Humans were made to move. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors reportedly walked 13 miles a day. Although we no longer need to travel such distance for daily sustenance, the mind–body benefits of exercise and play are well documented. Yet the majority of our time is now spent sitting, and this trend negatively affects school-age children as much as adults.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Heart Association, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are just three of many national organizations that recommend that children of all ages participate in a minimum of 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity per day. Few states, however, set a daily minimum amount of time that students must participate in physical education, play, or recess. If recess is offered, it's mostly relegated to preK through elementary school–age children.
Playful Learning
"It's a strange way we've set up the education system—that play is 'extra,' something that just little kids do," says Wendy Ostroff, an associate professor at Sonoma State University's Hutchins School of Liberal Studies in Rohnert Park, Calif. "To bring play to a screeching halt just as students hit adolescence reflects a misunderstanding of the research literature on the importance of play for learning."
Ostroff, the author of Curiosity in K–12 Classrooms: How to Promote and Sustain Deep Learning (ASCD, 2016), says that play is crucial for learning because it is "open-ended, self-directed, and fun/engaging."
"Play uses all the functions of the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the same part of the brain that learners use for critical thinking, flexible reasoning, and creativity," notes Ostroff. "We want to strengthen these brain areas as much as possible throughout all of schooling."
Melanie Dana, who teaches at North Star Self-Directed Learning for Teens in Sunderland, Mass., says that "play is important at any age but especially during times of rapid growth and change." Dana says that 3-year-olds as well as 15-year-olds are pushing new personal boundaries, so they need a lot of freedom to do so—within safe confines.
Play is integral to North Star's approach to teaching and learning, where "joy, curiosity, and cocreating an experience" are valued, says Dana. "I think the best way to incorporate play in the classroom is to cultivate a playful attitude. Teachers have to have faith that leaving things open-ended is not a recipe for chaos."
Play Their Own Way
Students all need to move, but not necessarily in the same way or at the same time. How and when we move is important, asserts Allison Posey, a curriculum design specialist and proponent of Universal Design for Learning, an education framework that incorporates neuroscience research to create flexible learning environments that accommodate the different ways in which students learn and process information.
Posey urges educators to "steer away from the 'let's all do 10 jumping jacks together!'" mentality about movement. "Moving at the same time is silly … Some students may be deep in a learning moment; now they are being asked to run around," she says. "That's maybe not what they need. When we are more flexible and offer alternative ways for kids to move, that's also being more inclusive."
"When I wake up, I decide: 'What do I need to eat?' I self-regulate to achieve daily goals," says Posey. "Our students need to be able to do this. Ideally, across our K–12 education system we'd be saying (daily) to students, 'Here's a menu of movement options from which to choose.'"
Missing Milestones
Physical education used to be a daily requirement across K–12 schools. It was a dedicated time period that taught health, movement, and agility and sports skills, in addition to providing socialized play time. Even as recess and physical education time decreased in the school schedule, more kids were still playing in the after-school hours and at home—and not with technology, explains Martha Kaufeldt, author of The Motivated Brain: Improving Student Attention, Engagement, and Perseverance (ASCD, 2015).
In her workshops, Kaufeldt offers this example: "When I came home from school, even though we didn't wear uniforms, I had to change into 'play' clothes. I put on dungarees to go outside and get dirty … that's the whole idea. I didn't stay inside and work on homework right away, and I wasn't always being shuttled every day to after-school activities, as many kids are now."
One of the challenges experienced by high school educators, Kaufeldt says, is that many of today's students didn't play as young children; therefore, they may have missed some developmental stages. For example, a high school physics teacher who pulls out equipment to teach a complex physics concept such as force, motion, inertia, may become upset because the students are just "playing with the materials and acting immature," she explains. That might be because, when they were 5, instead of playing with open-ended manipulatives like toy cars or blocks, these students were playing with devices or passively staring at a screen, Kaufeldt adds. She advises teachers planning lessons that use manipulatives or equipment to first give students time to handle or play with the new materials before teaching the lesson.
"Allow high schoolers to role play or to engage in play, games, or mini-competitions," she says. "It encourages students to be curious and try new things."
Thinking on Your Feet
Our biology drives us to move, and our brain is wired to learn through play. Middle and high schoolers need movement and play as much as their elementary peers. To get kids moving within the school day, Kaufeldt encourages teachers to engage in "daily differentiation," or instructional variety. Teachers need to "mix things up a bit by getting students to do things with others, to create more partner and group activities. Weaving in little things such as games, activities, and encouraging students to be playful gets kids up and moving."
She also wants teachers to understand the "neuroscience rule of thumb": Children can only handle sustained, focused attention in a sedentary state for about as many minutes as they are old, plus or minus two (e.g., 10–14 minutes for a 12-year-old), she said. "After sustaining focus for about 15–18 minutes, even the average adult brain then needs to do something, such as move, talk, and so on."
Kaufeldt suggests that teachers limit their "talking time" to about 15 minutes and remember to engage back and forth with students and insert frequent moments to 'turn and talk.'
"We know the basic science behind exercise is that when you move your body, (this causes) increased blood flow, including oxygen to the brain," says Posey. "Exercise decreases the free radicals that can build up and be toxic and shields us from stress. Nothing is jaw-dropping about any of this, but when we sit all day, the blood is not flowing."
Students in far too many classrooms sit for hours on end, when their bodies were engineered to move. Redesigning the learning environment so that movement can occur organically within the scope and sequence of the curriculum will support more effective teaching and learning. Simply adding standing desks to the classroom or giving students the chance to move around the room for discussion or active learning is a great place to start.
