Understanding Play

Our first sessions on understanding play completely shifted my perspective on what happens inside a primary classroom. Defining "play" has always felt abstract but learning Maria Montessori’s concept that "Play is child’s work" and Jean Piaget's view that "Play is the work of children" grounded it perfectly for me. It made me realize that play isn't just a reward or "free time" given after real learning is done, it is the learning. During our think pair share activity, I shared a childhood memory with my partner about climbing trees and building makeshift houses with blankets. That play was entirely intrinsically motivated and process oriented and we didn't care about an end-product, but we just loved the doing.                        

However, looking at our current Bhutanese educational landscape, I felt a deep sense of retrospective worry during our slide discussion on modern classrooms. In Bhutan, adults heavily pressure children to master alphabets and numbers early on. As a result, we are wearing out our young learners with "drill-and-kill" activities. When an activity is completely dictated, monitored, and evaluated by an adult, it ceases to be play.

The sources emphasize that children distinguish between work and play based on specific emotional and environmental cues. Emotional cues include the degree of choice and how "easy" or voluntary an activity feels. Environmental cues involve the location of the activity and whether an adult is present to evaluate the outcome. This distinction is crucial for my future practice. If I, as an educator, am the one constantly initiating and directing the "play," it ceases to be play for the child.  Seeing the images of children hunched over notebooks in a traditional classroom setting served as a stark reminder of the "Not Play" environment we must strive to change. 

As a future primary teacher, this is my biggest takeaway: I need to step back from rigid, lecture-heavy teaching. I want to intentionally design "purposeful play" by creating environments where learning objectives are met through child-initiated, joyful, and culturally relevant activities.