Play is easy to spot: it is generally considered to be spontaneous, intrinsically motivating and an activity that children will engage with on their own, without adult intervention.
Yet, according to a recent study, published by a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge, the role that teachers might take in directing children’s play could be worth a closer look.
Guided play - play which is partly directed by an adult - was the focus of a systematic review and meta-analysis published last month, which “considered evidence of guided play compared to direct instruction or free play to support children’s learning and development”.
The team found that in some instances, guided play could be at least as effective, or even more effective, than direct instruction.
To find out more, we sat down with Elizabeth Byrne, a research associate with the Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development, and Learning (PEDAL).
Tes: Play can be a contentious topic in education. Why do you think this is?
Elizabeth Byrne: There’s a difference between seeing the benefits of children’s natural, everyday play and using that as a teaching technique.
I think that while lots of people might agree that there’s plenty of value in children’s play, and that it’s really good for their learning and development, that’s different to saying, “okay, now, in my classroom, we’re going to let children play”.
There is an assumption that if we give children total control in the classroom, they’ll go crazy, they won’t focus on the task and it’ll be distracting from the learning goal.
But it’s more nuanced than just saying that some people agree that play is good, and others don’t. Early years teachers and primary school teachers already understand that play is good for development and already incorporate playful types of learning into their teaching.
How do you define guided play?
If you think of learning through play as a spectrum, with direct instruction at one end and children’s free play at the other, then guided play would sit somewhere in the middle.
On this spectrum, there are different degrees of adult involvement and adult control and child choice and child freedom.
Free play is the kind of natural, everyday play that children engage in, with very minimal adult involvement. It’s spontaneous, initiated by the children and it captures all the elements that make play so worthwhile: enjoyment, intrinsic motivation, children being actively engaged and seeing what they are doing as meaningful.
But in free play, if you have a specific learning goal, you can’t really rely on children to just kind of incidentally come across that in their own way.
So, what guided play aims to do is to capture the best attributes of children’s play and combine that with having a teacher or other adult who can provide some support and guidance when there’s a learning goal in mind, and keep the children on track.
Is ‘guided play’ just about the level of involvement that an adult takes?
There are actually three main characteristics of guided play. First, the child has to have some degree of freedom or choice in the activity. Second, there has to be an adult, who has a learning goal in mind - perhaps learning some vocabulary or a specific maths concept. And third, the adult is providing some sort of scaffolding for the learning: perhaps they are using gentle encouragement, asking open questions, providing prompts or suggestions, or setting small challenges.
But even though the adult has some involvement in the activity, children still have the freedom to reach the learning goal in their own way.
Could you give an example of what guided play would look like in practice?
Let’s take the example of children learning about the attributes of shapes: what makes a triangle a triangle, or what makes a square a square, even if you have different types of triangles, different sizes and so on.
In a guided play activity, you might give children shape materials to explore and play with, while maybe setting them little challenges in a playful way. For instance, I remember one study assigned children as “detectives” discovering the secrets of shapes. They had to try to work out for themselves what all of the different triangles had in common, and what the other shapes had in common, the target being that they would learn to categorise the shapes for themselves.
If you were to try to achieve that same learning goal through direct instruction, in that case, the teacher might just tell the children that a triangle has three sides. You could still show them the same materials, but you’d be giving them that information rather than them learning it for themselves.
You were recently part of a research team comparing guided play to other approaches. What did you find out?
Overall, we found that guided play approaches were at least as good as direct instruction, for several areas. For literacy and numeracy, the development of executive functions (cognitive skills) and social-emotional skills, there was no difference in terms of guided play being better or worse.
We also found that guided play was actually more effective than direct instruction at improving some areas of children’s maths ability, such as shape knowledge.
Is there anything that we need to be cautious about with those findings?
It’s worth noting that the concept of guided play is a little bit abstract: what it looks like depends on how you interpret it, and how you implement it. When we looked at studies, there was huge variation in the way that guided play was implemented. In some, it looked more like direct instruction, and in others, it was more like free play.
Lots of different outcome measures were also used and this meant that not all of the studies we looked at in the review could be included in the statistical analysis.
So, while this is a good, encouraging finding that adds to mounting evidence that learning through play can have a place in classroom learning, we still need to do more research.
For example, while overall we found a positive effect in maths, we don’t yet know what the mechanisms are that underpin that. It’s only by doing more research into the more nuanced questions - of how, and when, and for who - that we will be able to better target these approaches towards the right students in the right contexts.
More research is clearly needed, but is there anything that teachers can take away from this right now?
The key message is that there is no “one size fits all”. This latest research is not us saying that guided play is the opposite of direct instruction and that one approach is always better than the other.
But any evidence that giving children opportunities to explore and to discover things for themselves in a way that’s more meaningful to them should be taken seriously. When the national curriculum is becoming increasingly focused on academic attainment and crammed with content for English and maths, teachers inevitably face a lot more pressure to fill the day with teaching this content, rather than creating opportunities for play.
I know that the early years framework already does encourage learning through play, but it’s about maintaining that and valuing that, particularly within a climate where I think that younger and younger children are facing increasing academic pressures.
