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IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, I WAS ALWAYS among the first in the school yard because I wanted to be in the first group of players on the basketball court. I recall my days in class — yearning for a break after 45 minutes, although I was a serious, top-ranked student.
After an hour of classroom instruction, students’ heads sagged, attention spans slipped, and everyone needed a break. Science and biology confirm this phenomenon, but science and biology teachers don’t practice it. Nor do they produce excellent academic results.
Lately, I’ve been reading about schools in Finland, about how they are able to engage their students so much better than we do in the US. Finnish students enjoy the learning process, work with minimal adult supervision, and record higher scores in PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment for 15-year-olds) and other international tests which assess student learning outcomes. This is because they are engaged, happy, curious and genuinely learning.
If you are a parent, educator, coach or anyone working with young people, you need to take notice of this phenomenon. So what’s Finland’s big secret?
Better and more frequent recess time, i.e sufficient emphasis on play. In Finland, educationists genuinely believe that young children and youth learn through play which stimulates imagination and self-discovery. Therefore teachers not only allow, but encourage play which is regarded as central to — not a distraction from — the education process. Development of the holistic personality is highly valued. In Finland, a 15-minute break is given for every 45 minutes of instruction time, which keeps students fresh through the day. Finnish schools have been maintaining this practice since the early 1960s.
There’s a considerable body of research to support the proposition that frequent breaks keep students invigorated through the day. Anthony Pellegrini, author of Recess: Its Role in Education and Development (2014) and professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Minnesota, has been an advocate of this practice for over a decade. Pellegrini first observed this phenomenon in East Asia where most primary schools give their students a ten-minute break after 40 minutes of classroom instruction. He observed that after recess, students were more attentive in classrooms.
However, not satisfied with anecdotal evidence, Pellegrini conducted a series of experiments at an American public elementary school to explore the relationship between recess breaks and classroom attentiveness. In all the experiments, students were more attentive after a break than just before it.
In Finland, after following the frequent recesses tradition for many years, school teachers seem to know this intuitively. They send children out of class — come rain or shine — for a break leaving students to decide how best to spend their recess. Of course, unleashing young kids on playgrounds every hour offers a huge challenge to educators, and even parents. But according to Pellegrini, breaks don’t have to be taken outdoors to be helpful. In one of his experiments, some students were asked to recess within school premises and their learning outcomes matched those of students who went to playing fields.
What’s most important is not where kids take a break but how much freedom and opportunities teachers give them from structured work. When break time is regulated, recess loses its value, says Pellegrini. It’s freedom which gives students the opportunity to learn life and social skills. During these times, they not only rest and recharge, they also learn to cooperate, communicate and compromise — developing skills they need to succeed academically as well as in life.
This perspective and these values are central to my new book, Changing the Game: My Journey Through Life and Sports. It contains the narrative of how a short, Jewish kid from Compton (me) became a Stanford All-American point guard, went head-to-head with Bill Russell, became friends with John Wooden, worked for Ty Cobb, taught Kobe Bryant, turned down an NBA draft to become a Presbyterian minister and psychotherapist, and went on to apply some very hard-earned life lessons to programmes dedicated to helping kids rediscover the magic of sports and movement. What I’ve tried to do in this book is use my experiences and mistakes to help others avoid repeating them — or at least be better than I was at using these experiences as learning lessons.
The book is also part of my continuing effort to contribute to the development of young people by getting the word out about my Leading2Play program, which is designed to help youth learn leadership skills as they create and run student-led sports and fitness activities.
(Dr. George A. Selleck is a San Francisco-based advisor to EduSports, Bangalore)