It was Tasty Tuesday at the Hudson Valley Sudbury School (HVSS) outside Woodstock. Or so four boys deemed it for their improvised game. The oldest stood atop a landscape of stacked car tires suggesting words, and the younger boys, balancing on a beam nailed horizontally between two trees, referenced each by making a shape with their bodies. It was a mix of free association and language arts classification. They exercised their kinesthetic needs while balancing on playground structures, developing both social skills and higher-order thinking, all through a variety of learning styles. But mostly, it was fun.
There’s an inherent freedom to this kind of imaginative play. According to Read and Patterson’s The Nursery School & Kindergarten (Thomson Learning, 1980), it’s determined by the player, so it’s voluntary, and demands improvisation. Researchers and educators agree that play is where children act out viewpoints and scenarios, practicing communication, social skills, problem solving, and creativity. As Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD, pointed out in Psychology Today in 2012, “Over the last 75 years, a number of theorists and researchers have identified the values of such imaginative play as a vital component to the normal development of a child.” But playing at school is becoming controversial. According to teachers, most of the professional development emphasizes raising test scores and meeting standards, basically quantifying a profession that used to rely on expertise in child development and creativity.
HVSS looks like a college dorm—notes hang in the hallways and people sprawl out on couches. There’s a communal phone that anyone can use at any time and kids as young as five can go outside at any point in the day to play in homemade teepees or a spot in the woods that is called The Laboratory for no obvious reason. Staff member Matthew Gioia considers access to the outdoors a basic human right, and says, “All the complex movement our students engage in has more benefit for their brains than crunching numbers.”
HVSS students aged 5-19 decide when and what to study. They’re supervised, but not at the level we’ve come to expect. An adult might or might not be with them, so the kids are held responsible for themselves and for each other. Through a Judicial Committee, rules are decided and upheld democratically. “There are probably more laws at HVSS than at any other school,” says staff member Vanessa Van Burek, one of the founders. “There’s unlimited freedom, academically, but they’re living in a community that governs itself carefully.” Everyone is accountable to and for the other 80 to 90 students and staff, and Van Burek says students respect that responsibility. The learning that Sudbury fosters is grounded in an internal trust.
It’s hard to imagine how kids who play Magic Cards and then go climb a tree will fare beyond Sudbury, though. Play is unpredictable. Its intricacies are sometimes unnoticed and the attributes are subtle. Maybe that’s why educational philosophies often treat it like a four-letter word. Play is fun and fun is frivolous. And that’s not what we want for our kids.
Van Burek acknowledges that most HVSS students develop knowledgee around personal interests and may have gaps in traditional curriculum. They have the underlying skills needed to be successful in life, though. “To go to college, or get a job,” she says, “you don’t have to have a wide body of knowledge; you have to know how to get the knowledge. That’s what they develop here.” Whatever deficiencies students may experience, educators and psychologists are routinely surprised to see how easily kids catch up simply based on readiness. HVSS places its faith in self-guided exploration because they value the quality and efficiency of learning that students cultivate by answering their own questions.
Traditional schools don’t always function that way. The George Washington Elementary School in Kingston is unique. It’s a public option that meets the Common Core standards while using Montessori learning materials. Originally developed to teach orphans how to care for themselves, the Montessori philosophy places value on a child’s play, deeming it work, and designing learning activities that are both instructive and playful. In Felipa Gaudet’s Elementary I classroom at GW, which accommodates students in grades 1-3, children learn through a series of activities that are set up like games. In one such, called The Bank, children learn symbols for numbers, connect those symbols to real-world counting materials (the classic Montessori golden beads), and learn how to do basic math operations.
Despite a common perception that children who are allowed to play all day will become spoiled and entitled, Gaudet, now in her sixth year teaching early childhood education, notices that children take their game work seriously and collaborate together compassionately while achieving set learning skills. “Learning through play/work is so motivating for children,” Gaudet says. “It enables them to engage in conversations that are complex and require higher-order thinking. The children develop communication skills and other aspects of their emotional intelligence, such as perseverance and delayed gratification, that are necessary life skills.”
Joy in Learning
On the upper playground at the Randolph School in Wappingers Falls, the elements of traditional play structures give way to tree stumps and a grove of trees. At first glance, one might not see that it’s actually a system of imaginary worlds. The tree stumps are intentionally arranged into The Restaurant, where one boy ordered the onion grass. Since David Rockwell’s Imagination Playground opened in Manhattan in 2010, loose-parts playgrounds, inspired by European adventure playgrounds, are a step up from sandboxes and blocks, with their unfastened foam shapes. They present endless opportunities for children to manipulate and control their play.
The HVSS and Randolph School playgrounds are a blend of natural playscape and loose parts, with moveable materials like trimmed tree stumps and sticks. Inspired by their study of Native Americans, some of the older kids at Randolph created The Paint Shop, a trading post that specializes in red paint mixed from clay rocks. “They have time in their project study, and they have time in their play,” says administrator Karen Teich. “And a lot of what they’re learning manifests itself on the playground.” They’re working through big issues: Who’s the boss? What’s it like to have workers? Says Anita Merando, a K-1s teacher, “That’s why this outdoor time is considered a classroom. It’s rich in what they’re working on.” All the classes, K through 5, spend at least an hour each day outside in free play.
Wherever they are, the faculty look for teachable moments. When one of the children found an owl pellet on the playground, the science and PE teacher, Evan Miklos, dissected it with the children right there at the picnic table, reconstructing the mouse skeleton inside. “Teachers who have a chance to experiment in this way are excited to see how rich and fruitful the learning is, and how much happens automatically, instinctually, and organically,” he says. “Any lesson you can do inside, I believe you can do outside, in often surprising and spontaneous ways that are maybe more engaging than the one you had planned when you looked at your bookshelf.”
A new program for the K-1s, called Forest Mondays, where students spend all day in the outdoor classroom, is really an expansion of an idea already explored at the Randolph School. The students adopted trees in the grove and spend snack sitting by them as teachers visit them and talk about what they observe. Beatrice and Elise chose a small tree to share because they want to watch it grow. “The teaching has a soft quality to it,” says Merando. “We’re set up to be learners alongside them. We give direct instruction, but we watch first to see what instruction is missing.”
There’s a new programfor the K-1s, called Forest Mondays, where students spend all day in the outdoor classroom. “There’s only so much you can observe inside four walls,” says another K-1s teacher, Beth Honsaker. She came to the Randolph School last February in part because she heard that innovative teaching was encouraged there. When enrollment ballooned recently, Honsaker suggested they implement the Forest Mondays program, inspired by programs in Europe, as both a response to stretched classroom space and a way to take the nature classroom up a notch.
To Merando, the larger conversation about American schools measuring up in the world seems fear-based rather than research-based. “I really do trust kids to be able to show me what they do and don’t know. I don’t need to sit there with a standardized test in order to figure that out.”
Since 1998, there’s been an increase in teacher-led instruction, worksheets, and standardized assessments in American kindergartens. A study of the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K system by the Tennessee Department of Education and Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development showed that any strides students made in early academic programs were later outpaced by children who hadn’t had early academic experiences, and in fact, teachers noted that the early academic students eventually had a poorer work ethic and felt more negatively about school.
All the academic push served, it seems, was to discourage the children’s natural love of learning. If we asked teachers, education would be about helping them to use their training to help kids do what they do naturally. Kids want to learn. And most progressive educational philosophies pinpoint play as a child’s best method of learning.
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This article appears in December 2015.
Thanks to Ms. Harvey for writing about the importance of hands-on outdoor education. And thanks to the teachers introduced here for their wonderful work with kids. A special shout out to the staff at George Washington — public schools don’t always make it easy to be creative. And, finally, a note to teachers who would like to take their students to parks, historic sites, and museums away from school, but lack resources to do so: check out Explore Awards and Bus on Us grants available from TeachingtheHudsonValley.org.