Games lubricate the body and the mind.
Benjamin Franklin

It was a cold, icy, snowy New York City winter and Charlene Cruse-Rivera’s kindergarten children at P.S. 244 in Flushing, Queens were not getting outside often to explore the neighborhood outside the school. Earlier in the year they spent a lot of time visiting and playing in a variety of playgrounds as part of their playground inquiry project. What to explore now that it wasn’t as practical to spend much time outside of the school building?

Being a good observer of children, Charlene noticed that a group of the children liked to play board games. She and I discussed this interest and came up with some ideas together. Perhaps it might be opportune to plunge into an in-depth study of board games with the entire class. Would they find this interesting?

Charlene shared her observations with the class and asked them if they would like to spend a week exploring different board games. They seemed interested and so she had one period each day when children got into groups to play a chosen board game. Rather than introduce many games, she had doubles of games so that, for example, each day two groups of children could play Candyland, two could play Checkers, two played Snakes and Ladders, etc.

After playing the games, they discussed their discoveries and observations at the class meeting. Charlene introduced a book where children could write about the different games that they played.

After the week of being immersed in board games, two Choice Time centers were opened. At one center, children could play commercial board games. The second center was one where children could create their own, original games, introduce the games to the class and add them to the game center.

The enthusiasm here built up and even spread to the block center where a group of children created a Dinosaur Game from a block construction.

There’s so much learning that comes from experiences playing and creating board games. (Many of these points can be found on page 129 of my book, Choice Time: How to Deepen Learning Through Inquiry and Play.)
• Children draw on their understandings of number sequence
• Children gain an understanding of greater than and less than.
• Children learn the importance of careful strategizing.
• When children create their own games, they draw on their knowledge of basic game attributes and then have opportunities to creatively improvise.
• In creating their own games, children might decide to make up a game that’s based on a favorite storybook, thereby making some important literacy connections.
• Playing a board game is a social activity.

Here are two Choice Time Reflection Journal entries:

This article, from the Sunday, April 2, 2017 edition of the New York Times, spotlights the importance of believing and investing in all children. If you haven’t read it already, I hope you take the time to read it now.

SundayReview | CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER

Who Needs Charters When You Have Public Schools Like These?

Starting in kindergarten, the students in the Union Public Schools district in Tulsa, Okla., get a state-of-the-art education in science, technology, engineering and math. Credit Andrea Morales for The New York Times
TULSA, Okla. — The class assignment: Design an iPad video game. For the player to win, a cow must cross a two-lane highway, dodging constant traffic. If she makes it, the sound of clapping is heard; if she’s hit by a car, the game says, “Aw.”

“Let me show you my notebook where I wrote the algorithm. An algorithm is like a recipe,” Leila, one of the students in the class, explained to the school official who described the scene to me.

You might assume these were gifted students at an elite school. Instead they were 7-year-olds, second graders in the Union Public Schools district in the eastern part of Tulsa, Okla., where more than a third of the students are Latino, many of them English language learners, and 70 percent receive free or reduced-price lunch. From kindergarten through high school, they get a state-of-the-art education in science, technology, engineering and math, the STEM subjects. When they’re in high school, these students will design web pages and mobile apps, as well as tackle cybersecurity and artificial intelligence projects. And STEM-for-all is only one of the eye-opening opportunities in this district of around 16,000 students.

Betsy DeVos, book your plane ticket now.

Ms. DeVos, the new secretary of education, dismisses public schools as too slow-moving and difficult to reform. She’s calling for the expansion of supposedly nimbler charters and vouchers that enable parents to send their children to private or parochial schools. But Union shows what can be achieved when a public school system takes the time to invest in a culture of high expectations, recruit top-flight professionals and develop ties between schools and the community.

Union has accomplished all this despite operating on a miserly budget. Oklahoma has the dubious distinction of being first in the nation in cutting funds for education, three years running, and Union spends just $7,605 a year in state and local funds on each student. That’s about a third less than the national average; New York State spends three times more. Although contributions from the community modestly augment the budget, a Union teacher with two decades’ experience and a doctorate earns less than $50,000. Her counterpart in Scarsdale, N.Y., earns more than $120,000.

“Our motto is: ‘We are here for all the kids,’ ” Cathy Burden, who retired in 2013 after 19 years as superintendent, told me. That’s not just a feel-good slogan. “About a decade ago I called a special principals’ meeting — the schools were closed that day because of an ice storm — and ran down the list of student dropouts, name by name,” she said. “No one knew the story of any kid on that list. It was humiliating — we hadn’t done our job.” It was also a wake-up call. “Since then,” she adds, “we tell the students, ‘We’re going to be the parent who shows you how you can go to college.’ ”

Last summer, Kirt Hartzler, the current superintendent, tracked down 64 seniors who had been on track to graduate but dropped out. He persuaded almost all of them to complete their coursework. “Too many educators give up on kids,” he told me. “They think that if an 18-year-old doesn’t have a diploma, he’s got to figure things out for himself. I hate that mind-set.”

This individual attention has paid off, as Union has defied the demographic odds. In 2016, the district had a high school graduation rate of 89 percent — 15 percentage points more than in 2007, when the community was wealthier, and 7 percentage points higher than the national average.

The school district also realized, as Ms. Burden put it, that “focusing entirely on academics wasn’t enough, especially for poor kids.” Beginning in 2004, Union started revamping its schools into what are generally known as community schools. These schools open early, so parents can drop off their kids on their way to work, and stay open late and during summers. They offer students the cornucopia of activities — art, music, science, sports, tutoring — that middle-class families routinely provide. They operate as neighborhood hubs, providing families with access to a health care clinic in the school or nearby; connecting parents to job-training opportunities; delivering clothing, food, furniture and bikes; and enabling teenage mothers to graduate by offering day care for their infants.

Two fifth graders guided me around one of these community schools, Christa McAuliffe Elementary, a sprawling brick building surrounded by acres of athletic fields. It was more than an hour after the school day ended, but the building buzzed, with choir practice, art classes, a soccer club, a student newspaper (the editors interviewed me) and a garden where students were growing corn and radishes. Tony, one of my young guides, performed in a folk dance troupe. The walls were festooned with family photos under a banner that said, “We Are All Family.”

This environment reaps big dividends — attendance and test scores have soared in the community schools, while suspensions have plummeted.

The district’s investment in science and math has paid off, too. According to Emily Lim, who runs Union’s STEM program, the district felt it was imperative to offer STEM classes to all students, not just those deemed gifted.

Students congregate at the start of the Global Gardens after school program at Union Public Schools district’s Christa McAuliffe Elementary School in Oklahoma. Credit Andrea Morales for The New York Times
In one class, I watched eighth graders create an orthotic brace for a child with cerebral palsy. The specs: The toe must be able to rise but cannot fall. Using software that’s the industry standard, 20 students came up with designs and then plaster of Paris models of the brace.

“It’s not unusual for students struggling in other subjects to find themselves in the STEM classes,” Ms. Lim said. “Teachers are seeing kids who don’t regard themselves as good readers back into reading because they care about the topic.”

A fourth grader at Rosa Parks Elementary who had trouble reading and writing, for example, felt like a failure and sometimes vented his frustration with his fists. But he’s thriving in the STEM class. When the class designed vehicles to safely transport an egg, he went further than anybody else by giving his car doors that opened upward, turning it into a little Lamborghini. Such small victories have changed the way he behaves in class, his teacher said — he works harder and acts out much less.
Superintendents and school boards often lust after the quick fix. The average urban school chief lasts around three years, and there’s no shortage of shamans promising to “disrupt” the status quo.

The truth is that school systems improve not through flash and dazzle but by linking talented teachers, a challenging curriculum and engaged students. This is Union’s not-so-secret sauce: Start out with an academically solid foundation, then look for ways to keep getting better.

Union’s model begins with high-quality prekindergarten, which enrolls almost 80 percent of the 4-year-olds in the district. And it ends at the high school, which combines a collegiate atmosphere — lecture halls, student lounges and a cafeteria with nine food stations that dish up meals like fish tacos and pasta puttanesca — with the one-on-one attention that characterizes the district.

Counselors work with the same students throughout high school, and because they know their students well, they can guide them through their next steps. For many, going to community college can be a leap into anonymity, and they flounder — the three-year graduation rate at Tulsa Community College, typical of most urban community colleges, is a miserable 14 percent. But Union’s college-in-high-school initiative enables students to start earning community college credits before they graduate, giving them a leg up.

The evidence-based pregnancy-prevention program doesn’t lecture adolescents about chastity. Instead, by demonstrating that they have a real shot at success, it enables them to envision a future in which teenage pregnancy has no part.

“None of this happened overnight,” Ms. Burden recalled. “We were very intentional — we started with a prototype program, like community schools, tested it out and gradually expanded it. The model was organic — it grew because it was the right thing to do.”

Building relationships between students and teachers also takes time. “The curriculum can wait,” Lisa Witcher, the head of secondary education for Union, told the high school’s faculty last fall. “Chemistry and English will come — during the first week your job is to let your students know you care about them.”

That message resonated with Ms. Lim, who left a job at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa School of Community Medicine and took a sizable pay cut to work for Union. “I measure how I’m doing by whether a girl who has been kicked out of her house by her mom’s boyfriend trusts me enough to tell me she needs a place to live,” she told me. “Union says, ‘We can step up and help.’ ”

Under the radar, from Union City, N.J., and Montgomery County, Md., to Long Beach and Gardena, Calif., school systems with sizable numbers of students from poor families are doing great work. These ordinary districts took the time they needed to lay the groundwork for extraordinary results.

Will Ms. DeVos and her education department appreciate the value of investing in high-quality public education and spread the word about school systems like Union? Or will the choice-and-vouchers ideology upstage the evidence?

David L. Kirp is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a senior fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and a contributing opinion writer.

Susan Ochshorn,  blogger and founder of ECE PolicyWorks, has   written a very informed review of my book, Choice Time-How to Deepen Learning Through Inquiry and Play, PreK-2. I’d love to share her article with you.

RENEE DINNERSTEIN’S REVOLUTION GROWS IN BROOKLYN
Posted by Susan Ochshorn, on December 15th, 2016
Last September, before school began, I made my way to the Brooklyn Historical Society for the launch of Renée Dinnerstein’s new book, Choice Time. At a time of standardized tests for five-year-olds, canned curriculum, didactic instruction, and the Common Core—in a city of deep inequality and segregation—this event was long overdue.

More than 200 teachers poured into the landmark Romanesque Revival building, now a center of urban history, civic dialogue, and community outreach. Many were left standing around the edges of the room, the air tense with expectancy. After a day of setting up their classrooms, they still had energy to burn.

Following a PowerPoint presentation, Dinnerstein invited Anna Allanbrook, principal of the Brooklyn New School, to join her for a conversation. Both women are committed to active learning, equality of opportunity and diversity, the nurturance of community and democracy, and the belief that young children, who are naturally thoughtful and curious, make their own meaning, with adults as their trusted guides.

Dinnerstein and Allanbrook are members of a vanishing species of educator. Attention was rapt as they reflected on the challenges of upholding the progressive ethos in a city where it has become the province of the privileged. The audience was primed for the discussion, bursting into applause when the subject of segregation came up. “All parents want to send their children to schools where exciting things are happening,” Dinnerstein said.

The spirit of Lillian Weber hovered over the proceedings. A revered professor of early childhood education at the City College of New York, she supported teacher activism at the grassroots, and became the first woman, in 1973, to deliver the annual John Dewey Society lecture—well before No Child Behind and corporate reform would wreak havoc with the philosopher’s creed. “Find the cracks,” Weber urged her students, a sentiment echoed by the late Leonard Cohen in “Anthem,” released in the early 90s: “There is a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything) That’s how the light gets in.”

Choice Time, a guide to deepening learning through inquiry and play, is Dinnerstein’s gift to the city’s early childhood teachers, with whom she’s been working for nearly five decades. They’re hard pressed to find the light in today’s climate of constraint and metrics. The pressure on them and the children is acute, robbing both parties of autonomy, agency, and joy in the work at hand. “We need a revolution,” Dinnerstein declared, plaintively, at one point during the evening.

The book begins with a quick scan of the research on play, a powerful engine of human development. The repercussions of its disappearance cannot be overstated, especially for children in poverty. As Regina Milteer, Kenneth Ginsburg, and Deborah Ann Mulligan warned in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2012. “To effectively preserve play in the lives of economically disadvantaged children,” they wrote, “its presence in schools …must be supported…Otherwise, school engagement might suffer and efforts at creating a better-prepared generation might fail.”

Their concern was welcome, but their advice had gone unheeded. In the nation’s classrooms, the damage had been accruing, block by block banished from kindergarten—along with the kind of active learning that children need to thrive. Joan Almon and Edward Miller had been tracking the trend, reporting on its implications in their seminal work, Crisis in the Kindergarten, published by the Alliance for Childhood in 2009.

In Choice Time, Dinnerstein offers readers a taxonomy of play adapted from this report, nine types encompassing “forms of exploration that support…social, emotional, creative, and intellectual growth.” Never mind the overlap in form and function—children develop mastery, learn rules, and have their senses engaged in many kinds of play. In clear, simple language, she sets forth the rationale, rooted in research, for the centers of the ideal classroom:

… it’s a laboratory for exploratory learning, a place where children build things, conduct experiments, create innovative art projects, read fascinating books, write original stories, use technology and texts to find out information and feel free to imagine and try out possibilities. It’s a place where children grow big ideas, make new friends, and dig deeply into exciting investigations.

Here, learning is collaborative, students’ voices are heard, and their work documented. The teacher is the guide, scaffolding “children’s natural instincts for play, introducing materials and posing questions and ideas that help them develop a wide range of skills.”

Observation and recording, a vanishing skill in the age of quick, quantitative assessment, undergirds practice. Close, careful attention to children yields information for extending their learning. In the centers Dinnerstein proposes (blocks, science, reading nook, dramatic play, math, and art), these strategies hold, and she tells her readers just what to do, chapters interspersed with charts called “Teaching Interventions,” lined with observations and possible responses.

All of the above requires time—in short supply as we continue to race our students to the top. In the second chapter, Dinnerstein gets to the core of the loss:

It may be that of all the voices in the classroom, time actually speaks the loudest. How we use time during the day speaks volumes about our beliefs about teaching and learning and our understanding of the developmental needs of young children. Just as the heart pumps blood through the…vessels of the circulatory system, providing the body with oxygen and important nutrients, choice activities are vital to the well-being of young children…

Dinnerstein’s blueprint for change requires leaps of imagination and faith for the new generation of early childhood educators. They’ve come of age professionally during an era of reform that has pushed children’s needs and the evidence base to the periphery. Practitioners in a field long marginalized, they’ve been reluctant to challenge the regime.

Last year, at a meeting in East Harlem, where choice time is but a dream, a principal from Sunset Park, a gentrifying community of immigrants in Brooklyn, spoke of how she had just brought back blocks to her elementary school, after more than a decade’s hiatus. The teachers didn’t know how to use them. Choice Time lets the light in.