How Much Should Adults Intervene In Children’s Play

Today’s I’m looking at how much should adults intervene in children’s play?

Now this is one of the biggest debates in play-based learning research. You know me I’m a bit of geek when it comes to this stuff. Within this there are debates about whether adults should lead, guide, facilitate, or be not get involved at all during play.

I thought it would be really interesting to look at the benefits and negatives of each and where Forest School sits on this spectrum.

The 4 types of Intervention

• Adult Leadership: This is Play where the adult is the leader and generally follows a set of adult-imposed rules that children are taught to follow. This is evident, for example, in sports and games that have a rulebook that needs to be followed in order for the game to be successful. The greatest benefit of this approach is that adults can set clear learning goals and assess them. Creativity and ‘rule breaking’ tend to be discouraged during this kind of play.

• Adult Guidance: Guided play is a very popular approach to play-based learning. Guided play attempts to strike a balance between unstructured play and adult-led structured play. It involves the teacher setting up play scenarios and posing prompts to students to help them learn, while still allowing children to take the lead during play. The adults here have set learning goals to achieve but also are encouraged to let children learn through free play. This is commonly seen in the Early Years Foundation Stage.

• Adult Facilitation: Adult facilitation usually involves having adults act as what Montessori called “unobtrusive observers”. They set up the environment so that it is resource rich and safe. Adults then scaffold learning only as and when they are invited in. They pose questions for a child to metacongitise, think about their thinking and to further understand what the child wants to achieve. Never for knowledge or a set of scripted answers. Adults support learning through role modelling but not dictation simply you must do this because x, y z.

Adults in this play type observe and reflect a lot to see how they can best support and enhance learning from a non intrusive perspective. The downside to this is the adult must have specific set of skills in order to help this type of play as it requires specialist knowledge and skills to work effectively.

• Adult Non-Interference: Non-interference involves adults standing aside entirely and allowing children to play in unprepared environments. Non-interference used to be very popular; for example, children once were allowed to roam the streets until after dark playing with their friends. While we may be shocked at the safety concerns these days, non-interference has some benefits such as freedom to learn and quick learning of self-regulation.

So, there are pros and cons of each approach. If we remember back to Forest Schools key learning tool of child led play simply the child choosing, what when and how they learn through play, this all begins to make sense and the role of the adult can either enhance or destroy the play scenario based upon what the intended outcome is.

In and ideal Full Fat Forest School world the Leader should be maintain their intervention to the facilitation phase. This provides the best opportunity for children to develop independently and in the same breath be support to move to their next steps in learning.

All to often however Forest School Leaders tend toward the two before facilitation which leads to both Forest School diet and lite. When approached from an adult facilitation perspective the true benefits of Forest School are made available to your child over a long term repeated process.

Don’t forget Forest School is not a quick fix but a process of development in which children will become set up for life success.

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