Recess in schools: Research shows it benefits children.

Teaching Kids How To Play at Recess

Teaching Kids How To Play at Recess

Snapshots of life at home.
Aug. 29 2012 3:30 AM

The Rebirth of Recess

How do you introduce recess to kids who have never left the classroom?

Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer.

Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer.


But while administrators were trying to get rid of recess, academics were studying it—that is, they were studying the time when children weren’t studying. The new science of recess says that recess isn’t a waste of time at all. “Having recess is much, much, much better than not having recess,” says Anthony Pellegrini, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Minnesota who’s written extensively on the subject. “That’s unequivocal, I feel. That’s a no-brainer.” That’s good news for children in Chicago squirming in their seats. But what does recess look like when no schoolchild has ever had it before?

It’s an ironic turn of events: For years, schools have been getting rid of recess to spend more time on math and reading. It is notoriously hard to get reliable numbers on recess—recess policies vary from year to year, school to school, even classroom to classroom—but numerous surveys have found recess time declining. That’s especially true in poorer school districts, where test scores are frequently low and principals panicked. The numbers show a clear trend: The more minority students a school has, and the lower the income level of their parents, the less time allotted for recess—nearly half of poor children go all day without it. They don’t even have anywhere to have it: In Chicago, nearly 100 elementary and middle schools have no playgrounds at all. (The American Association of Pediatrics recently issued an impassioned statement on the “play deprivation” experienced by children in poverty.)


The arguments against recess are simple and no-nonsense, especially for these schools: What—you want the kids to play kickball when they’re failing math? When the Atlanta public schools got rid of recess, its superintendent famously said, “We are intent on improving academic performance. You don't do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars."


They’ll get more out of class, too: Children seem to learn more efficiently when information is spaced out—when it is distributed over time. It’s been widely documented that the brain needs a break. High-performing East Asian schools have famously long school days—but much of the extra time is taken up by recess, not instruction. Which might be why recess is now back, even in places like Atlanta (although it is squeezed for time).





Playworks doesn’t make kids play, Vialet says, and the recess coach doesn’t run recess. “There’s multiple things happening on the schoolyard at any given point. The coach floats around the schoolyard.” But the Playworks vision of recess—more structured, more orderly, more active—is very different from the traditional anything-goes break from class.


And despite the fears of many administrators, who talk about recess as if it were a Lord of the Flies sequel, studies have shown that there is surprisingly little violence on playgrounds, says Pellegrini: “It accounts for less than 2 percent of all behavior.”

For someone like Pellegrini, the structured recess of PlayWorks is anathema—the value of recess is in messy free play. For the principals in Playworks schools, structured recess is a godsend—precisely because it isn’t messy.

My childhood memory of recess—as a break that came twice a day, like a natural phenomenon, and that was wonderfully aimless—may be nothing like the recess my children will someday have. The argument over whether to have recess may be ending. But the argument over what recess means is only now beginning. Can we give kids today the freedom to play? Or do we need a pedagogy of recess—a pedagogy of free time? The answer may depend on what we value most, or what we can afford to value most: order or chaos, activity or daydreaming, learning to play or learning to be.