Friday, April 11, 2025

The Real Learning that Happens Through Play


Critics of play-based learning often express doubts about whether any "meaningful" learning happens through play. Or rather, they don't count it as learning unless we can prove to them that any individual child has experienced the transformation from ignorance to knowledge.

For instance, when I assert that a child playing with our cast-iron water pump is learning about hydraulics, they might press me for evidence of my assertion. I might then explain that they are learning about hydraulics because they are directly experiencing it, seeing it with their eyes and feeling it in their bodies. I might point out that they are engaged in trial and error scientific experiments by digging channels in the sand to direct the water, dams to block it, bridges to go over it. I might invite this critic to listen to how the children use their own words to describe what they are experiencing or planning. 

"Let's make a major overflow!"

"Hey, we made an island!"

"Pump faster!"

Most people then get it, even if it doesn't look like the school they experienced or that they anticipate in their child's future. But there are many who still want to hear it from the child themself. They want me to test them in some way. They want to hear the words "hydraulics" or "water pressure" or "gravity" or "liquid" or whatever a textbook might call it. They want to know that this learning is in the children's conscious minds because, for these critics, the only learning that counts is the stuff we can prove we know that we know. 

This is the entire testing industry in a nutshell: attempting to prove what children are able to hold in their conscious minds. And really, if we're being honest, even then it only counts for these critics as learning if a teacher has intentionally "taught" it to them. All this playing with a cast-iron water pump might be educational, but unless the child can somehow articulate the learning in an approved manner, it ain't real learning.

Here's the thing: people who study learning have long known that there is simply far more information at any given moment than our conscious minds can process. Indeed, that part of our experience we call consciousness is an important, but tiny aspect of how humans learn. Most of the information we collect and store about the world is done unconsciously. 

As Annie Murphy Paul writes in her book The Extended Mind, "As we proceed through each day, we are continuously apprehending and storing regularities in our experience, tagging them for future reference. Through this information-gathering and pattern-identifying process, we come to know things — but we’re typically not able to articulate the content of such knowledge or to ascertain just how we came to know it. This trove of data remains mostly under the surface of consciousness, and that’s usually a good thing. Its submerged status preserves our limited stores of attention and working memory for other uses."

The more we learn about human cognition and consciousness, the more we come to see that the lion's share of what we know we've learned without knowing we've learned it, which is how most learning happens as we play. From this perspective, standard schooling, the kind most of us remember from our own youth, is beginning to look more and more like a system designed to limit learning.

I've often heard parents ask their children at pick up time, "What did you learn today?" It's usually a fruitless inquiry, especially in a play-based setting. Even asking the more concrete question, "What did you do today?" often produces meager results. "Who did you play with?" is usually a more successful question, but parents who really get how learning through play works, will not ask a question at all, but rather say something like, "I saw there was easel painting this morning," or "I noticed the train tracks were out," or "Your teacher said there would be fresh play dough today."

The kids still might not give them what they want, but the odds go way up that these prompts will help them remember stories from their day. And it's by listening to the children tell their stories about what they did and experienced and wondered that we can gain genuine insight into what they've learned, what they are still learning, and what they don't quite yet understand. 

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If you're interested in transforming your own space into this kind of learning environment, you might want to join the 2025 cohort for my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning. This is a  deep dive into transforming your classroom, home, or playground into the kind of learning environment in which young children thrive; in which novelty and self-motivation stand at the center of learning. In my decades as an early childhood educator, I've found that nothing improves my teaching and the children's learning experience more than a supportive classroom, both indoors and out. This course is for educators, parents, and directors. Registration closes this week! This cohort started yesterday, but if you join today, you won't be behind. You don't want to miss this chance to make your "third teacher" (the learning environment) the best it can be. I hope you join us! To learn more and register, click here.

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