Cognition, Thinking & Understanding

Too Many Rules on the Playground: Working the Paradox between Safety and Freedom

An ISB Staff Meeting: The Influences on Playful Learning for Adults

"Frankly It's a Gamble": What Happens When Students Compose their Own Schedules?

This article describes what happened when a group of middle school teacherresearchers at the International School of Billund (ISB), Denmark, joined university-based researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, to engage in a new qualitative methodology called “Playful Participatory Research” or PPR (Baker & Davila 2018; Baker et al. 2016). The goal of the inquiry was to explore some of the tensions that exist between play and school—in particular the paradox between the timeless nature of play and the timetabled nature of school. The experiment was an example of one of the principles of a pedagogy of play proposed by the research team, which suggests that teachers’ collective and systematic study of artifacts of student learning (or “pedagogical documentation”) helps them to navigate such paradoxes. The teachers decided to replace two weeks of the standard school schedule with a ‘student-composed schedule’, in which students were free to design their own programme. Although the experiment got off to a shaky start, as it progressed, many students capitalized on the opportunity to choose where and with whom to work; they began to see each other as intellectual resources; and they started to take more responsibility for their own learning.

Lydia's Day in M7: "There's a lot of freedom"

"Driving the train": Martin leading his own learning in K1

Annika's day of playful learning

A Kindergarten Creator Space: Building a Space for 3- to 7-Year-Old Makers

Playing with Money: Playful Learning Meets Curriculum Goals

"More Passionated, More Choice": The Evolution of Passion Day

Signe's Day in P1: "If you just start it you'll feel more brave"