Can Educators Be Playful and Professional?
Hey educators!
How playful are you in your interactions with students, on a scale of 1 to 5? Be honest with yourself.
I’m super curious about what you think, and honestly, would ADORE it if you’d comment below this blog with your answer and why you scored yourself that way. (Hint: I’ll be asking a different question at the end of this article, and ask you to compare your answers… just wanted you to know that’s coming!)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of playfulness thanks to some comments made to me recently inside the Anti-Boring Learning Lab.
Playfulness, Not Rigidity
One of our new academic coach trainees was working through the Academic Coaching 101 micro-credential and asked the following question: “I’m curious about what ‘playfulness, not rigidity’ means?”
She was referring to a video where I discuss the values that we hold dear inside the Anti-Boring Learning Lab. In case you’re curious, here’s our full list of the values:
Consent (not compliance)
Curiosity (not know-it-all)
Toolboxes (not one-size-fits-all curricula)
Incrementality (not overload)
Playfulness (not rigidity)
Imperfect action (not perfectionism)
Community (not isolation)
This educator went on to ask, “Could you give an example of what this ‘playfulness’ looks like? I’m curious how coaches can balance playfulness with professionalism.”
Such a good question. And an important one, too!
First of all, I love the unspoken assumption embedded in the question -- that being “professional” is somehow opposed to being “playful.” It makes me wonder what it even means to be “professional.” The Oxford dictionary defines it as “worthy of or appropriate to a professional person; competent, skillful, or assured.” But can’t a person be good at what they do and also be playful? Can’t they be skilled and silly?!
It occurs to me that it might be good for all of us to think about who made up the rules for what it means to be “Professional.” I haven’t done the historical research, but I’m guessing that the qualities we think of as professional grew out of a work culture in the Global North that was mostly male and mostly white.
So what exactly is playfulness? To unpack this word, I went to my bookshelf and grabbed the book Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. Wow. Even that title doesn’t sound “professional” does it? Are professionals allowed to talk about “soul?!” I don’t know what the official rules say, but I do know that the best educators I’ve known do soul work alongside school work.
The author cites a framework for playfulness that I found compelling. Play includes:
Anticipation -- waiting with expectation and curiosity
Surprise - the unexpected, a new idea
Pleasure -- a good feeling
Understanding -- the acquisition of new knowledge
Strength -- mastery that comes from constructing experience
Poise -- grace, contentment, composure, balance
Hmmmmm. When you look at this list, doesn’t it actually sound like it’s describing an amazing learning experience!?!
I don’t see any reason why skillful teaching can’t be playful. None. At. All.
And yet…
Ok, so maybe the word “professional” isn’t the opposite of playful. When I was putting together the list of values for the Learning Lab, it felt important to me to name the opposites as well, to give the educators I train a point of clear comparison.
For me, the opposite of playful isn’t “professional” but rather “rigid.”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (sorry I sound like a middle school English paper here!!), rigidity is “the inability to be changed or adapted.”
Think about that. The inability. To be changed or adapted.
How many teachers did you have growing up who refused to change? Who always taught with the same course outline in the same way, and even intonated everything similarly. Bueller? Bueller?
Great educators can’t be rigid. They must be great improvisers. They are experts in their field who also know how to connect with students and adapt to what is needed in the moment to serve the student’s learning.
This is also the very definition of academic coaching. I go into every client session with a basic framework for what needs to happen -- (1) Check In about grades and habits and the student’s state of mind/heart, (2) Decide what “work” we need to do together, and then do that work, and (3) Reflect on next steps and create follow-through systems for the week ahead.
Within that structure, all kinds of things can happen, but I can’t actually plan for them!! Well, that’s not exactly true. I can plan for my sessions by collecting the best tools around for studying, time management, and organization, and also ensure I know how to use them. Then, I show up to my hour with the student, meet them where they are, and am willing to change and adapt according to their needs.
In other words -- to play.
Learning to Be More Playful
Ok. So we’ve unpacked what we think “play” is and isn’t. But isn’t being “playful” something different entirely? That’s about demeanor rather than action, isn’t it? How you show up as a person, maybe even how you show up as a professional? Playfully.
During a recent free week in my community, one of the new educators commented, ““I’m already noticing I’m more playful with my students, and that’s simply from the way you model playfulness in all your videos!!”
She’s referring here to two kinds of videos in which I show up as playful -- the lecture videos in which I’m teaching about one of the Anti-Boring tools, and student videos in which I teach an actual student using the tool I just lectured about.
I wish I’d asked this educator, “What kind of playfulness do you see when you watch my videos?” I didn’t have this forethought then. But here’s what I’m guessing she noticed:
I laugh a lot. I move my body a ton. I move from sitting to standing. Sometimes I’m even lying down during my client sessions (talk about “not professional,” though I used to have back pain that forced me to lie down!!). I ask questions and lean in with embodied curiosity and a glimmer in my eye as my student answers. Sometimes I tease my students and they tease me.
I love that this educator found it transformative to simply watch another adult be more playful in the presence of students. It makes me realize how rare it is to see an adult playing with a teenager (instead of lecture at or to them). Just watching my playfulness made changes in her own demeanor with students. She moved from “stuffy” to “spirited” and was delighted by her own transformation.
Are You a Recovering Serious Person?
Almost 20 years ago now, I trained in a community arts practice called InterPlay that promises to help you “unlock the wisdom of your body.” It certainly did that for me! I think I’ve always been a playful person, but I also believe that I easily kept that playfulness under lock and key. Ever since a friend in middle school told me I was too loud, and shushed me during a sleepover, it felt like my full expression was dangerous, and would lose me friends if I didn’t watch it.
InterPlay helped me become more of myself. We told stories in dramatic ways. We made silly sounds in community with others. We moved our bodies in ways that sometimes looked like dance and other times just looked like… humans moving bodies. We laughed together. But we also cried together. Turns out that unlocking the wisdom of the body is very playful, and playfulness can also unlock feelings that run the gamut. And if we are present to our feelings, we can allow them to flow, and then even play with them.
It’s InterPlay that taught me this phrase “recovering serious person.” So many of us have been trained into being too serious, especially in education, also called “ACADEMIA!!” (please say that word outloud with a very snooty tone).
If you are a serious educator in recovery and think you might like to practice being more playful, I strongly urge you to consider joining the Anti-Boring Learning Lab. You can learn all the Anti-Boring tools including how to teach them to students in very playful ways. Attend our Practice Parties, where we actually teach the tools to each other (and play with teaching them well while simultaneously not taking our teaching too seriously). I’ll even be layering in some calls where we quite simply play with each other. To practice playfulness (and have a little fun, too).
There’s a reason I’ve been told that my courses and community are the best professional development around -- and I think the playful rigor
We open the Lab every few months, so if you’re reading this post while the doors are still closed, come hang out with us at a monthly free Q&A with moi, your fearless (ahem!) playful leader. Sign up here. That will also put you on my newsletter list, so you’ll get to hear the announcement about when we open the doors again.
In the meantime, go play!