The Playful Classroom: The Power of Play for All Ages

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Jed Derryberry. Jed is a teacher educator and award-winning classroom teacher who was featured as GQ Magazine's Male Leader of the Year and met President Obama as the South Carolina winner of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching. And since 2015, he has provided quality, hands-on, engaging learning experiences for students and teachers across the country. And he's the author of The Playful Classroom, The Power of Play for All Ages.

[00:43] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:46] SPEAKER_00:

Jed, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:47] SPEAKER_01:

Hey, man, thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

[00:49] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, great to have a chance to talk about the playful classroom and to learn more about your work. You know, sometimes we think of play as something that belongs outside or maybe belongs in PE class. But, you know, mindset is that we need to be serious in the classroom. Why is play so critical and what does that mean to you to have a playful classroom?

[01:12] SPEAKER_01:

Well, it means a lot to me, first and foremost, as a learner. I reflect back on my years of school, and I wish that my learning experiences would have been more engaging, more playful, to make the learning stick. In the book, we talk about Dr. Julie Jones and I, the co-author. We talk a lot about the things that we learned as a kid from playing, how to cooperate, how to problem solve, how to pick yourself up and keep going. Think about the times where you were playing a game and it didn't work out kind of like you wanted it to, and there was no adult there to solve the problem for you.

[01:49]

You had to figure it out on your own. And a lot of that same skill and concept needs to be to our learning experience, especially for me as a learner, but especially for students out there who... Or just like me, when they were growing up, they needed those experiences to make the learning stick. I was not a great student as far as like sit and get, taking the notes and regurgitating the information.

[02:10]

I needed some sort of experience attached to it. And unfortunately, I didn't have that a lot as I was coming through school system. So as a teacher, I tried to infuse as much playful learning into my classroom as possible. And I will tell you what I've realized is that the older kids I've taught, they respond to it just like the little kids. I think a lot of times we think play belongs for the early childhood areas, which I've spent most of my time, first and second, third grade. But for the last 10 years, I've been doing adjunct work with pre-service teachers.

[02:42]

I've also been working with teacher cadets and teaching fellows that are across the state of South Carolina when their teachers invite me in and the teacher cadets are seniors. in high school. And man, those big kids, they love to play. And they'll tell you right out, we haven't done this in forever. I wish more teachers taught this way. And when you hear that critical feedback from students that say, I wish teachers taught this way, it begs the question, why are we not?

[03:07]

So that's why Julie and I wrote the book, because we wanted to understand the science and the neuroscience specifically around what play does for us and how it builds and makes the learning stronger.

[03:17] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, let's get into that because certainly we've probably all heard the objection that, oh, we don't have time or we need to really focus on the standards. We need to be serious. What is some of the research and the evidence base behind valuing play as a learning strategy?

[03:31] SPEAKER_01:

It's funny that you mentioned I don't have time because before we jump into the neuroscience, in chapter five in our book, we talk about debunking all of the excuses. Because look, I will tell you right off the bat, time is the one we hear most often. But we're not asking you to add anything extra to your plate. We're maybe asking you to reimagine what you're already doing to figure out how it could be more playful. For example, if you're teaching basic addition, how can you move beyond just the rote memorization of a worksheet and make two plus two more fun and engaging? I know there's a certain level of rote memorization that has to go there, but you want to connect it to make the kids learning, exciting, come back wanting more.

[04:16]

One of the effects that Netflix and binging has on us is that it leaves us wanting more. That's why we binge. We keep going back. We keep watching all the shows. That's how you want students to react. And play does that.

[04:30]

In the first section of the book, we call it the case for play. And that's where we talk about the neuroscience of it, like how the catecholamines are released and the neurons are firing and new synapses are growing, the neurotrophic factors that All of the things that are going on in your brain when you play, if you look at some of the research that's out there, what's going on in your brain when you're playing, if you did a brain scan, it's just firing up in ways that traditional learning is not allowing the brain to act. And so we relied heavily on the work of Dr. Stuart Brown. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, but he's like the father of modern day play research, I think. He wrote the foreword to our book, and it was a big deal for him to kind of put his stamp on it for us because we had valued his works for so long.

[05:18]

We'd been involved with the U.S. Play Coalition out of Clemson University, and that's how we got to know Dr. Brown and just value his work. I encourage you to read his alongside ours. Our book is more geared specifically to education and the role of play, but his work is more geared to the brain science.

[05:38]

And so we pulled out lots of that information to include in the book as well.

[05:41] SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk about some of what that can look like in the classroom, because, you know, as much as I'm a fan, you know, that kind of outdoor unsupervised time, like I'm not a fan of cutting recess. I do not believe that we need to give kids more classroom time at the expense of recess. But you're actually talking about things that happen within the classroom, right? Not just unstructured outside play.

[06:00] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. Yeah. We're talking about looking at your daily schedule and specifically at your core content and re-evaluate, re-image, if you will, where you could make it more playful. For example, I don't want to necessarily read the book to you, but we've got a chart in there where we talk about instead of do this, try this. So instead of pen and pencil practice, try a game. Instead of raising your hand to answer, turn and talk.

[06:30]

Panama or turn and dance while you're discussing it. Put some music on the background and everything doesn't have to be in your seat. Focus on the front. Just this morning, I was observing a student teacher who was doing a fantastic job of delivering information. but the kids were just sitting there watching. There was not a lot of engagement with their peers, not a lot of engagement back and forth with the teacher.

[06:55]

Instead of a five question quiz, why not give them a can of Play-Doh and have them sculpt their answers instead of filling in bubbles? Have them sculpt two pictures out of Play-Doh that shows their understanding of the topic. Instead of doing workbook pages on ecosystems, take a nature walk outside, do a scavenger hunt of the things that you can find. There's just so many different ways to make the learning playful. And unfortunately, I think sometimes our higher ed institutions are more direct instruction approach. Nothing wrong with that, but we need more balance.

[07:26]

And honestly, I would tend to say we need to swing a little bit more towards a more engaging, more playful side, obviously, because there's so much other things in the world that are pulling at our students. And school needs to be a place where they want to come, they want to engage. and fun, exciting learning. And we've got a lot to compete with. So we got to step it up.

[07:45] SPEAKER_00:

I noticed you talk a little bit in the book about names, about students' names, about knowing names, about using names. How does that factor in? Why is that so important? And what do you do with names?

[07:55] SPEAKER_01:

Well, first of all, it's funny that you mentioned names because before we got on here, you asked how to say my name appropriately. Derryberry, it's not spelled phonetically. For a lot of people, they mispronounce it. They add extra letters to it. But the name is the most unique thing that you have about yourself. Even if you're somebody like Matt Johnson, which is a very common name.

[08:17]

I live with a guy named Matt Johnson. And it's a very common name, but it's very unique to him that when I say Matt Johnson, I'm meaning a very specific person. So honoring people's names, celebrating who they are, their unique individual names means a lot. But in the book, we talk specifically about nicknames and nicknames can often be very playful. When I taught first and second grade, I had nicknames for all my students. A lot of times it was nicknames that maybe their mom or their grandma called them.

[08:48]

that I learned about during parent conference time. And I would always ask the student, you know, do you mind if I call you that nickname that your mom calls you? Because if it's just for your mom, I don't want to infringe on that. But the kids ate it up because it made our relationship playful. There's nothing wrong with having a fun, playful relationship like that with your students. It builds the rapport.

[09:11]

It builds community. It just, I loved it. I loved having nicknames because I think about the nicknames that people have for me. My nieces call me BB. My sister calls me brother. There are some people, there's a town in South Carolina called Jedburg.

[09:25]

So a lot of people call me Jedburg. My middle name is Edwin. So a lot of people call me Jedwin. And of course, tons of people have nicknames for my last name. There was this one student I had years ago and she could not say Derry Berry to save her life. So she said, Debbie, Debbie.

[09:43]

Like, you know, like Little Debbie, the cookie, you know, the cakes or whatever. And she also never, she never could quite figure out Mr. and Mrs. So she called me Miss Debbie Debbie the whole year. And for that year at school, my nickname was Miss Debbie Debbie. It just...

[10:01]

It's fun. It's playful. It's exciting. For me, when somebody gives you a nickname, it's meaningful. I mean, of course, as long as it's done in a way of respect, you don't give somebody a nickname that would hurt their feelings. That's not a nickname.

[10:16]

That would be called bullying, which is a whole other book. But nicknames that are almost terms of endearment, they build the relationship and they just make it more fun.

[10:26] SPEAKER_00:

Well, and while we're headed in that direction, I've never seen an Appendix A in a book like your Appendix A, Southernisms and Their Meanings. So talk to us about Southernisms, you know, and we're both living in the South, so I'm sure I'll be familiar with some of these, but how did they make it in the book?

[10:42] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I appreciate you asking that so much because when we first started, when Julie and I first started writing this book, Julie has her PhD. She's been in higher ed for quite a while. When you're writing a book for educators, you want to make sure it's an educated book. And we found ourselves having to search for meanings and phrases to replace our Southern speak. And I finally just said, look, Julie, this book is about play. Southern language is colorful and playful.

[11:15]

Let's be true to who we are and let's use that in context because it's playful. It's fun, you know. And we went to, so where we wrote most of the book was at our coffee shop downtown that we love. And right next to it is our favorite bookstore, little indie bookshop called Hub City Books. And we went in there and there was a book on the counter of Southernism's. And we sat there and read through that book and just howled laughing, just had the best afternoon.

[11:42]

This was before the pandemic, so we were just sitting there laughing, cutting up. And we realized these Southernisms are who we are. Another reason that we included them too And you may have experienced this, you know, having been from this, live in the South. Sometimes in the big wide world out there, we Southerners get a bad rap for not being educated because they think, you know, sometimes the backwards policies of our states reflect all of us, which is not true. They hear our slow Southern drawl and they think, well, that person must be uneducated. I couldn't change this voice if you wanted me to.

[12:15]

Now, when I'm around other people, say Midwest or, you know, I've got a really good friend who lives in Utah. When I go out there to visit, if I stay out there a few weeks, my accent lessens. But this is who I am. This is I mean, I'm sure your listeners will hear my draw. And I said, you know, we need to honor that. That's who we are.

[12:34]

So we put it in there and we absolutely love it. The glossary, we have gotten lots of feedback about it. People have learned lots of new words and new phrases, and we love it. We're glad we put it in there.

[12:47] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think that's something that we can all do with respecting the uniqueness of our region. And I've had fun. One of my sources of entertainment over the last year has been just the different viral videos that different comedians are putting out and seeing what people from different parts of the country find unique and special and funny about the place that they're from. And I think the more we can have that playful attitude toward the uniqueness of where we are,

[13:14] SPEAKER_01:

That was our goal. We wanted it to be celebrated and honored. And, you know, I'd realized even as I was talking, I used a Southernism. I don't think everybody uses it. We included it in our book. And our editor said that he didn't use it.

[13:27]

He was from California. I said we were cutting up. A lot of people don't know what cutting up means. It means just having a good time, right? Yeah. So when we didn't have that one in our original Southernism, but the editor said, what were you cutting?

[13:41] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

[13:41] SPEAKER_01:

We were like, we weren't cutting anything. We were just cutting up as a verb, like as acting out, as being silly. And so we had a great, we had a moment with our editor. And at the heart of what that is, that is play. We tried to, so many people have this misconception that play is what you do at recess, what you do on a sports team, what you're doing when you create art. And all of that is play itself.

[14:08]

But play, for some people, is this podcast. They're listening to this. They're laughing along. They're enjoying it. They're having a moment where they're not in the grind of the things, you know? And anytime that we can take the playfulness and drop it right into the middle of the grind, that just makes everything better.

[14:27]

Your mental health gets better. Your mood gets better. The people around you are more relaxed. Think about the meetings that you've been in, maybe the professional developments that you've been in. If it's somebody very serious standing at the front with their PowerPoint versus someone who has Play-Doh and crayons and markers on the table and some sticky notes and some candy. It's just a different vibe.

[14:50]

And we want that for our students. And we definitely want that for our staff developments because our teachers deserve it too.

[14:56] SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk about staff development a little bit, because often as adults, we get preoccupied with the serious adult things and think we have to approach them in serious adult ways. But you do PD for teachers, I've noticed on your website, that often breaks the mold on that. What do you do with teachers?

[15:10] SPEAKER_01:

I do that. I love, love, love working with teachers and helping them to not just think outside the box, but I often say destroy the box. One of my most requested staff developments is something called Destroy the Box. And the ideal behind that is to help teachers understand how trapped we all are in the box, that sometimes it won't even let us get out to play. So over the course of the workshop, I first have to show them how stuck they are in a box. I use a ruler to do that.

[15:43]

I won't tell you all my tricks, but I use a ruler to do that. And then we spend the rest of the time together, not just thinking outside the box, because when you think outside the box, guess what happens when you're done? You get back in the box. It's cozy in there. It's comfortable. It's familiar.

[16:01]

It's easier in the box because that's where your routine is. And when you destroy the box, your inhibitions go away, the playfulness floods, your creativity floods. And so that's one of my most favorite workshops to do with teachers. Sometimes I bring in costumes to my work. I'm 43 years old and I have six Rubbermaid tubs full of costumes. I'm not ashamed to say it because costumes do amazing things.

[16:28]

For a staff development, especially if you get a good group that's willing to participate, you know as well as I do, there's always a few. And same way with your kids. There's always a few whom you might have to coax along. But almost always, by the end, everybody's engaged. Everybody's into it. I'll tell you something, the high school teachers sometimes get a bad rap in that world that they don't want to participate.

[16:52]

But some of my most favorite memories of doing professional development have been for high schools that have just this really dynamic staff who are ready to go all in to do whatever it takes for their high school students. And if that means, you know, the football coach wearing a clown wig and a judge's robe and pretending he's the judge of all clowns and learning how to do writing from a different perspective, then that's what they do. And I love walking away from a staff development where people come up to me and say, you know, that was so different than anything we've ever had. You didn't even use a PowerPoint, you know? And no, I don't. I don't use PowerPoints a lot.

[17:29]

I got lots of information and I'll share all of it with you, but I just like to present it in more of a storytelling kind of way and experiential way than a slideshow.

[17:36] SPEAKER_00:

One of the insights of your book that really jumps out at me is that play is not just about the individual brain being activated or the individual person becoming more relaxed. It's also about relationships. Talk to us a little bit about how play influences relationships.

[17:54] SPEAKER_01:

We call up a lot our experience as a childhood, from childhood, to talk about that. I came from a pretty traumatic childhood. And so some of the relationships that I counted on most in my childhood were the relationships of my cousins. And what built the relationship of my cousins was the moments we played. It was there that, like I said in the beginning, that you learn how to treat each other fairly. You learned what each other's gifts were, what each other's talents were, skills were.

[18:31]

You learned empathy. You learn all of those things very quickly in a backyard game of kickball. with all the cousins that live on your street or the people from your neighborhood or the kids in your class. And it's not just in PE class or recess that you can do that. If you work on a group art project with recycled materials to build a civilization showing all the things that your group has learned about what makes a civilization tick in sixth grade, you know, in sixth grade standards, you can really learn a lot about your classmates. You can learn what they're good at, what they need help in, what they need support in.

[19:06]

And the more opportunities that we put in front of our kids like that, the more that builds. I'll tell you, the first time you do it, kids are going to argue. They might not get along, especially kids that aren't exposed to lots of playful learning at home or playful experiences at home. I mentioned Matt Johnson earlier. He's an assistant principal at a school here where we live. And he found that sometimes at recess, the kids just didn't know how to play even at recess.

[19:37]

So he he he developed something called guided recess, which literally like they had their free moments of play. But for five minutes at a time, they might blow a whistle and say, OK, everybody run to a location that they had predetermined on the playground. And they might have hula hoops set up or balls over here or and then they taught them how to play. And what happens is when you do that, that spills over into every other area of the curriculum. And it just builds the community. It builds a sense of relationships.

[20:11]

I can tell you it works for adults the same way. You go into a boardroom, if you will. Well, let me give you a real life situation. Several years ago, I was speaking to the Skate Conference here in South Carolina, South Carolina Association of Teacher Educators, all the people in higher ed who teach teachers how to be teachers, right? And I was a little intimidated to go speak at that group, to tell you the truth, because you have your preconceived notions of what those people in higher ed do or whatever, right? Right or wrong, you have those ideas.

[20:46]

And I thought, man, these folks aren't going to want to play with Play-Doh. They're not going to want to build sculptures out of tinfoil, you know, but they asked me to speak. So I brought those experiences. And at the beginning of our time together, it was a little bit like, what are we doing? But by the end, I brought them on board and the whole mood of the room had changed. It went from this quiet conference hall where everybody was sitting facing the front, ready for the speaker to deliver a PowerPoint, to tables laughing, joking, cutting up, discussing their learning.

[21:22]

They were bonding. They were engaged in a new way. And when you have teams that do that, when you have a faculty and staff that learn together in that way, it's amazing. I have another workshop that is called a class that laughs together, learns together, and talk about ways to infuse humor throughout your classroom. And when I do that workshop, Man, I love the way that staffs walk away from that with a sense of community and new relationships with the people they work with. I may use a whoopee cushion during that session and it's a lot of fun.

[21:53] SPEAKER_00:

I remember seeing when the challenge of building the tallest tower with the marshmallows and the spaghetti, dry spaghetti noodles, I was kind of making the rounds and just seeing the fun that people had doing something other than looking at slides, flipping through documents, making plans. The teamwork that comes out of That type of interaction is just hard to get any other way.

[22:15] SPEAKER_01:

It's the teamwork. It's also the creativity. In the book, I talk about referencing kickball or baseball. You want to play that in the backyard, but you don't have a bat. You don't have a ball. You don't have any bases.

[22:26]

What do you do? But we want to play baseball. Well, you find something that can substitute as a bat. You find something that can substitute as a ball. And then you look for trash laying around the neighborhood, pick it up, and those are your bases. Or if you got magnolia trees nearby, those leaves make really good bases because they're big enough to see.

[22:45]

You know, and magnolia trees are really it's a baseball game in a tree because you got the, you know, the seed pod. That could be your ball. Some of the branches that are lower, that could definitely be your bat. And then those big leaves. There you go. You know, I didn't mention that magnolia specifically in the book.

[23:03]

I just happen to think of that because I can see my neighbor's magnolia tree right now. So.

[23:07] SPEAKER_00:

So Jed, if you could have school leaders do one thing, school leaders everywhere, if you could get all of us in the profession to take a particular action to introduce more play into our classrooms, what would that be?

[23:20] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I'll tell you the number one thing that I hear from educators across the country when I work with them is that what they need more from their administrators than anything is permission to do this kind of work. They feel afraid that their administrators are going to think it's fluff, that they're going to think they're not focusing on test results, that they're not being academic enough. Rigor is a big word that people love to throw around. But play is all of that, and playful learning brings all of that into the classroom. I think teachers understand that, and they want to do that, but so many of them are waiting on permission from the administrators to do it. And so I think if I could wave a magic wand, everybody would listen after they heard this.

[24:10]

Of course, I want them to read the book, but more than anything, I want them to understand the concepts of the book and give educators in their buildings and districts permission to teach because play is powerful for all ages, not just the little kids. It's right on up to your seniors in high school. And of course, your higher ed and your staff development is for everybody.

[24:30] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is The Playful Classroom, The Power of Play for All Ages. Jed, if people want to find you on Twitter or find your website, where are the best places for them to go online?

[24:41] SPEAKER_01:

So my website is mrdairyberry.com and on Instagram and Twitter, I'm at Mr. Dairyberry. Hopefully you can spell it for them somewhere so they'll figure it out, figure out how to find it. But if you Google Jed Dairyberry, even if you spell Dairyberry funny, I'm probably the guy that would pop up. So I would love to connect with you on Instagram and Twitter.

[25:00]

And if you want to email me, mrdaryberry at gmail.com.

[25:02] SPEAKER_00:

Jed, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

[25:07] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.