Podcast: The False Choice Between Play and Learning

Among early learning advocates, the fate of play continues to be hotly debated. In the past few months, several articles have stoked the conversation, including an article in Scientific American MInd questioning whether preschool includes enough playtime and a piece in The Washington Post about the District of Columbia Public Schools adopting a play-based curriculum called “Tools of the Mind” for its 3, 4 and 5 year olds.  The first piece seems to reinforce the misconception that preschool will replace play.  The latter article describes a program that envisions classrooms in which playful learning and intentional teaching co-exist.

To learn more about the relationship between play and learning, we invited Annie Murphy Paul — journalist, author and mother of young children — to talk with us about what she has uncovered in the reporting of her forthcoming book, Brilliant: The New Science of Smart.   We talk about some recent research on play-oriented learning by Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley, and her colleagues, which suggests that 4-year-olds learn more about how an object works when they are able to explore it instead of being told how to use it. We chat about how play-based activities can help teachers meet early learning guidelines and standards. And we discuss the problem with headlines like “the Death of Preschool,” which was sometimes used in describing the Scientific American Mind article. Lastly, we talk about why it may be important to distinguish between different kinds of play, including the importance of unstructured play in the afternoons and weekends when young children are out of school. “I think we need to have a more nuanced sense of how play works for young children,” Paul says.

Early Ed Watch podcast – December 12, 2011

The False Choice Between Play and Learning

With our guest Annie Murphy Paul, author of the forthcoming book,  Brilliant: The New Science of Smart, as well as Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of our Lives (2010)