Recess: An Opportunity for Character-building
I love to be outside on a sunny day with children happily romping around the playground. They engage in friendly competition, work well with a team, and put their hearts into the game. Then they come back into the classroom ready to study again with renewed vigor.
If you have supervised elementary grade recesses very long, you know that this ideal picture is often shattered by reality. In real life, we deal with bad attitudes, complaining, poor teamwork, skinned knees, and bruised hearts. I’ll be honest: Recess has never been my favorite thing. Yet recess is an opportunity for learning, growth, and character-building with our students, and I have learned to enjoy the important conversations that sometimes happen after recess.
“These teams aren’t fair!” How many times have you heard students say something like this? Any game involving teams can become frustrating for this reason, yet recess is a valuable training ground for learning teamwork. I need to remind myself of this when I am tired of dealing with team drama. My students are still in the early stages of learning how to work with a team, and it is my job to help them learn this important life skill. Perhaps they need a little sermon about their complaining attitudes, but most of all they need patient guidance.
Along with teaching teamwork, recess is an excellent opportunity for teaching students to find peaceful solutions to disagreements. It is helpful to talk through possible scenarios before recess and to help students think about how they should respond if certain things happen. Compliment them afterward when you notice positive interactions.
We should also teach our students the power of apology. Recently during recess, two students came to me, both obviously upset. One said, “He purposely hit me hard when he tagged me out!” The other said, “I didn’t try to hurt her! I was just tagging her.” I was glad that we had had previous conversations about this kind of thing, and I said, “Remember what I told you that you can do if you hurt someone, even if you didn’t try it?” This led to a quick apology, and the conflict was resolved.
How should you deal with someone else’s dishonesty? This is another question that recess gives us the opportunity to answer with our students. Just because someone else is cheating in a game does not mean that you have the license to cheat as well. I sometimes tell my students, “If someone is being dishonest, it is mostly their problem and not yours. You need to make sure that you are being honest in the way that you play.”
Some years I did not enforce a "no talking" rule as the students came in from recess, so they would sometimes enter the classroom shouting and arguing as they found their seats and prepared for the next class. In more recent years, I have found it to be worthwhile to teach them to come in quietly. I tell them that if there are things they want to discuss about what happened at recess, I will be happy to take time for discussion. But we will do it in a civilized manner, and we will listen carefully to other people and take turns to talk.
Our society is becoming increasingly good at shouting matches and is sadly incompetent in the fine art of listening and having civilized conversations. We have the privilege of teaching our students this skill. Do you ever read the news and feel an overwhelming sense of wanting to do something to solve the problems of your community, the nation, and the world? But your time is more than filled with your teaching job, and you have no mental capacity left for anything more. What if teaching your students to listen to each other and to have thoughtful conversations and to respond graciously to opposing ideas is your way to shape the future of your community?
Learning to get along with other people is more important than learning things like math and science. May you be empowered to take the small interactions you have with your students—whether on the playground or in the classroom—and turn them into teaching moments.
