Recess

I read an article in the Boston Globe recently about a growing movement to give kids more recess. It caught my attention in part because the issue has become a topic of conversation in our house.

Our youngest is in second grade at Williamstown Elementary School, where recess time was reduced this year. He is a high-energy kid who does well in the classroom, but, like most seven-year-olds, he needs to move. He also needs time with other kids when the activity isn’t being organized for him by a teacher, coach, parent, or some other adult.

I came to the article with a bias. I think kids need recess. But as I read it, I started thinking less about my second grader and more about conversations I have with employers.

At the Berkshire Innovation Center, we spend a lot of time asking companies what they need from their current and future workforce. We also spend a lot of time working with people at different points along that continuum, from middle and high school students in our youth programs to adults developing new skills through our workforce programs. The answers certainly include technical skills, and those skills are changing rapidly as technology changes. But some of the things we hear most consistently have very little to do with a particular technology or credential.

Employers need people who can troubleshoot. They need problem solvers. They need people who can communicate, work as part of a team, adapt when something doesn’t go according to plan, and figure things out without someone standing next to them providing instructions.

The more I thought about it, the more that list sounded a lot like recess. Put a group of kids on a playground without a prescribed activity and all kinds of things happen. They decide what to play and who is playing. They make teams. They negotiate rules. They disagree about whether someone was safe or out. Someone gets frustrated. Someone gets left out. A game doesn’t work, so they change it or invent something else. They have to figure it out.

Of course, recess isn’t the only place kids develop these skills. They learn them in classrooms, on athletic fields, in clubs, at home, at summer camp, and in countless other places. But there is something particularly valuable about unstructured time, precisely because nobody has designed the outcome for them.

This feels especially important as we think about how education should evolve for a rapidly changing economy. We should be introducing young people to new technologies. We should be strengthening STEM education, creating connections with employers, giving young people opportunities to learn by doing, and developing new approaches to career

and technical education. We should also be thinking seriously about how artificial intelligence will change what today’s elementary school students need to know by the time they enter the workforce. But preparing kids for that future isn’t only about what we add. We also need to be careful about what we take away.

The Massachusetts Legislature is currently considering a proposal that would guarantee students in kindergarten through eighth grade at least 30 consecutive minutes of recess each day. There are legitimate questions about how schools fit everything we ask of them into a finite school day, and I don’t pretend that those scheduling decisions are easy. But I support the proposal. Thirty minutes of recess seems like a reasonable minimum, and I think we make a mistake when we treat that time simply as time taken away from learning.

Watch a playground for a while and you will see kids communicating, negotiating, solving problems, navigating disagreements, adapting, creating, leading, following, and working together. Interestingly enough, those sound a lot like the skills employers tell us they need.

We call it recess because it is a break from the school day. But if we want kids to become adults who can solve problems, work together and figure things out, maybe we need to give them the time and space to do exactly that.