C75: Engaging Play in Elementary through a Conceptual Lesson Cycle

​​This past week, I had the most lively debate with my friend Mondrea Mitchell over play and it only being in the early years.  Don’t you love it when you can respectfully share your ideas with a friend and they push back with ideas you hadn’t considered before?  I love this!  I don’t want to be coddled, especially since I’m full of a lot of opinions, as you can tell if you have been listening long. 

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The topic we were discussing is play in the early years.  She purported that true play is unbridled and truly engineered by the learner.  For this to happen authentically, there should be minimal guidance from the teacher.  I completely agree with this, but I think play can also happen for older learners.  We just need to get out of their way. 

Two weeks ago, I moderated a professional interest group about Play-Based Learning for the Toddle Inquiry Education Summit.  Based on a poll, most of the educators attending the session were early years teachers. What does that say about play in the upper years? 

As a hard headed person, I am going to still claim that play can happen for the upper elementary/primary learners and here’s how we can make it happen. ​

Conceptual Lesson Cycle

​One possibility of incorporating more play into your practice as an upper elementary teacher is a conceptual lesson cycle.  What the heck is that?  It’s something I made up while engaging with a variety of approaches to deliver content to our learners.  There are five main parts that allow learners to take more ownership of the process by playing with the ideas and we get to observe their thinking process. 

Step 1:  Pose a question

​This sounds very intuitive, but you would be surprised how many teachers begin a lesson with a statement or objective.  Even within international schools, I saw this happening at the beginning of a lesson cycle. 

More importantly, the question we ask is not just an ordinary question.  Huh?  What I mean by that is the question is crafted with the content in mind, but is open-ended for learner exploration.  At this point, there are NO teacher directions.  You are sitting back observing, asking questions, and getting learners to monitor and document their own progress. 

Unlike most questions I pose, I will not give my answer.  I ask the learners to reveal what their answers are to the provocation and leave it at that.  This leaves an air of mystery and allows learners to ask more questions without feeling like that portion is finished.  Pure magic.

Step 2:  Warm-Up Activity

​After posing a question, I will present an open-ended task with no directions.  I usually show an image, diagram, empty organizer, or provide manipulatives.  I ask the learners, “What can you do with these materials?  How are they connected to the question we just explored?”  Once again, the task is quite open-ended and I allow the learners to come up with their own wonderings and possible solutions. 

We will often share through gallery walks where groups compare and contrast how materials were used differently and reflect using visible thinking routines. 

Notice, I have not presented any new content until this point.  Learners are simply playing with ideas and creating their own inquiries, their own conclusions based on the information they have up until that moment.

​Step 3:  New Information

​At this stage, I present the new content in a short mini-lesson of 20 minutes or less.  I want the learners to understand the importance of the concept and be able to synthesize it on their own.  

At the end of the mini-lesson, I ask them to tell me how the open-ended question and warm-up activity connect to the new content.  I want the learners to make the connections; my role is to simply deepen their ideas through questioning and to clear up misconceptions. 

Step 4:  Play with Ideas

​With new information in their hands, learners are hungry to test it out.  I provide a more complex open-ended task for them to solve.  They work collaboratively to solve the problem and I provide various prompts (concrete to abstract), so they can apply their thinking in a variety of ways.  Being in the United States, I also have a responsibility to prepare them for the end of year assessment, so I include prompts to test their ability to transfer the learning to a new format. 

The key here is TIME.  I know we all complain about not having time.  To be honest, it’s because we are filling the time with a lot of separate activities instead of focusing on the big conceptual ideas.  Thinking from a transdisciplinary lens, all of the open-ended tasks can involve more than one subject to make it more connected to real-life.  Nothing is stopping us besides our imaginations.

Step 5:  Reflect

Speaking of time, don’t forget to do this last part.  I think it’s one of the most important steps in the process, but it’s often removed due to running out of time.  

Reflection is where the magic of metacognition, making relationships happen, having aha moments, recognizing misconceptions, and drawing new conclusions.  I think of reflection like a phone call.  We are having a nice chat with a friend and all of a sudden the line goes dead and they don’t call back.  Inside, you are wondering, “Are we done?”  This is the same feeling at the end of a lesson cycle.  Learners want to know, “Are we done?”  Reflection naturally wraps up ideas and helps the learners to synthesize the big ideas.  Don’t let another lesson cycle end without reflection. 

Well, I don’t know about you, but I saw a lot of play happening in that lesson cycle.  Remember, play and inquiry are very interconnected.  Play is allowing learners to play with materials and ideas to find their use in various contexts.  Inquiry is taking these materials and using them in unique ways driven by learner wonderings.  If we want meaningful inquiry to happen, we need to incorporate as much play as possible.  

This concludes our series on learning space design and play.  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this process even amidst all of the craziness of my work life.  Stay tuned for a new series…I’m still sorting out what I’m going to tackle next.  Something tells me it may be concepts or design thinking.  I keep going back and forth.  

Let me know what you’d like to explore next @thinkcha2020 on Twitter and @Lu Gerlach on LinkedIn.