(Updated) As these kids took a break from class to clamber over a jungle gym, a local educator scored the city school system for depriving young learners of enough recess and play time.
The kids played in the sun Tuesday afternoon at the Worthington Hooker Elementary School, where students still enjoy traditional recess. Recess has been eliminated at seven city schools.
Meanwhile, Marcy Guddemi, the director of the Gesell Institute, New Haven’s pioneering child development organization, argued students should be given more creative play time.
“I understand the political and parental pressures, I feel for the teachers’ pain — and many are doing wonderful jobs despite, that is, trying to get around the academic pressure — but, please let the children play,” she said, in a recent interview at her offices on Prospect Street at Edwards.
By “play,” she was talking about far more than just recess.
The interview was the occasion both of National Recess Week and also a reflection after the first anniversary of Guddemi’s arrival at Gesell to revitalize the organization. Click here to read a previous article.
School system spokeswoman Michelle Wade disagreed with many of Guddemi’s observations.
Gesell’s fame is based on its research. As to recess, Guddemi said, the research on it, like climate change, is incontrovertible: play supports academic achievement, social development, and diminishes behavior problems.
Guddemi (pictured) said she understands the exigencies of political pressures on superintendents and principals, personnel shortages, safety issues, and other reasons forcing the decline of the full, 20-minute recess period. But she thinks it’s short-sighted.
“Maybe if they renamed it ‘outdoor learning,’ that would make a difference,” she said.
In an email message, Wade noted the New Haven Public Schools were in compliance with the state’s relevant mandated requirement, namely that each district “include in the regular school day for each student enrolled in grades kindergarten to five, inclusive, a period of physical exercise …” The exercise, she said, is either traditional recess and/or the school’s increasing use of Take Ten and other in-classroom “deskercize.”
Those are desk-side stretches or crunches often linked to academic games. In operation in 18 schools, the various deskercize programs are part of the system’s Physical Activities and Wellness (PAW) program, which include health committees that sponsor a variety of better lifestyle activities for kids. PAW has received recognition and is becoming a model state-wide, and yet even this program is struggling for the private, foundation grants that keep it going.
Traditional recess currently functions in select grades at 26 of the city’s 33 elementary schools, usually dovetailing with the lunch period, Wade reported. Click here to view a list of participating schools.
“Some schools,” she reported, “use paraprofessionals for supervision of recess, and that could be impacted by layoffs.” The paraprofessional union is slated to lose 20 positions at the end of the school year.
Guddemi said she understood the pressures, fiscal and supervisory, but that in her view the value of recess should be preserved and expanded in the system. “I would encourage them to get more parent volunteers involved, for example. It’s that important.”
Of equal concern to Guddemi is the absence of old fashioned play time for three and four year-olds in the school readiness, Head Start, and early childhood classrooms that serve several thousand of the youngest learners in the city school system. “There are marvelous teachers there,” she said, “but I’m not sure of the wisdom of having infused into what they call their creative curriculum so much, well, academics. That’s a kind of contradiction.”
Guddemi was referring to units titled “Breakthrough to Literacy” and “Little Scientist” as well as a math learning program that she said are required for the three-to-four-year-olds.
In “Breakthrough to Literacy, for example,” she said all the kids are required to use the computer every day. “But what if a little child doesn’t want to get on the computer on a given day. Do you force them?”
“Kids learn at their own rates,” Guddemi said, “and when we force them to do this or that and they’re not ready, we create emotional blocks to learning. Do you know the average age kids learn to read is six and a half?”
In light of that, Guddemi said she is seriously concerned with the requirement that no child is allowed to leave kindergarten without being able to read, as is her understanding of the NHPS policy. “Long term,” she said, “there is no scientific basis for concluding that a child who learns to read at three is going to do better than one who learns to read at six or even seven.”
Wade, on behalf of the school board, countered that all her intelligence from classroom teachers said that free and dramatic play were built into all the pre‑K learning environments; that the kids using “Breakthrough to Literacy” love it, and that no kid is ever forced to use a computer.
“Believe me,” Guddemi continued, “we could address the achievement gap and create people who love to read if we had quality early childhood education,” and by quality she meant more time available for kids to learn without pressure. “If we push reading onto kids who are not ready, we create blocks, complexes. We really are creating our own remediation problems later.”
As to the reading requirement for kindergarten, Wade wrote, “the state has expectations about what a child should learn in pre‑K, but reading is not a determining factor to entering kindergarten.”
Parents, kids’ first teachers, of course need to know these things. To that end Guddemi has launched a program called Parent-Teacher Connection, in three early childhood settings to work with parents, as well as teachers, to help them understand the stages of childhood development.
Gesell’s mission, under Guddemi, has also included working with the New Haven Early Childhood Council and organizing seminars for NHPS early child education supervisors. “When we showed them our video of what an ideal classroom, based on the research, looks like, with an area for play with blocks, and so on, they said, ‘We’re not allowed to play!’”
Another bee in Guddemi’s educational bonnet is why the NHPS does not have a person in charge, a supervisor, dedicated specifically to kindergarten or at least to the early grades. (There are supervisors dedicated to the early childhood learning, up to kindergarten).
“My understanding is that the K‑12 supervisor for reading is in charge of reading in kindergarten and the K‑12 math supervisor does the math, but that’s really absurd,” said Guddemi. “The way learning goes on at these young ages is so different; it’s critical someone be in charge of that.”
When Guddemi (pictured with Gesell’s operations manager Annette Watert and the new coffee maker) came to town a year ago, she said she wanted to make some noise, and she has, quietly enough. She’s consulted with Teach Our Children, the grassroots parental advocacy group, especially in their campaign for more recess; she approves the results but not the confrontational style.
Wade said that Tina Mannerino, the NHPS’s director of early childhood education, was in general surprised to hear Guddemi’s concerns about the system’s early childhood education approaches.
On the busy Guddemi agenda for this year, in addition to promoting Gesell research products, seminars, and consultations nationally, she said is arranging a meeting with Dr. Mayo about early childhood programs in general in the city.
“It’s a really good time,” she said, “what with Obama and the people he is bringing in to oversee Head Start and similar programs. They really get it.”
Actually, a number of private schools still have recess. I'm aware of a number of Catholic schools that have recess. It's amazing how they can fit both Recess and a Religion class into the same school day tht the NH Public Schools have. How do they do it?