Can more play time make your kid smarter?

Kevin: Studies have shown that play has many benefits for children, including improved language and problem solving skills, perseverance, and creativity. Unfortunately, due to tight budgets and cuts made to staff and programs, Not all kids have access to play. What impact does play have on children’s development and well being?

How can play create equity in education? And how can we ensure all students have access to play?

Elizabeth: So some really basic things: skills, teamwork, cooperation, things that we all want our grownups in our communities to be good at, those are, those are being learned on the playground. So those are the kind of outcomes that we track.

Kevin: This is What I Want to Know and today I’m joined by Elizabeth Cushing to find out. Elizabeth Cushing is the CEO of Playworks, a national nonprofit leveraging the power of play to transform children’s physical and emotional well being. She joins us today to discuss how play can benefit our children.

Elizabeth, welcome to the show.

Elizabeth: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Kevin: Look, I’m gonna tell you, Elizabeth, I was really excited to have you on. I was talking to my brother about my show and said, I have this guest come around to talk about the power of play. And he sort of, you know, chuckled a little bit.

Power of play in school in terms of, you know, learning tour and all these, learn to play, play to learn, what have you. And I said, you know, this is a real deal, but it’s interesting the reaction of people when you talk about play. But, to me, this is very, very important. I guess the first question, Elizabeth, is what inspired you to get into this space?

Because there’s a lot of sort of tentacles to the education and academic world. What inspired you to, you know, get involved in this way?

Elizabeth: Oh, sure. Well, I’ve been in the non profit sector for 35 years plus now and was always drawn to human, human need, human issues, especially for women and children and I Became a mom when I was 31 And had three kids and so my lens on the world started to shift toward what do they need and what?

What are the barriers to them becoming their best selves, thriving in the world? And I came across this organization, which at the time was local here in Oakland, where I live and met the people who were involved with it. And I similarly was curious about what, why a whole organization dedicated to something that feels so natural, right?

So intrinsic to how children behave. And I quickly learned. that there are differences in conditions, in the relative investment, in opportunity to play, and in the understanding of how deeply it sets the foundation for thriving in all aspects of life. And so I was, I was hooked the minute I got a glimpse of what it was all about.

Kevin: You know, this idea of play, and I want to talk about play work specifically, It is, as I’ve mentioned to you, under emphasized in terms of the impact on children’s ability to learn, ability to embrace learning and the socialization skills. You know, one of the things I’ve noticed is that, you know, Finland has one of the most successful academic results in the world.

And, you know, I’ve been there, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to folks and, and for the first two, three, four years, as you know, they rarely deal with structured classroom exercises. In fact, they spend a lot of time with kids having two hour lunches. They have lunches with them, with their peers.

They have lunches with teachers, sometimes parents, they play on a playground for what we review is an exorbitant amount of time. Well, And they have the best educational outputs because kids feel nurtured, they feel seen, they feel heard, they’re able to interact with others. Talk about this dynamic before we get into Playworks, about the perceptions of play as opposed to the perceptions of academic excellence and how Somehow this country we view them as separate.

Elizabeth: Yes I think we don’t understand brain science all that well despite the fact that brain science has evolved so much over the last hundred years and It is not that our brains have separate sections for learning math and reading and another section for learning how to get along with others or be a person in the world or take risks or make mistakes and recover from them.

We believe here that our development depends on several things that play provides. One is connections and relationships. with other kids. We learned how to read those facial expressions, respond to their hurt or their joy to demonstrate our own hurt and joy and to build a sense of we are here together.

And that sense of safety that comes from relationships is critical to be able to take the risks of learning. Learning is a risky business. You have to try something new. You have to be ready to fail. You have to take in feedback that you. didn’t do well or don’t know it yet. And so this emotional state of mind that play gives kids a chance to practice over and over and over again is so important for being able to learn those skills.

So, we also know that moving our bodies and using our bodies is part of learning too. Learning is not just a brain thing. You also learn to, you know, use your fingers to manipulate things. You can’t do that if you don’t get a lot of opportunity to practice. And so, we use the brain. I think we know how to tap what is inherently a productive aspect of child development in a way that’s fun and easy and accessible, and changes the way it feels to be learning.

Kevin: So talk about Playworks. What do you do and how do you bring all this together in a way that really translates to what schools do or could be doing. in this area.

Elizabeth: Sure. So we’ve been around for almost 30 years. So we’ve really figured out how to partner with schools, elementary schools and K eights.

And we work with their teachers, their school staff staff out on the playground to put in place. Very effective practices that ensure that every kid is getting to play in a way that is joyful and inclusive. So we do teach games. Think of games from your childhood. I don’t know if you played Foursquare.

Absolutely. I was a master.

Kevin: I was a, wait a minute. I was a master in Foursquare. I remember those days.

Elizabeth: So we will. We will take those games and help establish them in ways that make it productive for everyone to play. So, for example, we use rock, paper, scissors as a conflict resolution tool. Now, it’s arbitrary, it’s a game, and many of us who are adults think, Oh, that doesn’t, the kids won’t abide by that.

The truth is, they will. When you establish that this is how you and I, Kevin Wood Resolve a conflict over whether that ball was on the line or out in four square. Yeah, quick game of rock paper scissors You are successful. I am NOT I get a high five. We give each other a high five. It’s joyful. It’s not shaming.

I get back in line, and I still get a high five.

Kevin: And you, and you lose, right?

Elizabeth: I lose. But I get a high five. Yeah, I lose in that case. Give you a high five and we get back in line. So a conflict resolution tool like that, when established across the playground, across all the school day, has enormous impact on whether kids feel like they can resolve conflicts on their own.

They are quick, so they get back to the game. So we establish all kinds of norms like that that are not, they’re not complicated. They’re not things you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t imagine. And we establish a lot of places around the playground that kids can play. They get to choose. This is not the assignment of fun.

They get to choose where they play. And we make sure that the games are, that everyone can play. So we have a game called Three Line Basketball. It’s basketball, but it’s essentially a quick rotation version of basketball. So three, three lines of kids, the first three kids are on defense. The second three kids are on offense.

You’re not picking a team. You’re just playing the game. First team to score gets to stay in the team that doesn’t gets back in line. It’s not about who are you playing with? Are you the best team? It is about getting to play, getting to be part of the play.

Kevin: Yeah. You know, I, I, this all resonates so much with me.

You said you’ve been in business 30 years. What have been the results with respect to your work and the schools you’re working with?

Elizabeth: Yes. So there seems to be some results that align with the, at the school level and then results at the kid level. So at the school level, what we see is. Bullying evaporates.

If you are a child who uses bullying to try to get included, on our playgrounds you don’t need to do that. We, we make sure you, every kid is invited into the game and the kids themselves are invited into the game. So bullying evaporates. The discipline issues that get sent to a principal’s office, typically from recess, which before Playworks gets there is the highest source of discipline issues out at recess, they’re gone.

They plummet. We actually are noticing that our schools have better attendance. And I think it’s because kids like to go to school when it’s fun and they know they’re going to get to play with their peers. Yeah. So teachers are happier in our schools because when kids come back from recess, they’re not bringing fights into the classroom that a teacher has to mediate.

They have had fun, they feel good, and they’re ready to get to learning. So that’s what our schools experience. For kids, we’ve done research, evaluation with outside evaluators, and we see improvements in things like self regulation. They’re learning how to take their turn to lose a game of high five and get back in line.

Resilience increases because they’re learning how to play. That’s a lot of what play teaches us anyway. And they have the conditions for that. And executive functioning overall, waiting your turn, remembering the rules. So some really basic skills, teamwork, cooperation, things that we all want our grownups in our communities to be good at.

Those are, those are being learned on the playground. So those are the kind of outcomes that we track.

Kevin: Elizabeth, this is so important and, and I’m so glad you shared this because, you know, schools are going through budget crunches. So, you know, time on the playground and then because of COVID, you have to make up learning loss.

So you have less play time, there’s budget cuts. So staff who may be monitoring playgrounds or play opportunities are being cut. And we also see in some of the things you talked about, you know, kids who are disciplined over abundance of black and brown Children are disciplined. And we also know that kids with disabilities are getting less play time.

And these black and brown kids who are being disciplined, they’re getting less play time. So it becomes sort of circular. So this idea of, of, of, of having The intention around more play time leads to better play and meaningful play opportunities with others, which sort of reduces all the other things that we know are out there.

Elizabeth: Exactly. We saw and continue to experience an increase, like dramatic increase, in requests for our support. from school principals, from teachers across the country. And I believe it’s because as children returned from schools being closed, they could not establish a calm learning environment. The kids were disrupted from what they under, you know, what they had been used to.

They couldn’t necessarily feel a lot of trust that everything was going to be okay. And so, you know, The educators recognized that they couldn’t just go right at teaching and expect that to work. And so we continue to have school partners reach out to us and say, Please, we need you to help us establish this sense of belonging, calm, excitement, and joy at school.

So we can do what we do best. We see ourselves as a support to teachers. especially, since 2020. And I think that we all kind of learned that we need to pay attention to our emotional and social experiences if we are to actually be productive in general, grownups alike. And so we’re happy to be contributing to that.

To that rebuilding of the climate and community of school.

Kevin: So, Elizabeth, I have a couple more questions. One is, we talked about earlier, these sort of misperceptions about play and the relationship to academics. And I said, when schools see kids in their district or, you know, have learning loss, then we double down on mentoring, which is important, and tutoring, which is important.

But what can we do about, you know, the growing need to for people to understand the importance of play as it relates to all of these things. And are you able to use the schools you’ve worked with as advocates for this?

Elizabeth: Yes, we are. We’re seeing how when we are working with a school or two schools in a district and they are having an experience that is productive and positive that we can ask them to help us tell that story across the district.

And so we are seeing more and more district level leaders coming to us and saying, we want you to support all of our schools. One of the things that’s really expanded at Playworks is our training service. So we, we both support some schools with staff in schools. We support far more schools, a thousand schools a year with training.

And it is not that difficult. to translate what we know to the school staff. So for example, in the city of Philadelphia, we are a district wide partner and we support all of the Philadelphia schools with some level of service from Playworks. So we can train large numbers of schools to do what we do. And I think that is the solution because We want to embed play in schools and the way they function, and for the city of Philadelphia, we are a key part of their strategic plan.

We help them achieve the other goals they are trying to achieve, academic, social, and otherwise. And so, that is the path, I think, to making play part of every kid’s experience in the United States, which is actually our ambition. That every kid in the United States will have access, and it’s in partnership.

Kevin: and to that point, and this is the last question, what I really want to know, we have a lot of school district leaders, superintendents, parents, even students listen to the show around the country and hearing what you said about your relationship with Philadelphia and the work you’ve been able to accomplish with the other school partners, there may be a, you know, you know, small to mid sized school district leader who’s facing budget cuts and, and they hear this and say, Hmm, that makes sense, but I’ve got a school board I got to deal with.

We got to figure out how, where do they start?

Elizabeth: Sure. I would say come to playworks.org and we have free resources. We have some guidance around Basic actions you can take to create the conditions for a healthy play at school. On our website, we also have a website called Recess Lab. where you can take a really quick checkup, an online checkup, about your playground and get some feedback right away from us for free again, about things you can do.

And so explore those free resources and then come talk to us. There may be a really cost effective way we can support you. And we can create change. Very quickly when we have all the grownups on board with how important play is on, we’d be excited to work with any district of any size. So I’m glad you brought that up.

Kevin: Well, that’s awesome, Elizabeth. Thank you again. And look, you can tell people you had an amazing interview with the eighth grade four square champion in Indianapolis, Indiana. Okay.

I was a Foursquare champion, so anyway…

Elizabeth: all right.

Kevin: Well, look, thanks again for joining us on what I want to know.

Elizabeth: Happy to be here.

Kevin: All right. Thank you so much. That was a lot of fun. Thanks for listening to What I Want to Know. Be sure to follow and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app so you can explore other episodes and dive into our discussions on the future of education.

And write a review of the show. Bye. I also encourage you to join the conversation and let me know what you want to know using hashtag WI WT K on social media. That’s hashtag WI WT K. For more information on Stride and online education, visit stride learning.com. I’m your host, Kevin P. Chavous. Thank you for joining What I Want To Know.