EYFS Best Practice: All about ... Joyful learning

Philosopher Simone Weil suggested that joy is as essential to learning as breathing is to running. Sadly, this is not a common view. Probably more widespread within our society as a whole is the belief that for education to be really effective it should be dull or even painful.

Thirty years ago, John Goodlad, an American educationalist, asked: 'Why are schools not places of joy?' Author Alfie Kohn, who speaks widely on human behaviour, education and parenting, responds to the question by commenting that some people worry about 'excessive enjoyment' and believe that it is a signal that not much learning is going on.

Joyful learning is a phrase embraced by those who believe that to successfully improve the effectiveness of learning and teaching in our schools - and levels of well-being within society - we must change the way we think about teaching and learning. Successful education is so much more than test scores; it must be about helping children to find joy in learning. We all learn best when we're happy.

WHY SHOULD WE FOCUS ON JOYFUL LEARNING?

The reward for anyone lucky enough to live, work and play with young children is the exposure we get to their joie de vivre - joy in life, for living and for the amazing world around them. We are enchanted by their excitement at seeing worms emerging from the earth after the rain, their exuberance when jumping in deep puddles, their enthusiasms - long and short lived - whether for trains, cupcakes, shiny stones, twigs, snails or dressing up, and for what Canadian resea- rcher Kieran Egan calls their 'ecstatic responses' to everything they encounter, all new and fresh in their eyes. All this is frequently reflected in their bounciness: dancing, whooping or jumping for sheer joy.

Joy comes naturally to young children. As such, it must, like music, have a biological function, a purpose in human growth. Recent research on babies' expressions of emotions or feelings shows clear differences between the way in which they express pleasure, joy and excitement. Professor Colwyn Trevarthen describes them as elements of humanity and as such, early childhood educators have a responsibility to support children's explorations of what it means to be human.

WHAT IS JOYFUL LEARNING?

Joyful learning undoubtedly involves play. Much has been written about the importance of play in early learning, yet despite centuries of rhetoric on the subject it remains in the minds of many at odds with learning. There is growing evidence that an early start to formal learning does not lead to higher achievement. Moreover, without a strong diet of playfulness, children are likely to be less able to think critically and creatively.

Living in the 21st century requires abilities that go way beyond the so-called basics - literacy and numeracy. These, of course, have never been neglected but basic skills for the future are likely to include critical thinking, creativity, and an ability to analyse, categorise and evaluate.

Perhaps above all, children will need to learn to collaborate. Scientist Susan Greenfield, who has specialised in the physiology of the brain, argues that computer use has led to a progressive lessening of empathy among young people and although her view is widely challenged it is one that should be heeded by educators.

Whether the ultimate cause of her findings is indeed computer use or not, we should all be sufficiently alarmed to feel that we should address this. Imaginative play, in which young children find so

much joy, promotes empathy, in helping children to take other perspectives and to learn to think like others.

Joyful learning should not be mistaken for simple fun. Fun is an important aspect of social interaction and a greatly under-valued element of learning. We can encourage children to undertake boring tasks or things that must be completed by making it fun. Tidying up or helping with the washing up can be readily achieved by this means. However, fun is not enough.

While children's joyful learning may encompass fun and play, and may be playful or boisterous, it may also include sadness, solitude, introspection and wonder. Nor is play or enjoyment enough. Play may become stilted and joyless. Enjoyment may be devoid of joy if it only emphasises pleasure.

Professor Ferre Laevers has highlighted the importance of well-being and involvement as indicators of effective learning. The characteristics of well-being that he identifies can readily be seen to be very like those associated with joyfulness. Laevers writes of the need for children to feel at ease and to act spontaneously. For him, high levels of well-being come from openness to experience and an enjoyment of life. Well-being also involves inner relaxation, vitality, self-confidence and being in touch with one's own feelings and emotions.

Tina Bruce's idea of 'wallowing' in play or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's notion of 'flow' as the essential element of creativity carry similar connotations to Laevers' description of involvement. He believes that energy, composure, facial expression and satisfaction are all closely related to joyfulness.

WHAT DO BRAIN STUDIES TELL US ABOUT JOYFUL LEARNING?

Humans learn best the things that bring them pleasure. Environments that link pleasure and learning help to prevent boredom, reduce stress and support the development of what psychology expert Carol Dweck describes as a growth mindset.

She suggests that people who avoid failure and focus on right and wrong answers - who, in short, have developed a fixed mindset - have identifiably different brain patterns than those with a growth mindset. For the latter, learning challenges are the priority. Learners with a growth mindset are not afraid of error. They are the joyful learners. For them, learning is pleasurable and this outweighs any fear of failure.

Excitement has long been understood by neuroscientists to be important in learning. When children are exuberant, chemicals in their brains change and make learning more possible. Events that excite the senses make learning more memorable. Similarly, vestibular stimulation that occurs as children swing and sway or hang upside down, improves brain activity and supports learning.

Research by Trevarthen also shows the importance of fun, humour and clowning about in young children's development. These elements promote interaction and reflect children's joy or zest for life. They reduce stress and anxiety, which interfere with learning.

In short, joy supports learning by:

•  encouraging the release of dopamine, which stimulates memory and encourages the release of chemicals in the brain that help to focus attention
• keeping children alert to new experiences, which they connect with familiar experiences, and
• ensuring that the amygdala (at the centre of the brain and responsible for feelings) does not need to filter out stressful situations.

One common manifestation of children's joyfulness is their drive to play and to be playful. Throughout history, play has been seen as one of the 'imperatives' of early childhood, despite any efforts to confine or constrain it.

Helpfully, the revised Early Years Foundation Stage in England has identified play as one of the characteristics of effective teaching and learning and this may help practitioners to have the courage to argue its importance. However, the words chosen to describe play do little or nothing to communicate or encourage the fact that the motivation for play is the joyfulness, characteristic of children in their earliest years.

BARRIERS TO JOYFUL LEARNING

The unconventional approaches developed by children when they are encouraged to explore playfully and joyfully are not always comfortable for adults. Allowing space and time for children's joyful learning can be inconvenient for adults as it involves the possibility of changed routines and timetables as well as mess. Mess can be a nuisance but potter and author Edmund de Waal insists: 'Mess is where it starts. It's in the flour in your hair ... or the clay on the floor.'

Noise and bustle

The exuberance of joyful learning might be noisy and can be difficult to explain to colleagues or parents. Many practitioners are not always brave enough to let noise and bustle happen.

Researcher and teacher Vivian Gussin Paley describes an absorbing play episode that initially involved a group of children depicting a hurricane and its effects. At a moment when the drama seems to have seized the whole class of children, the teacher surveys what is a huge mess but, says Paley, does not appear worried. Instead she 'calms the waters' and urges the children to pull on their boots and waterproofs - they are the National Guard and they are going to clear up the mess.

Paley suggests that by treating the children as actors rather than outlaws the teacher respects their exuberance and shows that she understands the importance to them of pretend play. This, she argues 'makes them willing to co-operate in the business of intimacy', a factor that leads to shared, sustained understanding.

Children's needs

Another barrier may be that children's needs are not always seen as the priority in the provision of early childhood care and education. Successive governments have treated it as being primarily about public health, women's employment or the economy.

In addition, there has been increased focus over many years on the idea that learning can be delivered to children - delivering phonics, literacy or numeracy. Learning cannot be delivered; it can only occur with the engagement of the learner.

Growing awareness of the need to start with the child - looking for interests and enthusiasms - helps practitioners to think less in terms of goals and more in terms of growth and development, with its inherent joyfulness.

It is also important to remember that, contrary to the views of some politicians, skills are not more important than thinking or feelings and they do not have to be taught prior to introducing children to contexts for their use. Skills are best learnt when children need to use them.

Disembodied education

Another factor that has led the focus of early care and education away from joyful learning is something termed disembodied education. Many expressions of joyfulness, particularly in young children, include physical action - dancing, leaping up and down, waving arms and so on. Physical action can also in itself lead to a sense of exuberance and fulfilment, yet much of young children's time may be spent sitting or waiting. How joyful have you ever felt while waiting in a queue?

Too many policies have appeared to assume that bodies can be left at the door of the early years setting - only the brain need attend. Yet if neuroscience and developmental psychology have taught us anything in recent years it is that social and emotional aspects of development are integral to all learning. Renewed focus on the importance of physical development in learning reminds us of its prime importance.

ENVIRONMENTS FOR JOYFUL LEARNING

The Joyful Learning Network suggests that joyful learning starts with passion, purpose and play. In order to create environments that foster joyful learning, we should passionately, playfully and purposefully:

Build strong positive relationships

The intimacy that comes from shared humour and emotional warmth allows minds to get in touch with one another. Shared understandings underpin shared learning. Positive relationships provide a sense of security that makes it possible for children to express the exuberance and excitement characteristic of joyful learning. They also make it safe for children to identify challenges at which they might fail - pushing themselves to the limit of their competence.

Develop a growth mindset in children

This can be achieved by making sure that praise is given for effort rather than achievement and that stereotypes and labels are never allowed to colour expectations. Parents may readily say that one of their children is artistic or athletic and practitioners often fall into the trap of stating that girls always do this or boys do that. These labels get in the way of growth.

Dweck argues that if children come to believe they are either clever or not, they cease to try. She also argues that girls with high achievement may have the most difficulty in moving from a fixed to a growth mindset.

Get outside

A vital aspect of an environment for joyful learning is the outdoor area. Sights, sounds, sensations and smells that cannot be achieved indoors all contribute to joyfulness. In his book, Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv highlights his belief that physical, mental and spiritual well-being depend on our association with nature.

Get active

Physical movement is in itself a source of joy. This doesn't have to happen outdoors although there is likely to be more space and fewer hazards like sharp corners on tables. Jabadao argues that all early years settings should have indoor movement areas. In or out, rough and tumble play has been described by freelance practitioner Jasmine Pasch as 'a source of joy, fun and laughter' and all young children love dancing.

Help children to find pleasure in learning

This will involve ensuring that they are given choices and that they are able to take pride in their achievements. Assessment should celebrate learning. Scrapbooks illustrating children's learning stories or learning journeys can bring parents, children and practitioners together in celebration, particularly where children have a strong voice in the choice of material to be included.

Help children to become experts

Becoming an expert on anything seems to enable children to find joy in learning. Working from interests and developing expertise underpins successful learning because it gives children:

•  insights into the nature of knowledge
• the passion that real expertise invokes
• focus and purpose
• opportunities for playful discovery (or tinkering, as it is described by one writer).

Make more use of creative and expressive arts

Singing, dancing, painting, drawing, imagining and pretending all allow children to represent ideas, events and feelings. They enable children to develop and make use of symbols, which in turn underpin thinking. They also contribute to a sense of joy. Edmund de Waal describes the 'extraordinary, extraordinary excitement about making something that you've never made before', a feeling we'd like all children to experience.

Don't forget stories

Narrative through told or read story has immense power. Stories represent our experiences and allow us to revisit and reflect on experiences.

JOYFUL TEACHING

Love the job you do

If you do not find real joy (not merely enjoyment) in the important work you do, you are letting children down! Be passionate about what you do. Celebrate the fact that you must play at work and that there is no more important purpose than rearing future generations.

Model joy

Show your passion — laugh, sing, dance and just have fun. Celebrate as children achieve purposeful learning. Learn to be more playful. As Alfie Kohn says, don't let others begrudge children opportunities for deep satisfaction and occasional giggles.

Look carefully at children

Are those who appear to be doing nothing looking with awe at something? Are they pondering, wondering, engaging in quiet reflection? Model calm introspection for them - don't feel you have always to be talking, leading, directing.

Make your setting inviting

UNICEF suggests that joyful learning environments should be active, bright and cheerful. Is yours? The organisation also says teaching materials should be natural resources readily available in the environment, such as leaves and stones.

WHAT DOES THIS COME FROM?

Joyful learning is essential, educational, effective and extraordinary. It involves passion, purpose, play and pleasure. It embraces children's ecstatic responses, emotions, enthusiasm, excitement, expertise, exploration and expressiveness.

MORE INFORMATION

• www.joyfullearningnetwork.com
• A Mandate For Playful Learning In Pre-school: presenting the evidence, K Hirsh-Pasek et al
• A Place Called School, J Goodlad
• A Process-Oriented Child Monitoring System for Young Children, F Laevers
• Early Childhood Education, T Bruce
• Feel Bad Education, Education Week, A Kohn, www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/feelbad.htm
• Flow: the psychology of happiness, M Csikszentmihalyi
• Last Child in the Woods: saving our children from nature-deficit disorder, R Louv
• Mindset: the new psychology of success, C Dweck
• 'Moving In Time: the many messages of a body dancing', C Trevarthen. In Movement Languages in Early Childhood Education, R Duckett (ed) and Sightlines Initiative
• Primary Understanding, K Egan
• 'Talking in children's first language — movement', J Pasch. In Movement Languages in Early Childhood Education, R Duckett (ed) and Sightlines Initiative
• The Boy on the Beach, V G Paley
• Tomorrow's People: how 21st-century technology is changing the way we think and feel, S Greenfield