The can-do classroom
“Providing opportunities for creative, investigative play, followed by helping children to reflect on their play experiences and then encouraging them to build on earlier experiences through replay, does what it claims: Children who learn under these classroom conditions are empowered. They learn habits of thinking, and they become more self-initiating, responsible, creative and inventive” (p. 25).
Play-debrief-replay: A way of organizing for instruction
Rooted in the principles of John Dewey (1916), play-debrief-replay provides teachers with a clearly articulated plan for moving teaching for thinking from the level of educational rhetoric into classroom practice; that is:
The Play’s The Thing
Play is generally carried out in cooperative learning groups, in which children contribute substantially to each other’s investigations and creative endeavours. The teacher designs the play around a curriculum concept that is important for children to study and learn (p. 27).
Productive play activities that yield significant conceptual growth share several criteria in common:
1. Investigate play tasks are open-ended. They do not lead students to “the answers.”
2. Play tasks call for the generation of ideas, rather than the recall of specific pieces of information.
3. Play activities challenge students’ thinking; indeed, they require thinking. Higher order-mental challenges
are built into each play task.
4. Play activities are “messy.” Children are, in fact playing around. Learning through play is nonlinear,
non-sequential (Wassermann, 1989)
5. Play tasks focus on “big ideas” - the important concepts of the curriculum - rather than on trivial details.
6. Each play task provides opportunities for children to grow in their conceptual understanding. When
children carry out investigative play, they grow in their ability to understand larger concepts.
7. The children are the players. They are actively involved in learning. They are talking to each other, sharing
ideas, speculating, laughing and getting excited about what they have discovered. They are not sitting
quietly, passively listening and receiving what the teacher is thinking.
8. The children are working together, in learning groups. Play is enhanced through cooperative
investigations. Cooperation, rather than competitive individual work, is stressed.
Teachers are able to design open-ended play activities or those with some limits, depending on how well the children function independently, how successfully they are able to choose, and how able they are to design investigations on their own.
Debriefing: Using Play Experience To Promote Reflection
Play experiences provide the arena for the development of conceptual understanding, for values development, and for the development of responsible group behaviour.
When the play period is over, the teacher uses the play experience as a basis for promoting reflection and increasing children’s understanding of the “big ideas.” This reflection-on-action stage has been labeled debriefing.
During debriefing, the teacher calls the group members together to discuss aspects of their play. Debriefing may be carried out with the whole class or with smaller groups of students. Whatever the size of the group, the teacher uses a reflective questioning strategy. See section for more information.
These reflective questioning strategies accomplish many things one of them being that they require children to reflect upon their experiences, and call for higher order cognitive processing.
Another requirement of debriefing is that children refine the language skills involved in communicating their ideas.
Such interactive strategies empower children as thinkers because:
Replay: Returning to the Scene of Investigation
Replay follows debriefing and generally occurs over the next few days. It may involve repetition of the investigation, and many young children enjoy and benefit from this, especially when it is their own choice. Replay may involve the addition of new material, to give the inquiry a new focus. It may move the investigation into another, related area of the curriculum.
Replay has several purposes:
Rooted in the principles of John Dewey (1916), play-debrief-replay provides teachers with a clearly articulated plan for moving teaching for thinking from the level of educational rhetoric into classroom practice; that is:
- Play activities are woven together with higher-order thinking operations, providing students with intellectual and creative challenges.
- Debriefing requires students to reflect and to search out concepts and meanings of substance.
- Replay promotes continued examination and reflection.
The Play’s The Thing
Play is generally carried out in cooperative learning groups, in which children contribute substantially to each other’s investigations and creative endeavours. The teacher designs the play around a curriculum concept that is important for children to study and learn (p. 27).
Productive play activities that yield significant conceptual growth share several criteria in common:
1. Investigate play tasks are open-ended. They do not lead students to “the answers.”
2. Play tasks call for the generation of ideas, rather than the recall of specific pieces of information.
3. Play activities challenge students’ thinking; indeed, they require thinking. Higher order-mental challenges
are built into each play task.
4. Play activities are “messy.” Children are, in fact playing around. Learning through play is nonlinear,
non-sequential (Wassermann, 1989)
5. Play tasks focus on “big ideas” - the important concepts of the curriculum - rather than on trivial details.
6. Each play task provides opportunities for children to grow in their conceptual understanding. When
children carry out investigative play, they grow in their ability to understand larger concepts.
7. The children are the players. They are actively involved in learning. They are talking to each other, sharing
ideas, speculating, laughing and getting excited about what they have discovered. They are not sitting
quietly, passively listening and receiving what the teacher is thinking.
8. The children are working together, in learning groups. Play is enhanced through cooperative
investigations. Cooperation, rather than competitive individual work, is stressed.
Teachers are able to design open-ended play activities or those with some limits, depending on how well the children function independently, how successfully they are able to choose, and how able they are to design investigations on their own.
Debriefing: Using Play Experience To Promote Reflection
Play experiences provide the arena for the development of conceptual understanding, for values development, and for the development of responsible group behaviour.
When the play period is over, the teacher uses the play experience as a basis for promoting reflection and increasing children’s understanding of the “big ideas.” This reflection-on-action stage has been labeled debriefing.
During debriefing, the teacher calls the group members together to discuss aspects of their play. Debriefing may be carried out with the whole class or with smaller groups of students. Whatever the size of the group, the teacher uses a reflective questioning strategy. See section for more information.
These reflective questioning strategies accomplish many things one of them being that they require children to reflect upon their experiences, and call for higher order cognitive processing.
Another requirement of debriefing is that children refine the language skills involved in communicating their ideas.
Such interactive strategies empower children as thinkers because:
- They call for children’s assuming responsibility for reporting on and comprehending what they have done.
- They are also respectful, for they ask children to tell about what has occurred; they invite children’s ideas and their ideas are listened too and given serious consideration.
- This respectful facilitation of ideas builds children’s esteem and empowers them cognitively.
Replay: Returning to the Scene of Investigation
Replay follows debriefing and generally occurs over the next few days. It may involve repetition of the investigation, and many young children enjoy and benefit from this, especially when it is their own choice. Replay may involve the addition of new material, to give the inquiry a new focus. It may move the investigation into another, related area of the curriculum.
Replay has several purposes:
- It provides additional practice with the concepts and/or skills.
- It builds on previous experience and subsequently amplifies and provides progression and in understanding.
- Its spiraling path allows children to return to play with the concept at later levels of development.
- It allows for children to look at experience in retrospect, leaving open the possibility that some point not grasped initially will become simplified when tackled at a later play stage.