Guided Play: Where Curricular Goals Meet a Playful Pedagogy

Abstract

Decades of research demonstrate that a strong curricular approach to preschool education is important for later developmental outcomes. Although these findings have often been used to support the implementation of educational programs based on direct instruction, we argue that guided play approaches can be equally effective at delivering content and are more developmentally appropriate in their focus on child-centered exploration. Guided play lies midway between direct instruction and free play, presenting a learning goal, and scaffolding the environment while allowing children to maintain a large degree of control over their learning. The evidence suggests that such approaches often outperform direct-instruction approaches in encouraging a variety of positive academic outcomes. We argue that guided play approaches are effective because they create learning situations that encourage children to become active and engaged partners in the learning process.

Full text

MIND, BRAIN, AND EDUCATION
Guided Play: Where Curricular
Goals Meet a Playful Pedagogy
Deena Skolnick Weisberg1, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek1, and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff2
ABSTRACT— Decades of research demonstrate that a strong
curricular approach to preschool education is important for
later developmental outcomes. Although these findings have
often been used to support the implementation of educational
programs based on direct instruction, we argue that guided
play approaches can be equally effective at delivering content
and are more developmentally appropriate in their focus on
child-centered exploration. Guided play lies midway between
direct instruction and free play, presenting a learning goal,
and scaffolding the environment while allowing children to
maintain a large degree of control over their learning. The
evidence suggests that such approaches often outperform
direct-instruction approaches in encouraging a variety of
positive academic outcomes. We argue that guided play
approachesareeffectivebecausetheycreatelearningsituations
that encourage children to become active and engaged partners
in the learning process.
Although many best practices remain to be elaborated, research
demonstrates that [the preschool] years lay a powerful foundation
for subsequent learning, and that they should be taken at least as
seriously as schooling in later years.
Hines, McCartney, Mervis, & Wible, 2011, p. 951
A growing body of evidence compellingly supports a
strong curricular approach for early education. Numerous
scientific studies affirm that academic and social experiences
in the preschool years are associated with school readiness
and later school outcomes in language and mathematics
(Campbell, Pungello, Miller-Johnson, Burchinal, & Ramey,
2001; Campbell & Ramey, 1994; Campbell, Ramey, Pungello,
Sparling, & Miller-Johnson, 2002; Reynolds, Ou, & Topitzes,
1Temple University
2University of Delaware
Address correspondence to Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Department
of Psychology, Temple University, 1701 North 13th St., Weiss Hall,
Philadelphia, PA 19122; e-mail: deena.weisberg@temple.edu.
2004; Schweinhart et al., 2004; Weikart, 1998; Zigler
& Bishop-Josef, 2006). The message from this body of
research is clear: A strong curricular agenda in preschool
fosters academic development, especially for low-income
children.
Early education should give children the tools they will need
to succeed academically in the later grades. But what is the best
way to achieve this goal? Addressing this question requires
that we distinguish between curriculum and pedagogy, that is,
between what is taught and how it is taught. The same content
can potentially be presented in a variety of different ways, and
the most effective strategy for teaching a particular topic or a
particular group of children may not work for a different topic
or a different group of children. Good teachers recognize these
facts and tailor their teaching strategies to the current topic
and audience, often combining elements of different methods.
Despite the undeniable necessity for this kind of flexibility
in the preschool classroom, an unfortunate recent trend is
the growing prevalence of preschool curricula and testing
materials that are oriented solely toward content-focused
education, particularly in reading and math (for review, see
Miller & Almon, 2009). The implementation of such curricula
often comes at the expense of other types of pedagogical
methods. In addition, discussions about preschool pedagogy
are often framed as a choice between extremes: The
preschool classroom should either present content directly
or allow children to play (Chien et al., 2010; Hirsh-Pasek &
Golinkoff, in press).
Given these trends, our goal in this article is to carve out
a middle ground and to bring guided play approaches to the
forefront of discussions about preschool education. We first
define this concept and distinguish it from other methods of
presenting content, then review evidence for its efficacy as
a teaching strategy in preschool. In closing, we explore why
guided play can be a powerful pedagogical tool.
WHAT IS GUIDED PLAY?
Two pedagogical methods often contrasted in preschool edu-
cation are direct instruction and free play. The former, as the name
©2013 The Authors
104 Journal Compilation ©2013 International Mind, Brain, and Education Society and Blackwell Publishing, Inc. Volume 7—Number 2

Deena Skolnick Weisberg et al.
implies, involves a teacher playing an active role in imparting
information to the students, who themselves are mostly
passive recipients. The latter occupies the opposite end of the
spectrum, with children retaining the ability to choose their
activities and focus without active guidance from a teacher.
Each of these methods supports learning within a preschool
classroom. For instance, free play is positively associated
with socio-emotional development (see Pagani, Fitzpatrick,
Archambault, & Janosz, 2010; Romano, Babchishin, Pagani, &
Kohen, 2010; Singer & Singer, 1990) and is related to positive
outcomes in language and literacy learning (e.g., Lillard
et al., 2013; Neuman & Roskos, 1992). And early research on
preschool and kindergarten program effectiveness suggests
that didactic pedagogies significantly improve academic skills
over traditional or ‘‘business-as-usual’’ methods (Carleson &
Francis, 2002; Engelmann & Brunner, 1995; Gersten, Darch,
& Gleason, 1988; Kamps et al., 2008; Stockard & Engelmann,
2008; Waldron-Soler et al., 2002). Indeed, children who
participated in the Didactic Instructional System for Teaching
and Reading (DISTAR) curriculum outperformed children in
the control and other experimental groups in reading, math,
and language, moving from the 20th percentile to near the 50th
percentile (Education Commission of the States, 1999; Ellis &
Fouts, 1993).
However, when specifically considering academic out-
comes, many findings support the claim that preschoolers
who engage in playful learning either match or outper-
form those who learn through direct instruction (for review,
see Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Berk, & Singer, 2009). By way
of example, Han, Moore, Vukelich and Buell (2010) found
that playful learning enhances vocabulary development in
low-income preschoolers relative to more didactic practices.
Alfieri, Brooks, Aldrich, and Tenenbaum (2010) reviewed 164
studies comparing discovery-based versus direct instruction
approaches to learning and found that assisted discovery
approaches trump the kind of learning that emerges from
more unassisted pedagogies. Research from our own labora-
tory suggests that children are better at learning the criterial
properties of geometric shapes like squares and triangles and
retaining this knowledge when they participate in activities
that are playful (Fisher, Hirsh-Pasek, Newcombe, & Golinkoff,
in press). In general, the evidence suggests that playful, child-
centered approaches that incorporate some degree of adult
scaffolding are more effective teaching strategies for achieving
academic outcomes with preschoolers than those involving
either direct instruction (Stipek, Feiler, Daniels, & Milburn,
1995) or free play in the absence of active adult guidance (Chien
et al., 2010; Honomichl & Chen, 2012; Lillard & Else-Quest,
2006; Lillard et al., 2013).
Given these findings, we argue that guided play offers
an appropriate middle-ground pedagogical approach for
preschool education. It allows for teaching rich content in a
way that incorporates elements of free play, discovery learning,
and traditional pedagogy. As a recent review of the literature
on the efficacy of pretend play for learning outcomes puts it,
...the lack of existing evidence that pretend play helps
development should not be taken as an allowance for
school programs to employ traditional teacher-centered
instructional approaches that research has clearly shown
are inferior for young children. The hands-on, child-driven
educational methods sometimes referred to as ‘playful
learning’ (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2009) are the most positive
means yet known to help young children’s development.
(Lillard et al., 2013)
So, what is guided play? What form does it take in
the classroom? Guided play sits between free play and
direct instruction. Although free play is notoriously hard
to define (Burghardt, 2011), most scientists agree that it
generally subsumes the following qualities: the activities are
fun, voluntary, flexible, involve active engagement, have no
extrinsic goals, involve active engagement of the child, and
often have an element of make-believe (Christie & Johnsen,
1983; Fisher, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Singer, & Berk, 2011;
Garvey, 1990; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 2003; Hirsh-Pasek
et al., 2009; Johnson, Christie, & Yawkey, 1999; Pellegrini,
2009; Sutton-Smith, 2001; Sutton-Smith & Kelly-Byrne, 1984).
These criteria emphasize those aspects of playful behavior that
are distinct from other forms of behavior, such as the fact that
it often seems divorced from reality at large. In addition, it
is important to note that these criteria are meant to apply to
all forms of play, including but not limited to pretend play,
construction play, exploratory play, and physical play. What
differentiates these forms of play from each other are the
different types of activities that children engage in: putting a
doll to sleep as opposed to building a block tower.
We further divide the conceptual space between free play
and no play by adding guided play, which incorporates adult-
scaffolded learning objectives but remains child-directed. In
guided play, adults initiate the learning process, constrain the
learning goals, and are responsible for maintaining focus on
these goals even as the child guides his or her own discovery.
This latter point is critical. While adults might initiate the
play sequence, children direct their own learning within the
play context. Thus, guided play is child-directed and can take
a number of paths within a play setting. In guided play,
teachers might enhance children’s exploration and learning by
commenting on their discoveries, co-playing along with the
children, asking open-ended questions about what children
are finding, or exploring the materials in ways that children
might not have thought to do (Ash & Wells, 2006; Berk &
Winsler, 1995; Callanan & Braswell, 2006; Callanan & Oakes,
1992; Copple, Sigel, & Saunders, 1979; Rogoff, 2003). These
kinds of situations embody a social-constructivist or assisted-
discovery approach that have proven effective for learning in
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both younger and older children (e.g., Chi, 2009; DeVries, Zan,
Hildebrandt, Edmiaston, & Sales, 2002; Honomichl & Chen,
2012; Tharp & Gallimore, 1991). Guided play always sees the
child as an active collaborator in the process of learning, and
not merely as a recipient of information.
Distinguishing guided play pedagogies from those employ-
ing direct instruction or free play is thus a matter of identifying
the roles of the adult and child in the situations. In direct
instruction, the teacher explicitly tells children things or asks
them to do things; she is the active agent, telling children what
they need to know or illustrating new concepts with little or
no room for children’s own efficacy. Both free and guided play
place the locus of control with the child. Because they are in
the lead, children are more likely to be active and engaged
with the situation than in a direct-instruction situation. In
free play, however, the adult’s role is passive, allowing chil-
dren to do as they would without interference. Although this
approach allows children the maximum amount of freedom, it
also means that children are likely to have difficulty achieving
the learning goal, because they are not being encouraged to
focus on the appropriate dimensions.
In contrast, the adult’s role in guided play is active, although
not dictatorial; the adult in a guided play situation might
initiate the play context but does not direct the play within
that context. Rather, the adult follows the child’s lead and
allows the child to engage in discovery within the context of a
prepared environment and with subtle scaffolding (see Ash &
Wells, 2006; Berk & Winsler, 1995; Callanan & Braswell, 2006;
Callanan & Oakes, 1992; Chi, 2009; Christie & Roskos, 2006;
Copple, Sigel, & Saunders, 1979; Mayer, 2004; Rogoff, 2003).
The focal concepts are more likely to be apparent to children
in these situations than in free-play situations, because the
adult helps them to zero in on the key variables. The concepts
are also more likely to be meaningful to children in these
situations than in direct-instruction situations, because they
are participating in the discovery process rather than having
it dictated by an adult. Children who learn through guided
play are thus actively engaged with a meaningful learning goal
(Chi, 2009; see also Honomichl & Chen, 2012).
For example, a teacher with the goal of teaching new
vocabulary words could take a direct instruction approach, by
telling children the meanings of the new words they encounter
in a storybook or by showing examples: ‘‘This is a helmet.A
helmet goes on your head to stop your head from getting
hurt if you fall off your bike.’’ Or, she could take a guided-
play approach, introducing the new words in the context of
a child’s play episode while encouraging children to think
broadly about the word’s meaning: ‘‘She’s got a helmet on while
riding her bike. What do you think would happen if she fell
off her bike and wasn’t wearing her helmet?’’ The difference
between these two approaches is not in the learning goal
or even necessarily in whether aspects of playful behavior
are included—direct instruction could encourage children to
pretend they’re wearing a helmet, for example. Rather, the
crucial distinction between direct instruction and guided play
is in who has control over the situation and who gets to decide
on the next step on the path of discovery. In guided play, there
is collaboration between the teacher and the child, with the
child’s interests in the foreground; in direct instruction, the
teacher is in charge.
THE EFFECTIVENESS OF LEARNING FROM GUIDED
PLAY
When considering the preschool environment, research from
the science of learning suggests that guided play approaches
provide a developmentally appropriate pedagogy that offers
children a focused approach to learning (e.g., Burts, Hart,
Charlesworth, & Kirk, 1990; Burts et al., 1992; Hirsh-Pasek,
1991; Love, Ryer, & Faddis, 1992; Marcon, 1993, 1999;
Schweinhart, Barnes, & Weikart, 1993; for reviews, see Alfieri
et al., 2010; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2009; Lillard & Else-Quest,
2006). More specifically, pedagogical techniques involving
child-centered playful learning have been shown to boost
young children’s academic development, leading to improve-
ments in reading and math scores, and these advantages last
into the primary grades (e.g., Marcon, 1999, 2002; Stipek et al.,
1998). Children exposed to guided play pedagogies also have
increased motivation for school (Hirsh-Pasek, 1991; Stipek
et al., 1995). There is even some evidence that children in
programs using a playful pedagogical approach show better
executive function skills, such as inhibitory control, working
memory, and cognitive flexibility (Diamond, Barnett, Thomas,
& Munro, 2007), although these findings have recently been
challenged (Farran, Wilson, Lipsey, & Turner, 2012).
Most importantly for the current purposes, guided play has
been shown to lead to better academic outcomes. In the Han,
Moore, Vukelich, and Buell (2010) study mentioned above,
a guided play intervention increased vocabulary scores in an
at-risk population. Two groups of preschoolers participated
in an interactive book reading activity that was designed to
teach new words. In both cases, the intervention lasted for
30 minutes and was performed twice per week for two months.
One group of children received the teaching protocol for the
entire 30 minutes. The other group received the protocol for
20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes in which they engaged in
guided play about the new words. Children in both groups
made gains in their expressive vocabulary, but the group
who had received the play intervention gained significantly
more than children in the no-play group (see also Bellin &
Singer, 2006; Christie & Enz, 1992; Dickinson & Tabors, 2001;
Pellegrini & Galda, 1990; Roskos, Tabors, & Lenhart, 2009).
These results are notable for two reasons: First, this study was
done with at-risk children, for whom learning new vocabulary
is a particularly important challenge (Hart & Risley, 1995;
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Deena Skolnick Weisberg et al.
Walker, Greenwood, Hart, & Carta, 1994). Second, the play
group outperformed the no-play group despite having had less
overall instruction about the new words. This latter point
strongly implies that taking time to include guided play in
preschool classrooms can have positive effects on academic
outcomes.
Guided play can also encourage learning of mathematical
andspatial skills (Ferrara, Hirsh-Pasek, Newcombe, Golinkoff,
& Lam, 2011; Fisher, Hirsh-Pasek et al., in press; Levine, Ratliff,
Huttenlocher, & Cannon, 2012; Ramani & Siegler, 2008). For
example, playing board games that have a numerical element
positively impacts young children’s mathematical knowledge
(Ramani & Siegler, 2008; Siegler & Ramani, 2008), especially
when these games are constructed in a linear fashion, so as to
highlight parallels with the number line (Siegler & Ramani,
2009). In another study, parents who engaged in a guided
play intervention with their children while constructing with
blocks used significantly more spatial language (e.g., words
like ‘‘over’’ and ‘‘between’’) than parents who played with pre-
assembled block structures with their children or who played
freely with their children and the same materials (Ferrara et al.,
2011).
In addition to encouraging positive outcomes in young
children’s academic skills, pedagogies based on guided play
have positive impacts on their socio-emotional development,
leading to better emotion regulation and less stress (Burts
et al., 1992), as well as to decreases in problem behaviors
(Marcon, 1994, 1999, 2003). For example, a random assign-
ment study with children in a head start program found that
children’s ability to improve their self-regulation and related
skills was advantaged when they engaged in a playful peda-
gogy as opposed to direct instruction (Ogan & Berk, 2009).
Children assigned to a supported play intervention showed
clear post-test advantages over children in a directed training
intervention in their planning skills and in tasks that required
suppressing, initiating, and controlling their behavior. In
addition, during free play, children in the supported play group
spent more time engaged in make-believe and less time unoc-
cupied, compared to children in the directed training group.
Because scores on tests of self-regulation at 3–5 years predict
reading and math achievement from kindergarten through
high school (Blair & Razza, 2007; Duncan et al., 2007; Gath-
ercole, Tiffany, Briscoe, & Thorn, 2005), the group differences
reflected here are particularly impressive and important.
Some recent work suggests that a playful learning approach
can additionally boost creative thinking and problem-solving
abilities (Fisher, Glazek et al., in preparation). In this study,
4–6-year-olds interacted with household objects (e.g., pieces
of aluminum foil, pipe cleaners) and a play mat depicting
a river and a forest in three conditions. In the free play
condition, the experimenter encouraged children to interact
with these materials in any way they wished. In the guided
play condition, the experimenter asked open-ended questions
to facilitate children’s explorations of the properties of the
materials (e.g., ‘‘What can we do with this?’’, ‘‘How are
these different?’’) and introduced a problem to be solved
(‘‘How can the bear get across the river to see his friend?’’),
but without providing answers or problem solutions. In the
explicit instruction condition, the experimenter described
the properties of the materials (e.g., ‘‘These are different
because ...’’) and demonstrated how to use them to solve
the problem (getting the bear across the river).
All children then participated in two tests. The first,
designed to be a near-transfer task, provided children with a
new set of objects and an analogous problem: A turtle needs
to get over the forest to see a friend on the other side. The
second test gave children yet another set of objects and asked
them to provide as many uses as they could think of for
each one (a version of the creative uses task). Fisher, Glazek
et al. (in preparation) found that children in the guided play
condition provided more and more flexible solutions in the
near-transfer task than children in the other two conditions.
They also provided more uses in the creative uses task than
children in the other two conditions. These results indicate
that guided play can encourage children to have flexible and
creative interactions with objects, and is superior at setting
the stage for these kinds of interactions than either explicit
instruction or free play.
Interestingly, the converse also seems to be true: The use
of direct instruction in the face of a novel toy or problem
can limit exploration and learning (Bonawitz et al., 2011). In
this study, preschoolers saw a new toy that had four hidden
functions, and were then given the opportunity to explore
the toy freely. What differed across conditions was the way
in which the toy was first introduced to the child. In the
pedagogical condition, an experimenter demonstrated one of
the object’s hidden functions. In the interrupted condition,
the experimenter also demonstrated a single function but
then excused herself to go write something down, implying
that the object had more functions. In the na¨
ıve condition,
the experimenter pretended that she didn’t know anything
about the object and then accidentally discovered one of its
functions. In the baseline condition, the experimenter looked
at the object but did not interact with it all. Results from
this study show that children in the pedagogical condition
explored less, made fewer different kinds of actions, and
spent more time on the demonstrated function than children
in the other three conditions, which didn’t differ from each
other. More importantly, children in the pedagogical condition
discovered fewer of the objects’ other hidden functions than
did children in the other three conditions. These differences
lead the researchers to conclude that pedagogy is effective, but
can also limit exploration by sending the message that the only
thing that can be done with this object is what the instructor
demonstrated. Although this study did not explicitly include
a guided condition, these results strongly imply that direct
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Guided Play
instruction is, in the words of these researchers, a ‘‘double-
edged sword’’ (see also Gopnik, 2012).
Further, some evidence suggests that children participating
in curricula that are based on principles of direct instruction
show more inattention and stress behaviors, less confidence in
theirown abilities, less enjoyment of challenging tasks, and less
end-of-year progress in motor, language, and social skills when
compared with peers in playful-learning classrooms. And these
disadvantages last through elementary school, leading these
children to have poorer study habits, lower degrees of academic
achievement, and greater levels of distractibility, hyperactiv-
ity, and peer aggression (e.g., Burts et al., 1992; Hart et al., 1998;
Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 2003; Singer & Singer, 2005).
These results do not imply that there is never a time or place
for direct instruction. But they do encourage us to consider
why guided play is such an effective pedagogical method for
preschool-aged children, and how it is able to achieve the ben-
efits outlined above. We take up this issue in the next section.
WHY AND HOW DOES IT WORK?
Children learn best in active, engaged, constructive and
interactive environments (e.g., Chi, 2009), when the material
they are learning is meaningful to them (Hirsh-Pasek et al.,
2009), and when they receive consequential feedback and
probing questions (Honomichl & Chen, 2012). By putting
their interests and needs at the forefront of the learning
process, by giving some feedback and direction toward the
relevant dimensions, and by allowing children to be active
partners, guided play is able to keep children engaged. As
Diamond and Lee (2011) write in their review of education
programs which successfully train executive function skills,
programs that focus on content with an eye toward a more
playful pedagogy ‘‘tend to reduce stress in the classroom;
cultivate joy, pride, and self-confidence; and foster social
bonding; all of which support efforts to improve [executive
function skills] and academic achievement’’ (p. 963).
In addition, guided play contributes to children’s self-
efficacy as learners by letting them direct the learning within
the play context and by presenting opportunities that invite
active participation and engagement. This is unlike direct
instruction, in which children’s attention is manipulated by
a teacher and does not emerge from their own interests. It is
also unlike free play, in which the learning goals may be not
be clear enough to the child to limit his or her exploratory
behavior in effective ways. Essentially, learning is a case of
narrowing the parameters to which one should pay attention.
By creating environments that help children to focus on
those elements that are relevant to the learning goal, guided
play reduces distraction, which has been shown to hinder
learning (Barr, Shuck, Salerno, Atkinson, & Linebarger, 2010;
Chiong & DeLoache, in press; Parish-Morris, Hirsh-Pasek,
Golinkoff, Collins, & Mahajan, under review ; Uttal, Scudder,
& DeLoache, 1997). What guided play does, ultimately, is to
organically encourage children to focus on the dimensions of
relevance to the current learning goal.
We offer the term mise en place, borrowed from the French
culinary tradition, to capture this aspect of guided play.
Literally translated, this phrase means ‘‘to put in place,’’ but
has come to mean something closer to ‘‘everything in its
place.’’ When applied to the kitchen, it refers to the way in
which cooks organize all of their ingredients and tools into
their proper places before starting a dish, so that they have
everything on hand and at the ready for whatever they are
planning to make. The kitchen mise en place in some ways
determines what a cook can make at any given time and
also how well and easily it can be made. When applied to
human contexts in general, we mean the term to describe
the properties of the total environment that simultaneously
enable certain kinds of events to occur and constrain actors’
available options for what to do next.
Aparticularmise consists of the set of abstract features of
the environment that create a mindset in the actors within that
environment. These abstract features can be any number of
things, including the physical properties of the environment,
the way in which people interact with and react to each other,
and, of course, the interplay between these features. These
environmental features combine to constrain people’s actions
within the setting, enabling certain sorts of attitudes and
reactive strategies to come to the fore (for related concepts,
see broken windows theory, Kelling & Wilson, 1982; niche
construction in human cognitive evolution, Sterelny, 2012; the
Lucifer effect, Zimbardo, 2007).
Using this theoretical framework, we posit that what makes
guided play effective is the mise that it creates, which affects
children’s mindsets for the better and encourages them to bring
the right kinds of cognitive tools to the situation. In guided
play, the adult sets the mise for a particular play context, and
the child then directs his or her learning within that context
with adult support. By making children feel comfortable
enough to explore and to spontaneously ask questions, while
simultaneously limiting their options in service of a learning
goal,guidedplaytakesadvantageofchildren’snaturalresponse
tendencies to successfully scaffold their learning. By contrast,
environments in which direct instruction dominates set up a
different mise for preschoolers, one that implicitly encourages
children not venture to far from the specific learning goal at
hand (e.g., Bonawitz et al., 2011).
The mise enplace concept can thus help us to understand why
and how pedagogical strategies or combinations of strategies
work effectively under certain circumstances. When consid-
ering preschool education, we believe guided play presents a
superior teaching method, for the reasons outlined above. But a
more directly instructional approach has been shown to trump
free play and exploration for some learning outcomes, such as
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Deena Skolnick Weisberg et al.
science learning in older children (e.g., Chen & Klahr, 1999;
Klahr&Nigam,2004;Klahr,Zimmerman,&Jirout,2011;Lorch
etal.,2010).Why?Wearguethatwhatisneededinanylearning
situation is the ability of the learner to focus on the dimensions
of interest to the current learning goal and to extract the rele-
vantinformation from the environment. While guided play sets
up the right mise for allowing preschool children to do so, direct
instruction can be more effective at establishing these con-
straints for those children who are accustomed to schooling or
who have already established a suite of ‘‘learning to learn’’ tools
(see also Fuson & Burghardt, 2003; Marulis & Neuman, 2010).
So our answer to the question of why guided play works,
perhaps surprisingly, is that there isn’t anything necessarily
special about either play in general or guided play in particular
that does the work of conveying the academic and cognitive
benefits reviewed above. Rather, guided play can be thought
of as a metaphor for any type of learning that encourages a
learner to be an active and engaged partner in the learning
process and that provides a constrained way for helping
children focus on the outcomes of interest. It is effective
because it invites the learner in, implicitly asking for his or
her engagement in a way that directly imparting the same
information does not. It is a format that utilizes the best
practices of the science of learning to date by offering a
context in which active, engaged, interactive, and meaningful
experiences coalesce, thus providing a fertile pedagogy for
optimizing learning. Guided play may be the most common
or easiest way to achieve this format in preschool, but we are
not committed to it being the only way to do so.
CONCLUSION
The evidence suggests that preschool children benefit from a
curriculum that is structured and rich in cognitive stimulation.
Such an approach leads not only to gains in content knowledge
and school readiness skills, but also to gains in some of the
less obvious areas of development such as self-regulation,
motivation, and creativity. As Kagan and Lowenstein (2004)
argue, ‘‘The literature is clear: Diverse strategies that combine
play and more structured efforts are effective accelerators of
children’s readiness for school and long term development’’
(p. 72). We humbly submit that guided play, with its focus on
children’s own efficacy and exploration, provides the model
for precisely this kind of pedagogy, making it uniquely well
suited to conferring academic benefits to preschool children.
Acknowledgments—The authors would like to thank Jerome
Bruner, three anonymous reviewers, and all of the members of
the Temple Infant and Child Lab for their helpful comments.
This work was supported by the Institute of Education
Sciences (R305A110128).
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