Kolb – play learning

I would say the more different kinds of learning experiences you can have, one of which is play based, the better off your brain development’s going to be and the better off you’re going to be in the end.  

I think the schools need to pay attention to the fact that play is necessary. I know there are schools that are going away from recess, going away from play periods because of perhaps litigation issues or worries about children being injured and so on, but what they’re doing is they’re changing brain development by not allowing kids to engage in these kinds of play. Furthermore, the attention span of kids, especially boys, in the absence of having engaged in play is clearly reduced. Perhaps less so in girls, but nonetheless I think it’s equally important that they’ve got to engage in play behaviours. Certainly when I was a child a very long time ago, going to school, we played at recess. There was a soccer ball and all the boys chased it around the field when it wasn’t snowing. Then when it was snowing you did other things, running around the field. That was important. If you can’t do that sort of thing and you’re supposed to sit and be quiet, that’s not engaging the brain in any way, it’s turning the brain right off. I think if play has a function, and I’ve suggested that it does, you’ve got to recognize and respect that function and say okay, how can we enhance this, how can we do it in a way that we don’t have children getting injured, although I don’t recall anybody getting injured on the playground when I was there, but perhaps some were.  

I have this worry that what parents have done and what schools have done is they’ve overprotected kids to the point that they’re interfering with normal cognitive and brain development because they’re not allowing the kids to do the things the brain evolved to do a hundred thousand years ago. It’s a sudden shift that may not be all that good. That’s my gut feeling.  

Given the developmental changes that are going on in the brain and particularly in the frontal lobe, both during the infant period and then the pre-adolescent and adolescent periods, the importance of play, and normal play if you like, peer related play really comes to the forefront. This is going to have huge impact on frontal lobe development and the ability to do the kinds of executive functions that the frontal lobe is engaged in. Now, I focused on the frontal lobe because that’s where we see the changes most easily. Is it the only place, probably not, but it’s one where they jump out and smack you in the nose and you go wow, those are big changes.