The importance of playfulness
Feb. 23rd, 2010 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberkitIt occurs to me that the thing that keeps people's attention is whether they're being entertained and finding something shiny/enjoyable. This thought comes up a lot during Chem class. Man, I used to love Chemistry in high school. I loved the explosions, the way that we know things work because of the instability of intermolecular forces, the idea that the world is held together fundamentally by electrons zipping around in crazy ways. Our teacher once had us run around in circles to show electron orbits. She used to make things blow up regularly, with pretty colors.
But my current chem class teacher doesn't demonstrate any of this -- no science experiments in class, no games, and sadly no group work: no chance to work together on the math part of things. His lessons fall short because he doesn't let the class breathe -- he lectures and doesn't use Socratic questioning, and ... I'm bored. (Tragicomedic quote from last week: "You only think he's not a bad teacher because you do all the reading from the book.")
Without play, you never get anyone's interest, and you'll never get anyone to like what you teach. All of the lessons that went really well in my classroom were ones that involved play -- short story prompts from ambiguous newspaper headlines, or acting out scenes, or playing Mad Libs to teach parts of speech, or poem writing using stuff in the room.
Playfulness is interaction without high-stakes self-consciousness. At its best, it is highly creative at drawing people in, letting them brainstorm without feeling worried about a product. It's about shared entertainment, a common goal, invoking common knowledge. It doesn't have to involve bonding, although that's important too for classroom management, but you have to be willing to have a group energy.
All of the workshops I've ever attended that have succeeded have elements of everyone playing together. If we weren't laughing, we were breathing together, fiddling with some project together, concentrating together for one short period at a time. Without that element of ... shared enjoyment, of the willingness to not be completely goal-oriented, it's actually really hard to learn or even pay attention. We are social creatures -- we take each other's cues in learning just like in any other social interaction, and it works better if we enjoy ourselves along the way.
But my current chem class teacher doesn't demonstrate any of this -- no science experiments in class, no games, and sadly no group work: no chance to work together on the math part of things. His lessons fall short because he doesn't let the class breathe -- he lectures and doesn't use Socratic questioning, and ... I'm bored. (Tragicomedic quote from last week: "You only think he's not a bad teacher because you do all the reading from the book.")
Without play, you never get anyone's interest, and you'll never get anyone to like what you teach. All of the lessons that went really well in my classroom were ones that involved play -- short story prompts from ambiguous newspaper headlines, or acting out scenes, or playing Mad Libs to teach parts of speech, or poem writing using stuff in the room.
Playfulness is interaction without high-stakes self-consciousness. At its best, it is highly creative at drawing people in, letting them brainstorm without feeling worried about a product. It's about shared entertainment, a common goal, invoking common knowledge. It doesn't have to involve bonding, although that's important too for classroom management, but you have to be willing to have a group energy.
All of the workshops I've ever attended that have succeeded have elements of everyone playing together. If we weren't laughing, we were breathing together, fiddling with some project together, concentrating together for one short period at a time. Without that element of ... shared enjoyment, of the willingness to not be completely goal-oriented, it's actually really hard to learn or even pay attention. We are social creatures -- we take each other's cues in learning just like in any other social interaction, and it works better if we enjoy ourselves along the way.
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-01 04:14 am (UTC)Not incorporating playfulness, sadly, probably tends to be only quasi-effective when you're in a compulsory environment and have effective means of punishment (neither of which tends to exist much in education, particularly higher education, any more). And even then, it's still not as good as playfulness.
Of course, there's other stuff, too, but things like the content, etc., seem to be more likely to be included than the playfulness ... *hugs*