Play

Play is a perpetual motion machine that generates and uses energy simultaneously and about equally, at least until we get to what Emily Dickinson calls “The manner of the children, who weary of the day, / Themselves the noisy playthings they cannot put away.”

Gardner recently ended a post with this comment and it has been knocking around in my head. People who know me have often heard my rant that goes something like this: kids start out as expert learners, learning through their playing, and then we send them to school and kill of their desire to learn by making play into work. What divides play from work? I think it has something to do with external reward, and the results can be differentiated as Gardner suggests–by graphing the flow of energy. Work uses energy and results in the external reward of money. Play is different; it both uses and generates energy.

One of my goals in teaching is to get my students to play. For our students, that is a tough sell. They have been really successful in our system by being good workers, understanding that if they do as they are told they will be paid with a high grade. This grade is a currency because it is the necessary payment to move to the next level of education and the work world. So they are smart enough to doubt anyone who tries to say “grades don’t matter; it is about the learning and not the grade.” Ultimately that is a lie because we still give them a grade at the end of our time together.

I am well aware of the importance of assessment and feedback (some here have referred to me as the person in charge of assessment for our ipod program, though I like to think I am coordinating the assessment attempts of many…) Research shows that the closer the feedback is to the attempt, the better the learning, (which can be challenging for us writing teachers who need lots of time to generate thoughtful feedback). My time listening to student feeback in the form of voice memos has had a profound effect on me. One of the things I am realizing is this: students are not very good evaluators of their own learning. I find myself laughing at the students who say “I didn’t really learn anything from doing the Creature Feature Podcast or listening to other students’ podcasts because it wasn’t on the test.” Then the same student, when answering the next question (how did your feelings about your creature change?) will speak in detail about the organism he studied, including its scientific name, habitat, etc. I have been trying to figure out why they don’t recognize their own learning. Could part of the answer be that we never let them recognize it? We tell them that WE will let them know what they have learned in the form of a test with a grade attached reflecting how many questions were answered correctly. The Creature Feature Podcast challenged students to both master new technology and to get creative and have some fun when presenting the information. Some of the promise I see in educational technology is that it has the power to pull students back into the world of play and personal investment and creativity. But I think we in higher ed have to be realistic about the system our students were trained in. We may have to spend some time teaching the students the value of play and what real learning is, and give them both the time and space to experience these things. I find lots to be hopeful about for the next generation when I see work such as that of Project NML which I learned about in Christopher Sessum’s blog . Why? Because their conception of how to help devlop children’s “technical literacy” involves the many complexities of play, collaboration, synthesis, etc. It is a much more rich conception than that exhibited in the comments posted on a recent article in “Inside Higher Ed.”  IT seems critically important to me that we grab the potential of new technologies to transform education, and not shove these new activities into old paradigms.