S1 E11 - What play can and cannot do for our early years students.

00.00
Introduction
Well, hello again. My name is Jocelyn. I'm so pleased to welcome you to the Structured Literacy Podcast. This week I would like to talk about the role of play in our early years classrooms and what it will and will not do for our students.

In the March volume of the Journal of the Queensland Association of State School Principals called the Queensland Principal, there was an opinion piece from me and a few others exploring the role of play in the early years. This, for me, was a rework of a blog post I'd written some time ago, and people were asking, "Jocelyn, what do you actually think about this?" And so, I thought,  I will make a podcast for you so that I can share with you my thoughts.

00.49
Why is full guidance better?
The first thing I want to say is that I'm a strong advocate for explicit teaching in early literacy skills. And if you know me, that will come as no shock to you at all.   I write about and I teach others about teacher-led systematic instruction and literacy. There is ample research evidence showing that full guidance instruction is much more effective than partial guidance for everyone but experts, and that comes from an article by Clark from 2012, and we will link to that for you in the show notes.

Now, this is particularly true for skills and knowledge that are biologically secondary, so let's unpack that a little. Some skills are biologically primary. We are hardwired to learn them. Others, such as learning to read and write, are not natural. We won't come to them without explicit teaching and somebody there to help walk us through the process of acquiring the knowledge and skills required. So, Children need adults to lead them. They need adults to direct their attention to closely monitor progress and to adjust instruction to their needs.

02.09
The Australian inquiry on reading instruction.
The Australian inquiry on reading instruction made several key recommendations when it comes to early reading instruction, and that included an early and systematic emphasis on the explicit teaching of phonics and a focus on direct teaching. It also recommended a rich print environment be developed. So we are not saying let's get rid of rich text. We're not saying let's get rid of play. We're not saying let's get rid of those lovely early childhood experiences that help us build our language skills. What we're saying is that direct teacher-led instruction is required for children to learn to read and write.

Now, while I'm an advocate for explicit teaching, I don't believe that this has to come at the expense of lovely experiences that are important for young children. We have to keep access to painting, craft, drawing and music in our classrooms. Children need to be able to be children. They should be able to listen to rich stories, and in fact, this is found to be supported by the evidence they need to be able to talk with each other in play.

How to create learning opportunities using play.
One of my favourite things to create for children is opportunities for dramatic play. I can't tell you how many hairdressers and doctor surgeries and schools and science scientists, labs, and all sorts of things I've created in my own classrooms so that children can assume the role of the characters in that play and talk with others. I believe that children need to have some choice about what they do in the day and that we need to help them build the social and emotional skills that will carry them through the rest of their lives.

Play is really important, and so I think that there is a way that we can (and I'm about to use a word we're not supposed to use)  find a balance between these things. But explicit teaching does, however, mean that we are very clear about the role of context-embedded opportunities to explore print in ways that work for children and the role of explicit teaching.

It's so important that we understand that it doesn't matter how many times you put the target graphemes you are teaching into the provocations for play opportunities. It doesn't matter how many times a student is the focus child in your investigation time, and you lead them to discover things that start with /s/. Play-based learning will not teach children to read and write. It will enable them to have opportunities to explore print and language in ways that work for them, but it does not replace those teacher-led explicit lessons.

05.00
4 ways to balance explicit teaching and developmentally appropriate learning?
Considering the strong evidence for teacher-led instruction in literacy and our recognition of the fact that our curriculum is very full, exactly how do we strike that right balance for students between explicit systematic teaching and giving them the opportunities for developmentally appropriate learning? I've got four ideas on this, and I'll share them with you now.

05.23
No. 1 - Link play to learning.
The first one is about making play meaningful and linked to learning. So play-based learning is not about putting out some toys and then letting the kids go for it, and the teacher sits at their desk and does whatever administrative work they need to do. That's not high-quality play-based work, and I don't think anyone would say that it is. When we look to implement some play opportunities, there is no random. We have to be intentional, and every experience is chosen for the way it contributes to the academic and social and emotional goals of children.

So if you are learning about the sound S in your explicit phonics lessons, go ahead and hide the letter s on pieces of paper around the room and ask the children to bring them to you when they find one saying the phoneme. This is a fun practice opportunity. You could also place things that start with the sound S  as provocations in play centres. However, these connections need to be pointed out to the students. Don't just wait for them to discover it. Some of them will, but many will not. And so there will be no benefit in practice or anything else for those students.

06.36
No. 2 - Adjust the timing.
The second idea I have for you on how to strike this balance is to adjust the timing. Schools that are rigorously play-based and stick very tightly to that will often require that the first hour, at least, of the school day, is dedicated to play-based learning. And I think that at the start of the Foundation year, that's entirely reasonable. It lets you get to know the students, they get to have that nice transition into the world of a more academically focused environment. But I don't think that the play base should stay at that key time for the whole year. In fact, I think that it should be shifting out of that key learning time entirely by the second term, at the very latest, if not within the first few weeks of the school year, it also means that we probably won't be doing this every day. That does have implications for how much time we spend organizing this thing and who uses it. 

In a school that I taught in that had a lot of children who were developmentally delayed in a lot of areas, We had one play-based room. We called it the Investigations Room, and all of the early years were able to use it. So the teachers all collaborated and worked together to create these experiences. This was a supplementary experience for students, and teachers chose when they used it.

So sometimes you might find yourself with, you know, half an hour, 40 minutes before or after a specialist lesson where there's really not time to resettle children if they've just been in science or something else, so you might choose to do it then. Sometimes it might be afternoon, sometimes it might be that there's just a few children there who are working,  with some social, emotional,  goals, and so that play experience is there to help. They may have additional needs or whatever it might be.

So then every teacher doesn't have to have their own play-based setup. This can be something that's used by a team, and everyone knows why they're using it and how, but certainly, we wanna adjust the timing so that our core focus time in the morning, usually, if not just before recess, is in fact devoted to explicit teaching. That's my view. You may have a different thought on that.

05.56
No. 3 - Apply the four pillars of learning.
I think we also want to be clear about what instruction looks like in our classrooms. So many of the early childhood activities that we give children are nothing more than time fillers. This often occurs in rotations, and kids have activities that they do themselves without adult supervision. So teachers spend inordinate amounts of time laminating and creating and making all these fun opportunities in the name of some sort of play-based approach, and we think that that's going to lead to learning. Well, Stanislas Dehaene and many others who work in explicit instruction show us, no, that's actually not the case.

So Dehaene has four pillars of learning. The first one is we have to direct students attention. They don't know how to do that for themselves until they're much older, up until the late teenage years. So in order for strong learning to occur, an adult needs to be directing attention.

The second one is active engagement. Children need to be actively building mental models of the thing that we want to help them learn about.

The third one is error correction. If children are working on their own, where's the error correction occurring? It's not in most cases,

and the final pillar is around consolidation, and that needs to be very targeted and teacher-led as well.

So when we think about activities or experiences we're providing for children, if our intention is for children to have strong learning, we have to be able to meet the requirements of all four of Dehaene's pillars of learning. We are directing attention, we are making sure children are actively building mental models, we're providing error correction, and we are focused on consolidation. Play-based opportunities simply don't do that. They have a role, but it's not in helping children acquire these strong skills in the first place.

10.53
No. 4 - Learning trays (tub time).
My fourth idea is a borrowing. Now, when my children were young, we lived in a town that had a Montessori-inspired early learning centre, and they went there. I watched in amazement as these little people from two years old worked with these learning trays and they were all set up, and the children would take a tray to the table independently, and they would complete an activity (obviously non-academic), and when they were finished with it, they put it back, and they chose another one. And I thought, wow,  look at the self-regulation that's being developed for these little people. This is amazing.

So if you are looking for an alternative to that usual group rotation, this idea of what I now call tub time could be an option for you, particularly in the foundation year. While whole class teaching is obviously the goal, there does come a time for most of us where we just need the kids to be doing something so that we can work with a small group in some way, and that's unfortunate, but it's the reality. It may just be you and 24 kids who are all up to different points in their learning. When we need students to have something to do independently, tub time could be an answer. So these are single-student opportunities for children to choose their own activity and work in their own space for a period of time. So if you're an age-appropriate pedagogy school in Queensland, here's where we are building agency into the day.

12.27
No. 4 and a bit - Tub time for Upper Primary students.
Now I've used this idea from preschool right through to year six to help children learn to regulate themselves and to develop the skills and focus to pay attention. We often expect children to work in group situations, but actually, I think if we can't manage ourselves independently, how do we interact with others in a positive and productive way? I don't think we can.

So what you have in these tubs could vary widely at the start of the foundation year. They're probably all non-academic things, and this is where you just make it really simple. It could be a small container with some Lego, it could be a whiteboard and a marker. It could be a puzzle. It could be pictures to retell a story that you've been reading in class. And they don't all have to be different. You do need one thing for each person, plus another couple.

And the idea is that the students independently select an activity. They take it to their own space in the classroom. They work on that thing for however long they want to. There's no timer because every child's capacity to focus will be different. When they've finished with that activity, they take it, they neatly put it away, and they select another. And this is all silent. This is not just quiet whispering time, this is absolutely silent. If we want a productive classroom, we have to help children learn the skills of how to be productive. This is one of the ways to do it.

13.48
What activities shouldn't be part of tub time?
As the children begin to acquire some academic capacity and knowledge, then you can start to put things in there, like, practising things that have blending and segmenting or that relate to phoneme-grapheme correspondence. Please don't put handwriting as an independent activity. They need feedback. Remember, They need error correction. We have to focus their attention on what's important. But you can put a range of small things in there, and often these will be the sorts of things you might have been including in a group rotation anyway, so you'll already have much of these if you've been teaching for a time.

Please be careful, though, when you're selecting the academic tasks that they fall in the category of independent practice. If this is something the children can only do, if they have an adult there to guide them,  then you're going to have lots and lots of interruptions. Children will be off task, behavior will descend into chaos. Maybe not quite that bad, but they won't be as focused as you would like them to be.

14.45
Are your activities targeted?
We will need to make sure these activities are targeted. And so you might have a tub for your green group or your red group or your wombats or whatever groups you've got in your classroom. And they know that I go to the green tub and in there is a range of activities for me. So there could be in little bags or boxes or something.

If you've got a copy of my book Reading Success in the early primary years,   look up tub time in the index, and you'll see an explanation there of how other teachers have used it.

 But even into the older grades, this idea can be something that is really useful for classrooms where you have a lot of behavioural challenges. Often the behavioural challenges come about because we're asking kids to do things that they actually don't have the personal skills to manage. And so giving them the opportunity for, you know, 10 minutes, 15 minutes of non-academic something or other can really help settle after recess.   

15.37
Can I use tub time in my Literacy block?
I'm not saying it's a must-do in your literacy block at all. In fact, for older children, if I've used it, I've very quickly switched it out for a low variance routine that children can do, but this can be a way to sort of short circuit the energy, shall we say, of recess or lunch, and help children come in and learn how to settle.

Quality play-based learning is about providing a range and balance of experiences.
Getting the balance right between play and explicit teaching in the early years is not about finding this magical ratio of play to explicit but providing a range and balance of experiences. Play is important for early years development.  It helps to build social skills and students learn about collaborating with others. Students learn to regulate themselves on their own without an adult guiding them. These are all positive impacts. It's great for well-being, and it gives a brain break, but play-based experiences will not provide students with the necessary skills and knowledge to learn to become strong readers  And yes, I'm sure that we could point out one or two students in our careers for whom that has been enough, but that is not going to be enough for all of our students, and that's who we are teaching.

So play's good, explicit teaching is good, know what your students are getting out of the experiences and make sure that you have a good range and balance that meet students, social, emotional, developmental, and academic needs.

That's it from me  I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this  You can leave a comment in the show notes on our website, jocelynseamereducation.com and look for the tab that says Podcast slash blog,  and you'll be able to share your thoughts with us there. 

Thank you so much, everyone. I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.