Guided Play: Principles and Practices

Abstract

Competing trends in early childhood education emphasize the need for strong curricular approaches and for unfettered exploration. We propose an approach to early learning that avoids this false dichotomy: guided play. Guided play takes advantage of children’s natural abilities to learn through play by allowing them to express their autonomy within a prepared environment and with adult scaffolding. We provide examples of how guided-play situations have been implemented in past work, as well as evidence that guided play is successful for education across a range of content—perhaps even more successful than other pedagogical approaches.

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Current Directions in Psychological
Science
2016, Vol. 25(3) 177 –182
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DOI: 10.1177/0963721416645512
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A recent article in Forbes magazine posed a question that
has always captivated entrepreneurs, business leaders,
and politicians: What is the key to prosperity? The arti-
cle’s answer was simple: play (Townsend, 2014). A grow-
ing body of literature from developmental psychology
and education science reinforces this conclusion (see
Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Berk, & Singer, 2008). For exam-
ple, at-risk children who attend play-based preschools
are significantly less likely to later be arrested for a felony
or suspended from work than children who attend pre-
schools without an emphasis on play (Schweinhart,
Barnes, & Weikart, 1993).
Although results like these suggest that play may sup-
port the growth of a variety of abilities, this work is pri-
marily correlational (Lillard et al., 2013). Therefore, it is
important to temper enthusiasm for play with consider-
ations of what play cannot do. Giving children unstruc-
tured time to explore may indeed boost their social and
self-regulatory abilities, but pedagogy of some kind is
necessary to encourage the growth of knowledge and
critical-thinking skills. Put simply, children cannot learn
letter–sound pairings or addition by running around on a
playground, even if that playground is covered in letters
and numbers. Strong curricular approaches thus have
value in teaching children the skills they need to start
school (Campbell, Pungello, Miller-Johnson, Burchinal, &
Ramey, 2001; Schweinhart et al., 2005).
Unfortunately, the issue of the proper role of play in
early education has too often been framed as a false
dichotomy between learning and play (Clements &
Sarama, 2014; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 2011). Discussing
early education in these terms masks the fact that each
approach has some merit. Here, we advocate for a mid-
dle ground: guided play, which melds exploration and
child autonomy with the best elements of teacher-guided
instruction (Fisher, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Singer, &
Berk, 2010; Weisberg, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2013).
What Is Guided Play?
Guided play refers to learning experiences that combine
the child-directed nature of free play with a focus on
learning outcomes and adult mentorship. Children thrive
when they engage in free play, which involves active
engagement and is fun, voluntary, and flexible (Burghardt,
645512CDPXXX10.1177/0963721416645512Weisberg et al.Guided Play
research-article2016
Corresponding Author:
Deena Weisberg, Department of Psychology, University of
Pennsylvania, 3720 Walnut St., Solomon Labs, Philadelphia, PA 19104
E-mail: deena.weisberg@psych.upenn.edu
Guided Play: Principles and Practices
Deena Skolnick Weisberg1, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek2,3,
Roberta Michnick Golinkoff4, Audrey K. Kittredge5,
and David Klahr6
1Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania; 2Department of Psychology, Temple University;
3Brookings Institution, Washington, DC; 4School of Education, University of Delaware; 5Faculty of Education,
University of Cambridge; and 6Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
Competing trends in early childhood education emphasize the need for strong curricular approaches and for unfettered
exploration. We propose an approach to early learning that avoids this false dichotomy: guided play. Guided play
takes advantage of children’s natural abilities to learn through play by allowing them to express their autonomy within
a prepared environment and with adult scaffolding. We provide examples of how guided-play situations have been
implemented in past work, as well as evidence that guided play is successful for education across a range of content—
perhaps even more successful than other pedagogical approaches.
Keywords
cognitive development, guided play, education, early childhood
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178 Weisberg et al.
2011). But for reaching specific learning goals, some
adult support is necessary. Guided play thus has two key
elements: child autonomy and adult guidance. This
makes it engaging, but with the advantage of focusing
the child on the dimensions of interest for a learning
objective.
Guided play can take two forms. In one, adults design
the setting to highlight a learning goal while ensuring
that children have autonomy to explore within that
setting. For example, high-quality museum exhibits teach
visitors while allowing them to explore as they like.
Research suggests that children’s relatively free explora-
tion with a restricted set of materials can lead to learning
(Cook, Goodman, & Schulz, 2011; van Schijndel, Visser,
van Bers, & Raijmakers, 2015).
The second form of guided play occurs when adults
watch child-directed activities and make comments,
encourage children to question, or extend children’s
interests. For example, 4- to 8-year-olds at a Chicago
Children’s Museum exhibit were asked to build a sturdy
skyscraper to highlight principles of engineering. When
adults asked open-ended questions while the children
were building (e.g., “What is this for?”), children learned
more and could transfer their knowledge to a new struc-
ture (Haden, Cohen, Uttal, & Marcus, 2016). Another
example comes from a study that trained instructors to
reinforce the meanings of new words in a play session.
Adults augmented children’s play by inserting definitions
for concepts when children’s attention was naturally
focused on those concepts. For example, they might
teach the word below as a child decided to make a dragon
fly over a toy castle (Toub et al., 2015).
These examples illustrate how sensitivity to children’s
attention and engagement within the flow of an activity
allows for the accomplishment of a learning goal. In
guided play, adult scaffolding focuses the child toward the
pedagogical goal without usurping child autonomy. Allow-
ing children to lead ensures that they are intrinsically moti-
vated to learn. If children feel that they are doing an
activity only because an adult wants them to, or because
they want to earn a reward, then they can feel prodded or
bribed and lose interest (Lepper & Henderlong, 2000).
Guided play emphasizes the need for keeping the activity
engaging from the child’s point of view (Ramani, 2012),
because children learn best when they are active and
involved (Chi, 2009; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015). Importantly,
adult guidance is just as crucial. Without it, even older
children might struggle to learn some types of content,
because demands of the learning context may exceed
their capacities for encoding and storing relevant informa-
tion (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006).
In brief, guided play takes place in a constrained envi-
ronment with scaffolding that allows adults’ expertise to
inform children’s independent choices. We crucially
emphasize that guided play leaves the locus of control
with the child, allowing for self-directed exploration
while enhancing learning and genuine enjoyment. The
adult’s role is to prepare the environment and use open-
ended prompting to encourage the child toward the
learning goal, but children must navigate their own path
through the learning context. Maintaining this balance
between child leadership and adult scaffolding is the
essence of guided play’s successful formula for learning
(Honomichl & Chen, 2012; Weisberg et al., 2013). This
approach takes its inspiration from Lev Vygotsky, who
championed the idea of teaching at each child’s “zone of
proximal development”: the level at which each child is
most ready to develop new skills. Our goals here are to
clarify exactly how we think this kind of teaching should
be implemented and to provide evidence that it works
for preschool and early elementary education.
The Efficacy of Guided Play:
Four Key Examples
Many studies have illustrated the efficacy of a guided-
play approach. Some were reviewed in a recent meta-
analysis of learning in children, adolescents, and adults,
which aggregated the results of 164 earlier investigations
( Alfieri, Brooks, Aldrich, & Tenenbaum, 2011). This anal-
ysis found that “enhanced discovery” (analogous to
guided play) led to better outcomes than other types of
learning. Here we present four detailed examples illus-
trating this claim in young children.
In one example, Sobel and Sommerville (2010) showed
4-year-olds a machine with colored lights, which could
be activated with buttons. All children had to figure out
which lights would turn on at the same time. Some of the
children played with the box first and then observed the
experimenter press each button once and narrate his
action (discovery condition). Other children engaged in
these two phases in reverse, first observing the experi-
menter and then playing with the box (confirmation con-
dition). Children learned how the lights worked better in
the discovery condition than the confirmation condition.
Acting on a toy to discover how it works thus leads to
better learning compared to playing with a toy merely to
confirm what has been shown. This suggests that partici-
pating in active discovery allows children to benefit more
from adult teaching (see Schwartz, Chase, Oppezzo, &
Chin, 2011, for an analogous result with adult learners).
The second study directly investigated different strate-
gies for teaching preschoolers the properties of various
shapes, such as triangles (Fisher, Hirsh-Pasek, Newcombe,
& Golinkoff, 2013). To understand triangles, children
must learn that every figure with three sides and three
angles is a triangle, even if it is not an iconic equilateral
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Guided Play 179
triangle. Each child received a set of bendable sticks that
could be used to construct shapes and a set of cards
depicting shapes. These cards presented two different
types of shapes: typical (e.g., equilateral triangles) and
atypical (e.g., triangles with one very wide internal
angle). Children saw these materials in one of three con-
ditions. In the free-play condition, children could do
whatever they wished with the cards and construction
sticks without direction from the experimenter. In the
didactic-instruction condition, the experimenter acted as
an explorer discovering the properties of each type of
shape while the child passively watched. In the guided-
play condition, the experimenter invited the child to
explore with her and to discover the shapes’ properties.
After this training phase, children were asked to select
only the real triangles from a set of typical shapes, atypi-
cal shapes, and non-shapes. Children in both the guided-
play and didactic-instruction conditions learned better
than children in the free-play condition. But children in
the guided-play condition were significantly better at
transferring their knowledge to atypical shapes compared
to children in the didactic-instruction condition. Chil-
dren’s active participation in discovery, combined with
appropriate scaffolding from a knowledgeable adult,
allowed them to better understand the important features
of the shapes (see also Sim & Xu, 2015).
Guided play can also allow children to generate their
own learning opportunities that go beyond adult teach-
ing. In our third example, 4- to 6-year-olds saw a toy that
had several functions (e.g., pushing a button turned on a
light; pressing a lever played music). When adults dem-
onstrated only one of these functions, children’s later free
play concentrated on the demonstrated function. When
adults seemed to happen on the function by accident,
however, children’s later free play revealed more experi-
mentation with the toy’s full range of functions (Bonawitz
et al., 2011). Guided play may thus enhance the discov-
ery of undemonstrated functions, whereas direct instruc-
tion may inhibit this kind of exploration. Importantly,
teachers can scaffold self-directed exploration in other
ways, such as by hinting at other ways to explore after
providing a demonstration (Kittredge, Klahr, & Fisher,
2013) or by asking pedagogical questions (Landrum,
Bonawitz, Omar, Bamforth, & Shafto, 2015).
These examples suggest that guided play offers an
effective alternative to direct instruction when there is a
learning goal in mind. But finding an optimal balance
between self-discovery and adult guidance is a serious
challenge, because it heavily depends on the target con-
cepts. As children get older and the contexts for learning
become more complex, children might not be able to
fully discover causal relations without increases in explicit
instruction. Klahr and Nigam (2004) directly tested this
hypothesis with a group of third and fourth graders as
they learned to design simple experiments in a science
lesson. After an initial period of exploration, children in
the direct-instruction condition saw a teacher perform
experiments and explain why each experiment was good
or bad for determining the effect of some variable. Chil-
dren in the discovery condition were asked to design
experiments that would reveal each variable’s effect with-
out any further guidance.
We acknowledge that there is some ambiguity about
the precise label that should be applied to these two
conditions (Klahr, 2013), especially since this direct-
instruction condition was similar in some respects to
Sobel and Sommerville’s (2010) discovery condition. But
the most relevant aspect of this study is that, on a difficult
far-transfer task in which they were asked to make richer
scientific judgments, the few children who discovered
experimentation strategies on their own performed no
better than the many who learned it from direct instruc-
tion (see also Chen & Klahr, 1999). For learning this chal-
lenging procedure, it is difficult to design an environment
that will ensure that children attend to the critical features
of the learning goal without more adult scaffolding. Such
studies remind us that the balance between adult scaf-
folding and self-direction can and should shift depending
on the learners’ abilities and the learning goals.
These four studies, taken together, show that a combina-
tion of children’s self-directed participation and adult
scaffolding creates a powerful pedagogical approach for
learning in young children. More importantly, these studies
demonstrate that there is a vast pedagogical space between
the stark dichotomy of free play and direct instruction.
Why Is Guided Play Effective?
Guided play offers an exemplary pedagogy because it
respects children’s autonomy and their pride in discov-
ery. It thus may help to cultivate children’s love of learn-
ing, promoting their engagement while offering support
for knowledge acquisition. In this way, guided play cre-
ates the right mise en place—a confluence of environ-
mental and psychological factors that gently shape not
only the desired outcomes in learning but also a more
positive attitude toward learning itself (Weisberg, Hirsh-
Pasek, Golinkoff, & McCandliss, 2014).
The mise en place constructed in guided play can also
explain why these environments are successful at convey-
ing learning goals. For example, in the shapes study dis-
cussed above, having both typical and atypical shapes
present sparked comparisons between different types of
triangles. Different features of objects thus encourage dif-
ferent kinds of interactions, which in turn set the stage for
deeper kinds of learning. Similarly, the encouragement to
provide scaffolding during child-initiated activities can
lead adults to construct richer learning opportunities:
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180 Weisberg et al.
Parents who were encouraged to work with their children
to assemble a block structure in a guided-play environ-
ment produced more spatial talk (and hence more oppor-
tunities to learn spatial concepts) than parents who
engaged freely with their children (Ferrara, Hirsh-Pasek,
Newcombe, Golinkoff, & Lam, 2011).
Open Questions
Further research, especially in naturalistic settings, is criti-
cal for building a more nuanced understanding of guided
play. One challenge is to determine exactly which aspects
of adult-provided guidance are most effective. For exam-
ple, in an adult-guided board game with kindergartners,
a very small difference in guidance—asking children to
add the spinner’s number to their current number, rather
than counting from 1—led to substantial differences in
learning about the number line (Laski & Siegler, 2014).
Another major aim for future research is to determine
exactly how to balance child agency with adult constraint
across a range of educational content and for different
learners. How often should learning experiences take the
form of guided play? How much child agency is neces-
sary for high-quality learning? Another key challenge will
be to differentiate how guided-play experiences affect
students’ learning of content compared with their motiva-
tion for future learning.
Conclusion
Decades of research have shown that free play is neces-
sary for healthy development and can boost certain skills
in early childhood. But children need to be pointed
toward the relevant dimensions of a problem if they are
to learn. Guided play combines the best elements of free
play and direct instruction: child autonomy and adult
expertise. It provides an optimal medium for delivering
educational content in ways that are enjoyable and that
allow for genuine child agency, while constraining chil-
dren’s activities to facilitate learning.
Existing curricula could naturally incorporate elements
of this approach, such as by allowing children to take the
lead within a prepared environment (see Neuman & Ros-
kos, 1992) or structuring material in game-like ways
(Morris, Croker, Zimmerman, Gill, & Romig, 2013). New
curricula might also build on the success of existing pro-
grams that implement aspects of the guided-play
approach, such as Montessori (Lillard, 2013), Reggio
Emilia (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1998), Tools of the
Mind (Bodrova & Leong, 2015), and Community of Learn-
ers (Brown & Campione, 1994). The research reviewed
here gives us reason to believe that doing so will lead to
the best possible educational outcomes.
Recommended Reading
Bodrova, E., & Leong, D. J. (2007). Tools of the Mind: The
Vygotskian approach to early childhood education (2nd
ed.). Columbus, OH: Merrill/Prentice Hall. Describes an
early childhood curriculum incorporating some of the prin-
ciples of guided play in the classroom.
Burner, J. S., Jolly, A., & Sylva, K. (Eds.). (1976). Play: Its role in
development and evolution. New York, NY: Basic Books. A
classic edited volume examining the role of play, discovery,
and learning, including many examples from nonhuman
animals.
Miller, E., & Almon, J. (2009). Crisis in the kindergarten: Why
children need to play in school. College Park, MD: Alliance
for Childhood. An accessible overview of the decline in
recess and other free-play opportunities in schools and
why this poses a problem for early education.
Singer, D. G., Golinkoff, R. M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (Eds.). (2006).
Play = learning: How play motivates and enhances chil-
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NY: Oxford University Press. A collection of papers pre-
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Tobias, S., & Duffy, T. M. (Eds.). (2009). Constructivist theory
applied to instruction: Success or failure? New York, NY:
Routledge. An extensive (and sometimes heated) debate
over constructivist approaches to instruction in a wide
range of contexts.
Author Note
Deena Skolnick Weisberg and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek contributed
equally to the writing of this manuscript and should be consid-
ered as joint first authors.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with
respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.
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