Developing the Sixth Sense: Play.

Abstract

Play is by its very nature educational. And it should be pleasur-able. When the fun goes out of play, most often so does the learning. —J. Oppenheim, 1984 Asign posted above the teacher’s desk in a classroom werecently visited announced in large red letters: “Absolutelyno displays of emotion will be tolerated. ” Although the moti-vation behind the sign—the desire to control outbursts and to keep students on task—is understandable, legislating emotion out of the classroom often leaves nothing but apathy to fill the void. In many ways, the “no emotions ” sign symbolizes the current uber-serious-ness that has become the norm in K–12 schools. Today, any activity that does not directly contribute to enhancing the quality of the bottom line—the test scores of students—has become suspect. Once the movement to tie salaries of teachers and administrators to test results gets fully under way, levels of stress and fear will only rise. Yet stress and fear do not help build positive dispositions or encourage creativity: they inhibit them (Csikszentmihalyi 1997; Seligman 2002). Traditional ways of teaching—working from a textbook, design-ing quizzes, and assigning seat work—are predicated on the idea of students ’ ability and desire to self-regulate. However, these seden-tary techniques are ineffective with unmotivated students and poor readers. Teachers commonly invoke fear of failure in an attempt to engage students in the activity at hand. “This will be on the test!” has become a modern-day mantra. But such an appeal does not work with students who do not fear failing grades. Student apathy is one reason “traditional ” approaches to teach-ing have yielded such mediocre results in recent years, at least