The Learning that Lies Between Play and Academics
By: David Alexander

The increasing emphasis on student achievement and mastery test scores has many after-school programs struggling with the demand to improve academics and offer homework assistance, while also offering a well-balanced program that provides plenty of opportunities for play and social interaction.

What can quality after-school programs do to encourage learning, while not creating an overly academic climate? The answer lies, in part, in project-based activities, activities that stand between play and academics and combine the best of both.

Learning Through Project-Based Activities
Unlike the rather serendipitous learning that can occur through play, project-based activities can provide more intentional and planned learning experiences, while still offering many of the attractive qualities of play.

Play is typically internally shaped by the child, while project-based activities are more externally shaped by program leaders. These activities are open-ended, challenging and experimental in nature. Additionally, they can build on and further children’s learning in a stimulating and creative way, thus maintaining the positives associated with play, while also helping children develop new skills and learn new information.

Project-based activities generally share these seven qualities.

1. The project is usually stated as an open-ended (“there are many ways to do it and many potential outcomes”) challenge to the children, which encourages many child-originated ideas.

Example: “Using fewer than 10 feet of masking tape and 100 paper straws, design a bridge that will span these two tables and hold the weight of the tape dispenser. Test to see if plastic straws are better than paper ones for building. Try wooden coffee stirrers instead of straws.”

2. The best projects have well-described variables, boundaries and the possible directions. The project above is a good example of this type of activity.

3. Projects can be done privately or collaboratively.

Example: “By yourself or with a friend, find the dirtiest place in this room and prove it by using sampling techniques.”

4. The project is so well chosen that every child, young or old, can start off with a sense that they can be successful and can use the skills and understanding they already have--along with varying degrees of instruction and assistance--to meet the challenge of the task.

Example: Creating and publishing a newspaper for the after-school program.

5. The adults have sequenced and organized the project and have some sense of the project tasks and what it takes for children to access them successfully.

Example: Designing sleeping bags. Locating the materials. Learning how to sew. Finding appropriate city location. Taking the sleeping bags to the homeless.

6. As in peeling and opening an orange, children’s involvement in the project helps them really understand and uncover all the layers and major concepts of the project.

Example: Planning, organizing and implementing a center track meet requires children to consider everything from when, where, who, how, rules, spectators, prizes, publicity, materials needed, classes of runners, etc.

7. There is depth to the project or study because of the many directions children can explore.

Example: The “building bridges from weak materials” project can include comparing paper with plastic straws, experimenting with clay and newspaper as construction materials, looking at bridge designs in the city, interviewing architects, looking in magazines for bridge photos, reading stories about famous bridges in the United States, watching videos on making straw bridges in Guatemala, and discussing what the expression “don’t burn your bridges too soon” means.

Children typically enjoy these project-based experiences so much that while they are involved in the planning and designing, the risk taking and the collaboration, and the delight with the job being done well, it may look like play to an adult onlooker. As in play, children will get bright-eyed and excited as they realize they have an idea for how to meet the project challenges. They solicit their peers to join them in implementing an idea. They are industriously busy and perhaps noisy in their involvement. However, the tasks associated with the project require a different kind of cognitive rigor than play requires. The children also need a different kind of involvement on the staff’s part than is needed during play.

The Role of After-School Staff in Project-Based Activities
In project work, the learner is often challenged to think about something in new or unfamiliar ways. Students in a project-based activity program are suspended in a complex and fluid body of ideas. Adults can guide them through choosing among those ideas and to experience the challenge and hard work of engineering their own necessary bridges to understanding these new ideas. Part of that bridge building includes the adult helping or assisting the child to do what he/she cannot do until they can do it for themselves. Of course, the level of needed intervention will vary. The child who is self-assured and confident of his/her ideas will need less intervention than the child who needs structure and instruction.

Key components of adult involvement in successful project-based activities include:

* Encouraging the child to talk about what they are planning

* Helping to break the project task down into manageable or doable chunks of activity

* If need be, suggesting routes the child might take to accomplish a task

* Supporting and applauding the child’s efforts

* Giving hints when the child attempts to take over the task but gets stuck

All of this requires much more adult intervention than the activities generally associated with any kind of play. It also involves more preparation than supervising children on the playground and more creativity than helping answer questions about multiplication for children completing worksheets. Project-based activities can be worth the effort, both in terms of children’s enjoyment and learning, but they do require more from staff.

Whether it’s a project-based after-school program filled with challenging invitations for children, a community service program or a play-and-teach program, the reality is that children learn to solve problems by solving problems. They learn to read by read; they learn to compute by computing; and they learn to plan and implement a plan by planning and implementing plans.

After-school programs that offer project-based experiences where children can and need to read, compute and problem solve; children can both imitate and be instructed; children can convert that instruction into mastery and understanding; children can spend time around staff who consistently recognize that there is much to learn and many ways to do it; provide an enriching, supportive atmosphere that complements and furthers the learning that occurs during the regular school day and links appropriately with children’s play are focusing on the importance of project-based activities.

David Alexander is a project associate for the National Institute on Out-of-School Time.