Campus Desk :
How important is it for students to have fun in the classroom? And if lessons are dominated by play does this distract from learning?
Tim Taylor, an advanced skills teacher in Norwich who has written extensively on learning through play, explores these questions in a post on his blog, Imaginative Inquiry.
He dissects three common arguments against using play to make lessons fun and engaging. One of the criticisms he hones in on is the belief that fun is frivolous and therefore has no role in the classroom. He believes that this concern comes from people mistakenly equating fun with entertainment, reports the Guardian.
Tim writes: “Learning does not have to be boring, nor does it have to be entertaining, but it does have to mean something to the learner. This, I think, is the nuance that is missing from the anti-fun argument.
“Of course it is bad practice to make lessons vacuous or so distracting that students forget what they are learning. Just as much as it is bad practice to make lessons so tedious and boring that they lose the will to live. But there is no reason at all not to try to make learning enjoyable, to make the context interesting and attractive to the learners, to offer them a way in and to give some opportunities to contribute and be heard.”
In another blog post Tim gives a great example of how play can be used to engage students in learning. With the help of Luke Abbott, an expert on imaginative inquiry, pupils were taught about how to respond to an accident using drama-based learning – Tim stresses that this is not the same as role play.
He writes: “Within a few minutes of starting, the children, in role as an emergency rescue team, were discussing what equipment they were going to need to rescue people trapped in a giant sink-hole.
“I remember sitting there in the corner of the classroom, talking to my hard-to-engage class, every one of whom was crouching with Luke in rapt concentration.”
It’s a technique that primary school teacher Jenny Lewis also converted to. She talks about how she uses the approach in this interview on our network.
We’ll be exploring lots more methods and ideas for teaching students through play in our live chat. We’ll be talking about the benefits and challenges of the approach, the research behind the idea, and discussing where teachers who want to adopt the technique can find support, resources and examples of best practice.
