Education and The Well-Played Game

A colleague received the following note from a teacher interested in attending a session I was teaching about The Well-Played Game:

Do you feel this workshop will work with 10 of our teachers combined with 20 other people from other areas in the community?

I really am not totally convinced of the direct application of this workshop to the classroom, but maybe you can convince me more! I do see the relevancy of having fun, but I guess I am used to workshops for teachers that are specifically geared to the curriculum and classroom.

Here's my response:

As a teacher, hired by the School District of Philadelphia, back in 19 - can you believe it - 68! to write a city-wide elementary school curriculum in, yes, theater - I discovered how remarkably ineffective our schools were at teaching kids how to work together. Theater, as I understood it, is a demanding, labor-intensive, social collaboration. It's all about working together, creating together, acting together. So I wound up developing a 5-volume, 6-hole punched curriculum to teach kids how to play together.

As a teacher, especially as someone who was working inner city elementary school kids, who spent his time playing games like duck-duck-for-goodness-sake-goose, I learned how important play was to human, social and intellectual growth. And how important social growth was to educational growth. And how silly we were to expect kids who didn't even have a chance to play together to become skilled at working together.

And that's what I'm still teaching 40 years later.

Yes, I realize that the ability to work well together is not measured directly, per se. But my guess is that any experienced teacher understands how a kid's ability to play with other kids turns out to be part of everything that we educate for - not just math and reading skills, but intelligence, maturity, esteem, leadership, grace.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith