children play. Shouldn’t kids be left alone to direct their own play during recess? If they can, yes. And some adults disagree with Playworks’ approach because they feel that children need more time for unstructured play. But it’s not clear that there is such a thing as unstructured play, even simple make believe. “All play has rules,” the play philosopher Johan Huizinga has written. “The rules of a game are absolutely binding and allow no doubt… As soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play-world collapses.” The real question is who provides the structure — the children or the adults.
We don’t let children loose in the water before they can swim. Why do we throw them into playgrounds before they can structure their own play? The problem is that many children today don’t know how to initiate games and keep them going, largely because they’ve grown up with so little practice. We take it for granted that children know how to play, but the skills that make play fun, that make it possible— like being able to resolve conflicts quickly, knowing how to choose fair teams, knowing and respecting rules —are not innate; they are learned. And they must be practiced.
In decades past, when neighborhoods were perceived to be safe, children had lots of time to play outdoors, and they naturally picked up the culture of play from older kids. Today, children are indoors more and “personal use media” takes up six or seven hours of their time every day (pdf). Young people between the ages of 10 to 16 engage in vigorous activity for only 12.6 minutes per day — nowhere near the 60 minutes that the surgeon general recommends. And the kids who are regularly active typically participate in sports leagues run by adults.
“Do you know how hard it is to get kids to exercise for 60 minutes a day?” explains Jill Vialet, the founder of Playworks. “Do you know how easy it is to get kids to play for 60 minutes a day?” She adds: “Kids are desperate to be taught ways to get along with each other and be successful in play and school. It hasn’t been taught.”
If children don’t know how to play, says Vialet, the answer isn’t to remove play from their lives; it’s to teach them. That’s what the coaches do. They aren’t recess monitors or physical education instructors: they are skilled in the art of getting kids to understand the nuances of play. At first, coaches organize the playground, but the goal is for kids to learn how to do it for themselves – so they can create their own games with siblings or friends out of school. The coaches introduce games like foursquare, kick ball or volley ball. They teach games that involve hula hoops or bean bags (theirplaybook lists over 250 games, including 37 variations of tag). They chalk out areas in the schoolyard so kids know where to expect different games. Rules are modified to maximize the time kids spend moving and to make the games fun for all, not just star athletes.
Most important, the coaches show kids how to get games started quickly and how to solve conflicts using a technique that takes about five minutes to master: rock, paper, scissors (which they call roshambo). They teach them how to choose teams without humiliating anyone. They encourage girls and boys, and children from different cultures, to play together. They deputize “junior coaches” — typically fifth graders – to distribute and collect equipment and model sportsmanlike behavior for the younger kids. (Give a 10-year-old a whistle and a special T-shirt and they are putty in your hands, says Vialet.) Along the way, they offer strategies to help children overcome the urge to fight or throw a tantrum or cheat. With continual reminders, “Ha, you’re out!” gradually becomes “way to go” and “nice try” (pdf).
I’ve interviewed several principals who use Playworks. Within about three months, they say, playgrounds in which a quarter or a third of children were previously involved in play become like anthills of activity, with 80 or 90 percent of the kids involved in games by choice. As a result, they contend that their playgrounds are safer and their schools feel more relaxed. One principal, Audra Philippon, who runs the AXL Academy, in Aurora, Colo., told me that Playworks led to a drop in playground injuries — from 242 one year to 51 the next. In the same period, disciplinary incidents requiring office referrals fell from 40 to 10.
“Out of a very limited playground space Playworks has produced an enormous amount of physical activity that was never taking place before,” Philippon told me. “And it’s managed completely by the kids. It is so simple, and it’s spilled over into the classroom. When there’s a dispute the kids do roshambo and they solve it, no teachers required.”
“It’s significantly improved the amount of quality instructional time available in the afternoon,” she added. “We’ve gone from kind of dreading teaching the period right after recess to it being a very productive academic time.”
On Friday, I’ll respond to comments, share some more stories from schools, and mention another organization that is working to make healthy play accessible for more children.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a meta-review (pdf) of 50 studies and found “substantial evidence” that school-based physical activity “can help improve academic achievement, including grades and standardized test scores.” Educators need not worry about losing precious teaching time: the report found “no evidence that time spent in recess had a negative association with cognitive skills, attitudes or academic behavior.” Physical activity appears to interact with the brain’s physiology in specific ways – for example, by increasing the production of neurotrophins (which stimulate the creation of new neurons) and the growth of nerve cells in the hippocampus, the center of learning and memory.
[2] A recent meta-analysis of 213 social and emotional learning (SEL) programs involving more than 270,000 students found that such programs can boost students’ social and emotional skills and enable academic gains. The study reported an 11 percentile point increase in academic achievement. Researchers suggested that students who understand their emotions and learn how to become more emotionally self-regulating – also get better at setting academic goals, planning ahead, and motivating themselves to overcome challenges. Better relationships with peers and teachers makes school more enjoyable.
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David Bornstein is the author of “How to Change the World,” which has been published in 20 languages, and “The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank,” and is co-author of “Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.” He is the founder of dowser.org, a media site that reports on social innovation.
