In this talk, Jesse Coffino, parent and educator, provides an in-depth introduction to Anji Play, a revolutionary movement of educational change that began in rural eastern China and has begun to scale globally.
TRANSCRIPT:
MATT: Jesse, who is our guest, has been working with Anji Play in China, which I think is a really awesome new way of teaching kids at an early childhood just to be better people, which I think is a good thing. I’m not going to steal his thunder, so I’ll let him go ahead and tell you what it’s all about.
JESSE ROBERT COFFINO: Hi, everyone. And thanks, Matt, for that lovely introduction. And it’s really quite an honor to be at Google talking to people that are part of a revolutionary endeavor to change how we think and interact and what we do. And so it’s a really, I think, fitting place to talk about what’s happening in Anji, China, what’s starting to grow across China, and what’s now coming to the United States in the form of Anji Play.
And so Matt gave you a brief introduction to me, but I want to give you some context about why I’m the person here talking to you, what my background is, how I’m involved in this project.
About three and half years ago, I get a phone call. And it’s from a close friend, a woman by the name of Dr. Chelsea Bailey, former professor of early education at NYU, somebody with decades of experience in the field.
And she says to me, “Jesse, I’m in Anji County, China. There’s a revolution taking place.” I think she used the word epistemological shift. She said, “the world is going to change because of the work that’s taking place right here, right now.
And I am 100% certain that in that moment, my thought was, “You’re out of your mind. This is why I told you not to drink the tap water. You need to sleep more.”
But I said, “I don’t know. I’m a little bit busy.”
She said, “Well, there’s a woman named Ms. Cheng Xueqin. She is the force, the mind, the drive behind what’s taking place. And I’m bringing her to the United States, and she’s going to give some talks. And I’ve got a PowerPoint, and I need you to translate that PowerPoint for me.”
It seemed like something I could stomach as a friend. I was interested. I’m a skeptic naturally, but I was like, OK. Let’s take a look.
So she sends me through a 200 page PowerPoint. And I opened it up, and immediately, within seconds, I see a clarity, a profundity, a depth of purpose, and I see what Chelsea’s talking about. And I spent the entire night translating the PowerPoint, and I stopped everything else that I was doing. And that’s why I’m here now.
And so in that period, I spent time in Anji, China, a lot of time with Ms. Cheng, who has developed this approach. I have worked as her interpreter. I’ve brought educators from the United States and Australia and Bangladesh and Sub-Saharan Africa. I brought them to Anji to experience this.
And so today I’m going to share my view as a parent, because one of the really lasting changes that Anji Play has made in my life personally — and this is why I’m sticking to this contextual, personal introduction — is it’s changed how I see my child. And what I expect of people that are going to be taking care of her and how they see her and how I see her and how my wife sees her is informed by this engagement with these ideas.
So my PowerPoint is going to be about 1/10 as long as the one that I interpreted and translated. If it has 1/100 of the clarity and depth, then I feel like this will be worth it for you guys to be here. So I’m going to start on that note, and I’m going to start with this.
It says, this is your brain — or this is my brain. I want you guys to take a minute to take out your Pixel 2 or open a Google Doc, and I want you to write down or recall your deepest memory of play as a child — your deepest memory of play as a child. I want you to take a minute — the first thing that comes to your mind.
Think about where you were, what you saw, what you smelled, who you were with, what was going on. And really think about it. And why this is important will become clear in a few minutes.
All right, I hope everybody has a memory of play as a child. So Anji, China — this place that is the cradle of a shift in how we think about children, how we think about the role of the teacher, the role of the adult, the role of society, really, in supporting the growth, the development, the learning of the child.
I think of it as the Mendocino County of Shanghai. It’s about a three-hour drive. It’s beautifully forested in bamboo. It produces white tea. If you remember “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” it’s where those wire fighting scenes were shot. It’s mountainous, and it’s diverse.
You can see — if you could just go straight southwest from Shanghai, it’s a three-hour drive. It’s rural enough, and it’s originally disconnected enough that it has its own distinct culture — its own distinct way of being, way of living. It’s a really gorgeous, pleasant place to be, and I hope that all of you will join us there, because we do have opportunities to come visit and to see what’s happening there.
In 1999, Ms. Cheng is appointed to the position of director of pre-primary education for Anji County. In China, the way the system works is you have kindergarten, which is for ages 3 to 6. It’s not compulsory. It’s optional. It’s not a mandated curriculum. There are very broad guidelines, and it’s provided on a need basis. So tuition is calculated based on the financial wherewithal of the family.
So when Ms. Cheng comes in to her position, she comes from a background of being an early educator, of being a preschool teacher. And when she was in college in the ’80s, when she was learning her profession, a lot of the focus was on traditional abilities — playing the piano, drawing, singing — approaches to entertaining children. And so she was put in this position.
She was seen as somebody who had great potential for administration. She moved over from the side of teaching to the side of administration, and her first and most pressing concern was access. She had a large rural county with a county seat that was fairly urban, and she knew that her responsibility was to provide a clean, safe, accessible space for every child in her county.
And I’m not going to go into the really long and detailed policy story of how she made this happen — and it’s brilliant, and I’m happy to share that with you if you’re interested.
But she went from a situation where they had four sites that were in the process of being privatized at the beginning of the 2000s when you had a shift in economic realities and the relationship between the free market and the government — she made sure that those schools stayed part of her administration, and then she grew it exponentially.
And so from 1999 to 2009, she goes from 4 sites to 130 sites. She goes from the county seat to a point where 98.5% of children between the ages of 3 and 6 attend a public kindergarten in Anji County. So she started by building the infrastructure.
SO WHAT IS ANJI PLAY?
We know where Anji is now. We know how early education happens — to a degree — in China.
First and foremost, it began as a response to national policy. So in 1989, the UN passed the Convention of the Rights of the Child. In 1992, China ratifies that.
In 1996, China integrates a very core concept within the Convention, which is that children have the right to play. They put it in their guidelines, and then in 2001, it becomes even more firmly established at the level of national policy to say that the primary activity of the child in kindergarten should be play.
But as I mentioned a moment ago, there is no mandated curriculum for kindergartens in China. There are guidelines — very broad guidelines. And so Ms. Cheng, in her position — in her position of responsibility — was confronted with this question of, may kids play?
And so she had to ask herself – she had to respond to this question of what play is. What is play? And we asked that question a moment ago to come back to some of your memories.
And so as this is taking shape, she’s asking herself what play is. She’s responding to the concerns of parents who, very reasonably, want to know that their children are being taken care of and that they’re learning. She is responding to a crisis that she’s seeing develop amongst her teachers.
That crisis is something that, in differing degrees, exists in the United States. It exists in your communities — which is that increasingly, the demands of primary school are being pushed down to the early educator.
And what happens then is the early educator is seen as a caretaker, as a nanny, as somebody who is failing at teaching children what they need to know. And so you have the status of the teacher within the community as one of passive obeyer of the demands of the parent and the demands of the primary school, and you have a question. The teacher is saying, well, what am I supposed to do? What is my role?
I have all these conflicting interests. I know that I am a professional. I know that I am somebody that should be respected. So one of the questions that’s being considered and is being addressed as this takes shape is, what is the role of the teacher? Who are they? What are they supposed to be doing?
There’s also a response to political imperatives that’s taking place as this takes shape. So I share this picture. This is the party secretary for a small village in Anji. His name is [Inaudible] and we’ve talked to him and we visit him every couple months. What he describes is he was taking part in Ms. Cheng’s drive to build schools where, at the local level, local leaders were asking the people in the villages to provide land, to provide space, to provide the resources to create these sites for children.
What he said, is he said, I was able to convince the villagers that they should give the best part of land in the center of our village over to children, because I knew that if their kids were safe, that if they were happy, that if they were learning, they could go to work and they could rest assured that when they’re at work, they don’t have to worry about what’s going on.
And my responsibility is to the people in my community, and so if we can do that here, if we can do that throughout the county, then we’re serving a very important political role. So he saw his decision to support early education as a political decision — as something that was about sustainability, about creating conditions for prosperity, for harmony, things that are considered top national priorities.
And I would assume that those are top national priorities in many countries. There’s also a response to the status quo. And this is a very important frame for looking at what’s taking place in Anji. And that is that oftentimes, when we design systems, we first look at what we’re measuring. We say, here are the outcomes.
And so the question becomes, who decided what those outcomes were, and why are those outcomes dictating our practices? Why do you start with product and then move backwards to process? And so what was very fortunate about the situation that this moment in Chinese political and social history provided was there weren’t any measures. They were saying kids should play. They weren’t saying, you have to have this rating scale or this preparation for kindergarten.
And so they had the space to discard those status quo definitions of outcomes. So this is what Anji County Kindergarten looked like before 2001. Ms. Cheng calls this the period of no play. You can see why she calls it that. And I can tell you — and I’ve been to a lot of schools in the United States that change out the clothes, change out what’s going on the walls, get some pedal desks.
You’re going to find situations in the United States where children are being managed, where they’re being contained, where they’re expected to sit, where they’re expected to repeat, where they’re expected to learn very specific — irrelevant, in my mind, to their experience and to their depth and complexity of knowledge. So this is what was happening pre-2001.
From 2001 to 2002, Ms. Cheng takes this imperative from the Ministry of Education that children should play. And so what do they do? They build beautiful environments, beautiful, lifelike representations of food, of various roles, various spaces, kitchens. And the teachers design rules for play. They organize the children to play. And at the same time, they’re winning awards.
At the provincial level, people are saying, wow, look at that beautiful environment! How did you get your teachers to spend all of their time creating this beautiful space for children? And Ms. Cheng walks into these schools, and I share this picture not because you can see the environments that were created — what Ms. Cheng said is that children are not smiling with their eyes. This play does not belong to these children.
And again, you change a little bit about the environment. You remove that Chinese character in the background. You can go to a lot of programs in the United States — programs that are play-based, programs that are child-centric, programs that emphasize the value of playful learning — and those are the expressions you see.
So false play was a reality for Ms. Cheng in Anji, and it’s a reality for us here as parents. And if we go back to the political imperatives, us as citizens — because we have to think about what this is doing to children and what that means in terms of our relationship to children.
SO WHAT IS TRUE PLAY?
And so this is the question that Ms. Cheng asked herself. She said, what is true play? And where she started was with her deepest memories of play as a child.
She said, what do I remember? What is it in my childhood that is still with me that I can’t forget, that when I think about it, I smile? That when I think about it, I can smell those smells, I can see those sites, I know exactly how I was feeling? And that’s why I started with that question, because that’s where she began.
She began with the sense of a deep sense of responsibility to children, to her teachers, to her community. And that began with a question, and the question that she started to ask her teachers and her principals. Because what she saw — she saw teachers and principals who were spending days and nights creating environments that children didn’t enjoy. And so there was a tension. There was opposition.
I’m a teacher. I’m trying to do things to make you happy, to play. You’re not happy. Something’s wrong with you, there’s something wrong with me. Everybody thinks that they’re not learning. It became a very vicious cycle of opposition, and that’s not what education is about. That’s not what learning is about. That’s certainly not what play is about.
And so she reached some conclusions. And at the end of our talk here today, I want to ask you some questions about your memories. But she saw some common characteristics in the memories that she and her principals and the parents had about their own play.
Most importantly, the play that was remembered was play that arose from the interest and the intention of the child. It was play that was self-determined. It was played where the child decided with whom, where, and what to play. It was play that oftentimes took place out of doors. It was often risky play. It often involved extensive periods of time. It was play that — pardon me.
It was play where the outcomes, in terms of the individual’s experience, were clear. They had friendship. They had bravery. They discovered. And so what they decided to do and what they began to do, was they decided they needed to step back.
Ms. Cheng says that her first instruction to teachers is hands down, mouth closed, ears and eyes open. Now, that’s not the end point of the teacher, but that’s the starting point. Because if you cannot see true play, if you cannot allow for true play, then you have no way of knowing to do — you have no idea of how you should act next, what you should do next, how you should respond to that.
And if we’re saying that this experience of true play is the most fundamental, the most natural, the most complex form of learning that a child can engage in, then that is the priority. And so the priority is to create the conditions for that to happen.
Once you create the conditions for that to happen, then you can make decisions about how to support that, about how to allow children to reflect and to share and to express and to build on that play in order to create knowledge — to create true, deep learning.
And in that process of stepping back and observing, if you tell the teacher — or if the teacher becomes aware — that their role is not to possess the authority of knowledge, to transmit the authority of that knowledge to the child — but that their stance is a humble stance of seeking to understand the child, they gain a deep sense of expertise.
Because what they’re learning from is children. Their expertise is children, and what their expertise in children is not what some dead scholar said 100 years ago or 50 years ago or 20 years ago or some live scholar said 5 years ago. The knowledge that they have of children — the children that they’re seeing that are engaged in the deepest, most complex form of learning — is coming from their eyes and their ears.
And they’re creating the conditions for that to happen, and so they become experts in children. And they can communicate that expertise. They can communicate that expertise to children. They can communicate that expertise to parents. They can communicate that expertise to primary school teachers and policymakers.
And so what you see when teachers step back, when they’re given that space, that permission, when they’re empowered to allow children to lead their own learning, you see a status change within community. And that happened in Anji.
Teachers were no longer nannies and caretakers. They weren’t passive receivers of the knowledge that they were supposed to pass on from the primary schools. And so the more complexity they observed, the more they understood the child. The more that they were able to communicate that, the more value that was perceived around their work.
And so what we talk about — and we talk about this, and we’ll get into this in more detail, because risk is an important aspect of this — is that all true learning — and what they decided when they stepped back in Anji — was that all true learning takes place on the boundaries of our capacity.
And if you don’t step to the boundary of your capacity, you’re not learning anything. And some of you are engineers. You have to problem solve. You have to think about how to do something differently. You have to push yourself. You’re not sitting there with instructions about what you’re supposed to do. You’re at your best operating on the boundaries of your ability.
And so I want to bring us into a quote here from Ms. Cheng. And it’s a little heady, but you guys are smart. And I could choose a quote that’s very touchy-feely, and there are a lot of those about how amazing the child is and how our job is to discover the child, but I want to go right into the heart of what this means.
So what she talks about is returning the right of play to children. And that means the child’s play is self-determined. It comes from their intention. And she’s not talking about liberating children. She’s talking about liberating teachers. And that’s important.
And as parents, we can think of it as liberating adults, because we are not bound by a need to control or to direct. And we’re put in a position of truly appreciating, of deeply loving children, because we see their capability.
And we get that feedback of children seeing our trust, of feeling our trust, of understanding the respect that we feel for their ability and knowledge. And so that’s a liberating feeling. It’s liberating not to be stuck in a back and forth around getting somebody to do what they want to do. And that’s not to say that as a parent, as a teacher, there aren’t instances where we have to problem solve around getting somebody to do something.
But when you say that the primary role of the teacher — the primary activity of the school — is a respect and the creation of conditions for deep experiences of true play, you get this sense of liberation, of empowerment.
And then we get into liberating teachers from formalisms and utilitarianism. And so utilitarianism is just the idea of outcomes defining the approach — of basing what you’re doing based on a perception of what it will lead to. And so that’s assessing how many letters you have it for. That’s how long you can sit still without moving and do your table work. That’s defining learning narrowly, based on measures that don’t account for the incredible depth and the complexity of the thinking of the child.
So true play, as it emerged in Anji, was defined and continues to be defined by five core values. You can call them conditions.
LOVE
And the first is love.
And love is many things, but in its most pure form, is stability and safety and respect and trust. It’s that place that you can stand on and that you can go and take that risk. You can go and do that thing that you don’t know the outcome of, or that you think you might know the outcome of.
But you’ve known this. If you’re playing and you run away from home to go play, you know your home is there. There’s that safe place that you can return to. And that’s something that teachers can provide and that teachers get back from children. It’s a deeply ecological distribution of a condition.
So when teachers provide that love of a deeply engaged presence, of putting the child’s own experience and intention on par with the most important — or treating it as the most important — activity of the school, children give that back.
Because when I, as a parent, experience the capability of my daughter in negotiating risk and making discoveries, I feel a deep sense of love. I’ve given her love. She’s taken my trust and my respect, and she’s shown me what she’s capable of.
And what happens then is you can communicate that to parents. You can communicate that to administrators. You can communicate that to principals. And it’s not a one-way thing, and it’s not a simple thing. But what it really allows for — that deep sense of safety and security, that deep sense of belonging — is it allows for risk.
RISK
And as we said, risk is what learning is about. Any real learning is testing the edges of your ability. It’s standing on that boundary and saying, I’m going to put my foot over. And we each experience risk in a different way.
In Anji, there’s an incredible amount of really impressive physical risk that takes place. But there’s also social risk, emotional risk. There’s intellectual risk. Risk is not narrowly defined as something that might make you anxious because it looks dangerous. Risk is really about taking that leap — figuratively or literally.
And what you see here in this image is you see children who have created their own conditions for risk. And there’s a lot of research on this subject that shows that when children are allowed to decide how and when to take risks, when they’re given materials that they can master and build, that they will take risks that are developmentally appropriate, and they will — for that reason — be safer.
If you have a fixed climbing structure, a child can’t decide its height. They don’t have a knowledge of its structure. They get bored of being low, they go high, and they fall off. And they can hurt themselves.
But if you have children who are building, who are testing, who are experimenting, who are using a minimally-structured, large movable material to build progressively over time and they’re given the space and time to do that and they’re not being told, do this, do that, take this risk, take that risk — because what’s important about risk and what’s important about true play is that can’t come from a teacher.
That can’t come from an adult. If you tell a child to jump off of something, that is danger. If a child builds something and jumps off, that’s risk. And so there is a responsibility to provide materials that aren’t going to break, that aren’t poisonous, that spaces don’t have pointy objects sticking out of them.
There is a baseline of safety that has to be provided. But beyond that, by creating materials — and these materials, the materials of Anji — and there are hundreds of materials that Ms. Cheng has developed over time based on her observation of children following specific principles. They really create the potential for maximum complexity with minimal structure.
AND SO WHAT’S THE OUTCOME OF RISK?
What’s the outcome of risk when you make a breakthrough in your work? When you do something and you feel that thrill of jumping off that ladder, when you get up on the stage and you give your speech and you’re actually doing OK at it, you feel joy. You feel a deep sense of joy. And that’s a reward mechanism.
And to me — and I think that there’s a lot of science that will back me up on this — that if you’re in a position where you have the sense of safety, the stability of love, when you’re taking risks and you feel joy, you’re learning. You’re learning about yourself. You’re learning about the world.
You’re learning about all of the things that we try to teach in very dogmatic ways. When you go back to this picture, there’s physics going on there. There’s a lot of science taking place there. It wasn’t set up for science. We didn’t demand that they do this for science. It wasn’t designed for science.
But children are embodying — with their bodies, with the materials — the materials, in a way, are an extension. They’re an externalization of what’s happening internally. They’re a part of their being and their body, and so they are feeling. They are experiencing. They are building these concepts.
JOY
And so that joy — that joy makes you want to take another risk. It makes you realize that risk was worth taking. When you get love leading to risk resulting in joy, what you see is a deep, deep engagement.
You see children who spend hours focused on solving problems, on negotiating challenges — socially or intellectually. You see an engagement that is the foundation for learning — the foundation for learning that takes place when they’re 8, or when they’re 9, and when they’re being taught abstract principles.
Not only are they embodying these principles that they’re going to learn later, but they see the experience of engagement in understanding the world as something that has deep value and relevance.
The last principle — the last condition — is where we get to the role of the adult in all this.
REFLECTION
So when we went to that memory and we saw those memories of play where there weren’t adults present, the difference that we have is that we have schools. And schools are systems, and teachers have responsibilities.
And so how do you treat the experience of deep engagement and joyful learning as a fundamental subject matter for the children?
Well, what you do is you provide opportunities for children to reflect on their own experiences. And something funny happened. When they first started doing this in Anji, the teachers were so impressed by what they were seeing the children do, they were so excited that they were pulling out their phones and taking pictures and video, because they wanted to show the other teachers.
Look what my kid did. Can your kids do this? And they realized that they wanted to know what the children were doing. And so they began to provide opportunities for children to describe and to discuss their specific experiences. And so as the teacher gains knowledge and becomes more of an expert in the children that are in their care and in children in general and children in a context of true play, they are deeply attuned to what those instances of learning are — what those instances of insight are.
What are those moments when the children are doing something that they haven’t done before? When they’re encountering a problem they haven’t encountered before. And so they have that ability to take a picture, to take a video of those moments.
And so when the children come back into the classroom, they’re invited to engage in a discussion of their own experiences. And it’s very open-ended. It’s not a leading discussion. The children are really leading their own description of their own experience.
And what’s crucial here is the experiences that they’re describing are experiences that have come from their own intention. These are things that are deeply interesting to them, because it’s coming from them. It’s what they were just doing. It’s what they chose to do.
And so in the classroom, that experience is what is considered the source of knowledge — of learning. That is the experience that the children are being told — that are being communicated to through the decisions of the teacher — is what is most valuable.
And so what you see is you see discussions around problem solving. You see complexity in descriptions of physical principles. You see children talking about the rules that they have established. You see children talking about how they’ve solved conflict. You have an opportunity for children to engage in thinking about their own thinking. They’re engaging in metacognitive reflection around their own decisions — around their own complex decision making.
And as this takes shape over time, there’s a decision that there’s a really important role for children to take part in art and description. And there are broad guidelines. There are guidelines for early education, and art is part of those guidelines. And so it’s important, in the school, that children have access to materials for art. They decided that the children should have an opportunity every day to draw a story of their own play.
And that starts when they’re three, when they first start in kindergarten, and it continues all the way up until they’re six. So every day, the child is given an opportunity without any other prompt than to draw or to depict the experience of your own play.
And again, what you see is you see an eagerness to talk about what was taking place — again, for that same reason that that play came directly from their own intentionality. And what you see on the back is you see writing. And that writing is the child’s own description of their drawing, which is transcribed by a teacher or a parent.
So if you think about it, you have 14,000 kids that are doing this on a daily basis in Anji. Over the course of a school year, that’s about 3.5 million play stories created every year. What you have is a record of the learning of the experience of the child, and you see a medium for shared knowledge — for shared experience.
You see a medium for sharing across schools. And again, you see documentation that comes from the child, that’s put on the wall, that becomes the primary expression of the value of the school. So not only does this practice result in deep reflection, problem solving, planning. You see schematics.
You see the development of narrative storylines. You see these cells — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. One child starts doing that, and all the children start doing it. You see a culture and a language develop from the child’s own reckoning with their experience of learning.
So complexity — I’ve been using the word complexity a lot. I haven’t really given you guys much basis for that claim. So I want to share a quote, and again, I — Alison Gopnik, who is a very brilliant, respected professor at UC Berkeley, who is on the cutting-edge of research into cognitive development — she talks about causal relationships — causal mapping. That our deepest thinking is around cause and effect — creating conditions and reassessing those causes and effects, making inferences, and then planning.
And that’s where imagination and that’s where inference comes from. So you see that complexity that’s taking place in environments where, rather than a top-down model of assessing specific skill sets and learning outcomes, you’re saying the child has a capacity for deep complexity and deep causal mapping.
And so where are we now, and why are we here, and what’s going on in our context? And there’s a debate that’s gone on for about 3,000 years — at least in the west. It’s empiricism on one hand and rationalism on the other. And the empirical argument is that we gain our knowledge — our mind develops from sensory input.
So experience informs our knowledge. If we don’t experience it, it’s not part of our knowledge. And what rationalism says is that essentially, we’re born with little acorns in our minds, and they become oak trees. And it’s all there, and it unravels over time. And that has characterized, to a great extent, our theories of mind and our approaches to understanding how we think and how we develop.
And as we get into the 20th century, you move towards an understanding of behavior and development — a scientific description of why we make decisions to act certain ways, and how we progress over time developmentally. And so in both instances, there is deep truth to that.
If I give my daughter a cookie, she’ll get in the stroller. That’s behaviorism. That works. It’s very limited. It shouldn’t be a strategy for teaching or for respecting the ability of the child, but it’s present in how we think about interactions with children. And developmentalism, which talks about stages of development.
And it looks at development as taking place in a linear fashion. It posits that the ideal outcome is rationality — is rational adult thought — and that our role as adults, or as teachers, is to help children get from one step to the next step, to the next step, either in the deepest or the most efficient way.
And I like to sum it up by saying, we know what comes next. We can predict what’s going to happen next, and so we can help children get from that one place to another. And a lot has happened since B. F. Skinner and Piaget were around.
There’s been a lot of new thinking about education. But this is a lineage that still runs very deep in how we think about children and how we educate children, how we measure children, and how we assess teachers.
And so what happens in the ’80s and ’90s, what happens with Alison Gopnik — is there is a rethinking of these ideas of rationalism, of empiricism, of behaviorism, of developmentalism. There is idea that comes forward called Theory theory. And there’s a elegant simplicity to it that I think speaks to what we see happening in Anji Play — what we see happening in Anji, what we see happening in experiences of true play.
And the idea is that we’re born with an essential theory — essentially, a sort of scientific method that, through inputs, we can draw conclusions about cause and effect. And as we draw those conclusions, we refine our theories and create new theories. So in a sense, there is an empirical aspect. We’re using these inputs and our experience, and there’s a certain rationalist aspect.
We have this essential theory that we’re born with. But what that means is that the more complexity, the more opportunity you have in terms of inputs. The more space you’re given to create new theories, to adjust your theories, to engage in that Bayesian adjustment of predictions of outcomes based on new inputs — then you have, in the period of development between 0 and 6 or 0 and 8 — essentially, genius-like thinking — thinking that isn’t constrained by specific naming of experiences.
And so there’s a way in which the work that’s happening at Google represents, in a way, this paradigm shift. I know that nobody here is going to tell me how the algorithm works, but it’s not a linear — you get from here to there. There is a consideration of a variety of inputs, of thinking about how things are related, and then decisions made based on how that works in a given situation based on a universe of possibilities.
And so the danger that we have — the great danger that we have — is to say that that is a deficient adult. Your job’s to get out of that, because that’s not thinking. That’s not learning. Let’s get those numbers into you. Let’s get those letters into you. And particularly in communities where there has been a systematic denial of opportunities for play — where policy, where capital has decided that in order to solve a deficit, we’re going to teach you earlier and faster and harder and we’re going to measure you more.
And we’re not only going to measure you. We’re going to measure the teachers, because if you’re not learning your letters, your teachers are failing. We should take their money away. There is a very vicious and oppressive outcome that is born from ignoring this paradigmatic shift in how we see the mind.
And that shift is just now being embodied in a very systematic approach to education, and that’s what’s happening in Anji. And that’s why what we’re talking about is a revolutionary, epistemological, paradigmatic shift away from teachers as keepers of knowledge to teachers as creators of conditions for deep, authentic learning that receives the respect that it deserves.
So we oftentimes talk about Anji Play in a variety of terms. It can be referred to, I think, as a philosophy. I think that’s accurate — a philosophy of education. It can be referred to as a complete, comprehensive approach to early education. In its totality, it consists of materials, technologies, practices, environments. But the reason it works, its DNA, the reason it’s different from a top-down model of defining outcomes that every kid should have, is because it’s a grassroots ecology that is based on respect for the child, for the family, and for the teacher.
And so that ecology connects all of these points in a relationship that’s defined by those crucial elements of learning and experience. And we talk about this in our work. And my work, for the last three and half years, has been, how do I share this with integrity with the world outside of China?
And that work includes working with pilot partners in the United States. It includes talking to parents. It includes talking to educators. And whenever we look at what we’re doing, we look at these five principles. And if something doesn’t feel right, I say, is there some issue around the love?
Is somebody not feeling love here? Are we not on the same page about our risk? I will look at myself. I say, why am I not deeply engaged? Am I not feeling a sense of joy from what I’m doing? And then maybe we haven’t been reflecting enough.
There is a way in which — the definition of this ecology is these five principles, and it stretches beyond a curriculum, and it’s what creates the strength for it to take place. It’s what creates the conditions for it to grow. And it’s why it can’t be easily boiled down to a simple set of instructions.
It’s not a boxed binder of lesson plans. It’s about a fundamental change in the stance of the adult towards the child. And so what you see as this happens is that you have support.
So as government officials see joyous children, as parents see joyous children, they become involved in the work of the school — in the work of the teacher. There’s a whole description of how the materials and the environments have taken shape over time, and that involves parents bringing in their own experiences of play as children — of reflecting on what they were doing when they were kids, building brick ovens for their children in their schools.
So there’s a way in which the creation of this ecology — this deep engagement around the learning of the children — allows for a virtuous cycle of strengthening where the more you become a part of it, the more you can bring into it. And what we’re seeing now is that it’s impacting elementary education.
The elementary schools in Anji are getting children who are deeply engaged in the process of learning. And so as a result, the entire province — Zhejiang Province — has eliminated academic instruction and testing and assessment in the first year of primary school. So there’s a recognition that something important is taking place and that it would be a shame — it would be almost a crime — to stop that from happening — to cut it off too early.
So again, the role of parents, vis-a-vis teachers — I’m speaking to you guys as a parent. It’s often seen as the biggest challenge of schools to communicate with parents. And so that’s why part of the ecology is the engagement and the participation of the parent. The parent’s ability to own the same expertise — to feel the same expertise — the teachers have.
And so there’s, again, strategies, and there are vehicles for that to take place within Anji. And again, resources, materials, environments – the things that schools need — the thing that schools here need — become more freely available when the people who make decisions about them have a deep belief and engagement in what’s taking place.
So I want to just briefly touch on the role of technology. I want to give everybody a chance for questions and answers. But technology is a really — and, I mean, we’re standing here at Google. You guys know what technology is.
TECHNOLOGY & CHILDREN
Technology — there’s a lot of controversy over what the role of technology should be in the lives of children. And so when you go into an Anji Play school, you see teachers with smartphones taking video of children playing. And what that video is being used for — as we were discussing — is sharing and reflection.
The children are seeing their own experiences, and they’re having an opportunity to describe them and to reflect on them. It engages children in an active reconsideration of their own learning. But fundamentally, technology is a tool for respecting the experience of the child.
Technology is not a passive medium for delivering content that’s been developed by adults – again — to derive those outcomes by some advisor who said that this is how you can get kids to learn colors faster. Technology becomes a tool that the adult has to document — to value — the learning of the child.
It’s also a method for teachers to develop, for administrators to develop. When you have a deep record of children’s experiences, you have the basis for engaged discussion about what’s taking place. You have an opportunity to understand the learning that’s taking place for children, and you have the opportunity to understand what decisions about materials and environments — what impact that’s having on children.
And you see the ability to share with parents. That when parents see the capacity of their child, when they have an opportunity to experience the bravery, the compassion, the ingenuity of their own children — again, that’s part of the ecology. So insofar as technology has a crucial role in Anji, it has a role in supporting the development of that ecology.
And for now, as we begin to expand what’s taking place in Anji to sites in the United States and in other parts of the world, technology allows us to communicate across distance, to share in that professional development — that understanding, that analysis — with China, with Budapest, with Madison, Wisconsin.
And so we can share and we can talk about, and we can think about what’s taking place. And we can think about what we’re doing, as adults, based on what we’re seeing, and based on what we’re documenting. And again, a natural development of a practice, of a use, from that starting point — that humble place of saying, there is something that a child can do that I have no idea about.
There is an ability, there is a capacity that I have no ability to guess or predict. And so what I have to do is I have to seek to understand that and to see that. That’s my role. And so technology is a tool that’s come out of that.
Because once you see that thing, you really want to know what’s going on. And so obviously, in Anji, that’s asking children what they’re doing. It’s letting children draw that experience. It’s having them talk to each other.
But as a teacher, or as a parent, it’s the opportunity to review that, to think about that, to document that, to keep that. And again, it’s an acknowledgment of the fact that technology exists, that it’s powerful, that it’s unavoidable.
I think it’s a mistake to say technology is bad. Children shouldn’t be exposed to it. And then go out in the world and see technology everywhere. So it acknowledges the reality of technology, and it uses it to crucially respect and reflect the child’s experience and learning. So a typical day in an Anji Play school.
And I know we’re getting to the end, and so I want to just zoom through this really quickly. But again, the primary experience of learning is open-ended, self-determined play. And that’s given, usually, at least two hours every day. But it’s a full-time schedule, so there’s a lot of other things that happen.
There is the daily contact that comes when you drop off your child and pick up your child at school. There’s outdoor play. There’s also indoor play. There’s time that’s provided for reflection, for expression, for self-care.
The children are encouraged to take the lead in learning how to use the bathroom, how to drink water, how to take care of themselves – how to do all of those things that are necessary for ownership of one’s own experience and self-sufficiency. There is a lot of inquiry that takes place. And what I call extemporized pedagogy —
I think that there is a term called emergent curriculum, and in my understanding, it’s a little bit different than what happens in Anji. But it’s really about creating opportunities for children to learn based on their expressed interest. And it’s less like what we think of as project-based learning, because it’s more immediately responsive to what’s happening.
And so the teachers do play a role in providing that support for the children’s interests. So I think it’s a mistake to think of the teachers as standing behind a glass wall and letting children do whatever they want. The teacher has a role of authority — of respect — that they create routines, that they are the people that are protecting the play of the child.
But they’re teachers. It’s not a free-for-all. It’s not “Lord of the Flies.” It’s expertise at its finest, really, in teaching. And so what you have from this is you have flexibility so that teachers can decide how aspects of the day are organized based on what they observe in the interest of the teacher.
And again, that’s a deep respect for the teacher in making decisions about what is most important based on their knowledge of the children that are in their care, and protecting teacher time. And so every Friday is a half day, and during that second part of the day, the teachers get together and they talk about what they’ve seen that week.
They share their videos. They talk to each other. They meet both within the school and between schools. And that time for reflection — that time for joyous engagement in understanding the children — becomes the basis for their decisions as teachers moving forward.
And again, regular opportunities for parent engagement – parents are brought in to take part in play, to engage in documentation, to engage in sessions where the more experienced parents lead them in video analysis of children’s play.
So again, that part of the ecology – that engagement with the parent, the bringing the parent into the experience of the school. And now we’re really bringing this to programs in the United States. That’s a really critical aspect of our work — is that as it scales in China, as it scales beyond the 14,000 children in Anji to 80,000 children, now, throughout Huzhou Municipality, it’s set, now, to expand across Zhejiang Province to all 90 counties.
And it’s become a matter of national importance at the Ministry of Education level — that these opportunities for play are crucially important for children in the United States. And so what we’re doing is we’re working with partners that see the value of this — that see the necessity of this for their community.
And so we’re really focused on programs that serve children that have often been denied these opportunities for play. We’ve decided that to create a model that will allow us to scale this with integrity, with fidelity, with purpose, that we have to begin working with partners that don’t have huge budgets, that don’t have the access to every new thing that comes up, but with programs that are deeply committed to the importance and the urgency of this experience for their children and for their communities.
And so right now, we’ve got partners in Madison, Wisconsin. We’re doing this incredible program with the Madison Public Library, which is a free drop-in program with the public parks there. With Sierra college, which is in California, and Contra Costa College in California, and Wu Yee Children’s Services in San Francisco. And it’s growing.
We’re getting incredible interest from across the world. This is a map that represents the geography of the people that are contacting us about the need for this in their community. So this is not something that is limited to a rural part of China or a fancy play-based kindergarten in Palo Alto.
This is something that is crucially important to children throughout the world, because — and this goes back to what we were talking about before — we don’t know the challenges that we’re going to be facing in 30 or 40 years. And I don’t think we’re particularly prepared for those challenges.
And so if what we’re teaching is how to confront the challenges of 50 years ago, then we’re in a really precarious position. But if we say, provide the optimal conditions for children to understand the world and themselves, to solve problems, to work together, to understand the world — then I think that puts us in a much better place 50 years from now, 60 years from now.
And so it’s incredibly important. And the people that really understand the trajectory of our societies — that understand the trajectories of the human minds — recognize this. And so you guys are all here today because you’re early adopters, because you saw something that interested you. And those early adopters are parents, and they’re teachers.
But they’re also some of the greatest minds today thinking about education. And so I want to end with this quote, because it really brings home the fact that things are changing fast and that what we need for our children is the ability to understand themselves and to confront what the reality will be when we’re gone.
And so that brings me back to — I want to say thank you — but it brings me back to that first question I asked, which is your deepest memory of play. And what I want to tell you is that we’re getting to a point where children don’t have those memories of play anymore. And so if I’m going to talk from the perspective of a parent, I have a sense of responsibility that when my daughter, who’s 3 now, is working at Google — maybe she won’t.
I don’t know — but she’s at a talk. That when she’s asked, what is your deepest memory of play as a child? She doesn’t draw a blank. That she can speak to that experience. And my hope — and that’s what’s been part of my parenting — is that she’ll have too many experiences to remember, and that she’ll have to choose one of many.
And so I want you, if you’re parents, to think about this when you’re with your child, when you think about how you schedule their time, how you interact with them around play, what you expect of them.
Take a step back. Put your hands down. Close your mouth. And see what you can see. So I want to thank you guys for taking the time to listen, for taking the time out of your day.
I had a video I wanted to show of my daughter, but we’re getting really late. And I’d love to provide an opportunity for anyone to ask questions that might have them. So the question is, the cultural challenges and the regulatory challenges of bringing Anji Play to China. The cultural challenges — so the name Anji is a county in China.
But what I would say is that deep, authentic learning — that true learning and true engagement, the experience of joy and of love — really is, more or less, universal.
In terms of acceptance — I mean, I think that’s a question of education and of sharing and our work to share these ideas. And it’s also the work of policymakers and scientists that the most advanced understanding of cognitive development is reflected in policy around education and around expectations. So it’s the work of parents to demand this.
It’s the work of policymakers to understand this. And it’s the work of all of us, really. And it really doesn’t matter where you happen to be culturally. But I think that at the end of the day, it comes down to a commitment to respect children. And I certainly hope that’s not a culturally-specific value.
In terms of regulatory issues, the science around self-determined risk is very compelling. And the standards around licensing for safety are not based on that very compelling, very, very cutting-edge science. So there’s catchup that has to take place.
At the same time, we live in a democracy, and we can make change, and we can make demands. And so oftentimes, when we engage in change, you hear a lot about why things aren’t possible. This can’t happen. That can’t happen. This can’t happen. That can happen.
We’re working with pilot sites that say, we’re going to make this happen. They’re figuring out ways to make that happen. So if you have the determination to create the conditions for what we’re describing, then you can figure out how to change those regulations, how to work within those regulations.
There’s always a way — in any context — to figure out, to problem solve. Because what Anji Play is largely about is problem solving. It’s about problem solving. It’s about complex problem solving. It’s about taking risks.
…school system — do you feel that we need — do we need a federal standard to ensure that students are learning effectively? That is a big question. I think that there is a lot of fragmentation around the organization and policy around education. We have states, and we have the federal government. A lot of that is tied into funding mechanisms.
So there are accountability measures that are tied to how schools are funded.
So it would be great if the federal government wanted to work with us to create an assessment of true play and true learning. So if that were the case, I would certainly support that. I think that I would absolutely, absolutely advocate for more spending at the local, at the state, and at the federal level in children, because there’s incredible amounts of research that that is a good investment, that that pays off.
And so what we have in Anji Play is we have a very comprehensive, clear, scalable model. And so that can be the basis for that change on a national level. It’s the basis for the change on a national level in China, and I think our goal is that it’s the basis for change around the world.
So we’re going to have to work with the federal government, and I think they’ll see how effective that learning is, and then they can create some standards based on that.
Well, thank you guys so much again. I hope you’ll check out some of our resources online and stay in touch.
Thank you.
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