Where Agency and Community Meet

In this episode of Teach Wonder, we explore the powerful intersection of agency, playful learning, and social interactions. Drawing from our experiences in Iceland and classroom observations, we dive into how stepping back as educators can create rich, organic learning communities. Discover how giving students choice and autonomy can lead to more meaningful peer interactions, deeper engagement, and joyful learning experiences. Whether you're an educator, parent, or curious learner, this episode offers insights into fostering environments where children can explore, connect, and grow together.

Pedagogy of Play - Diagram on page 50 

Intro Music: David Biedenbender

Other music: Pixabay 

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Transcript

Julie Cunningham: 0:00

I think, although sometimes we tend to talk about things in isolation, with very concrete sort of evaluations or assessments at the end, right? Really, there's this overall child we're talking about who, in order to be prepared for their future needs many of these skills. Okay, now we're recording so

Unknown: 0:26

welcome to teach wonder. Yes,

Ashley O'Neil: 0:31

welcome to teach wonder, a

Unknown: 0:36

podcast hosted by Ashley O'Neill and Julie Cunningham. You. Music.

Ashley O'Neil: 0:46

So we've been on a bit of a hiatus. Thank you for your patience, as the gap between last season and this season is a little bit longer than normal, but we're back, and we're really excited to talk to you about a related topic, but a bit of a pivot, a bit of a shift. So all last season, we talked about agency. We talked about fostering a sense of ownership in whatever educational space you're in. We talked about championing our students as sense makers, and we really pulled in some of the patterns that we saw from our trip to Iceland. We talked a lot about the thoughtful observation that those practitioners did, where they would wait and observe and really look at what was happening before they jumped in to intervene in a classroom situation. We talked about our culture and the community needed to create a space for education. We talked a lot about how children are experts of their own needs. We had several guests on who articulated that really well. If you haven't had a chance to listen to those episodes, we really recommend those particularly if you're thinking about getting children outside or getting kids to take risks. And we talked a lot about how the outdoor space is a uniquely perfect environment for fostering agency. So this season, we are, yeah,

Julie Cunningham: 2:01

so Ashley mentioned that we're pivoting a bit. So we're pivoting to, I would say, almost the other side of the coin, right? So the we're pivoting from agency to look at social interaction. And we have three driving questions that we want to talk about. So what does agency have to do with social interactions? Or how are agency and social interactions related? Why is playful learning a valuable tool or framework for all educators? And again, I will go back to then. What does that have to do with both agency and social interactions, right? And then, how can a community that supports agency and playful learning be facilitated. Yeah.

Ashley O'Neil: 2:44

So a lot of our series last time was talked. We talked about stepping back with intention to make space for learners, like when we the facilitator, are in the front, and kind of orchestrating the social interactions, orchestrating the learning pace, how that doesn't really leave a lot of room for students. And so we talked about facilitating flow, getting students to really get into that space of learning where they're really focused on a task yet relaxed, and how we can support their active engagement. And this time, we're really talking about those interactions with learners and individuals and what they do with each other. And because we know that as much as that independence, doing things on their own is really valuable, doing things with other people, that social acts aspect of learning matters too. So this season, I think the great word that we could use is that we're talking about community.

Julie Cunningham: 3:37

Yeah, I agree, and I want to just share a story that came to my mind, even though this is from Iceland again, and we sort of said we were pivoting off of Iceland. It really could be from anywhere. It wasn't specific to Iceland, just means that I saw it there. But the last evening, we were enjoying our group around a campfire in a schoolyard at a school that had a lot of outside areas specifically for for children, for their students, and many of these schools were situated in a neighborhood, so there were some students who came by the schoolyard who were older students than would attend that school, and we were a group of probably 2025, adults sitting around having conversation, but that didn't stop them from asking if they could like play on the playground equipment. But by playground equipment I mean like stumps or posts in the ground that were at different heights, right? So although it was intended for student play, it wasn't like a swing set or a slide. It wasn't your typical playground equipment. Anyway, my point is that these middle school kids did not interrupt us in any way. They asked simply, could they be over there playing on the equipment? And. And was probably like 1020, feet behind us, so we could still hear them. And they proceeded to make their own game with their own rules and to not argue about the rules, like as the rules were negotiated, right? So they communicated the rules to one another. They had this made up game about how you went around on these different stumps, and like, who won and who had to move off the different stump, and there was no arguing, no disagreement, or if the if there was disagreement, there was renegotiation, right? It wasn't an obvious disagreement. And then after a while, they came and sat around the fire with the adults. They knew the teachers from that school, and we could hear a mom from the apartment building behind us yell for her child to come in for dinner. So it was like clear that this was part of the neighborhood and part of something that would go on regularly, but I just think that's a nice way to talk about these all of these youth had autonomy over what was happening with their evening, and yet negotiated this playful learning and this community of their playful learning through their game. Yeah, and

Ashley O'Neil: 6:15

I think the other piece of that that really struck me was so there were two adults, two teachers from that school. One would have been like the comparative to our principal, and then the other one was the outdoor educator, and here they were kind of leading a big night. They had a responsibility to walk us through this evening. They had dinner for us, and they were kind of leading like a discussion around the fire. And it would have been very easy for them to want to focus on that adult portion and the joy and just like true welcoming that they had when they saw those kids there right like they were so excited to see them. They were so delighted to have them stop by. They invited them to come sit by the fire with us, and just kind of enveloped them in and you could tell that that was just a really natural like, of course, of course, these kids are going to be here. Of course we're going to be excited to see them. Of course we'll ask them to stay. And that open invitation where the students both wanted to be there, and then the adults reinforced that joy was really nice. And then we

Julie Cunningham: 7:19

took a look also at the pedagogy of play book by project zero, which is out of Harvard. And there is a diagram that also, I think, resonated with us, in terms of, it's like a Venn diagram of three different areas, so exploring the unknown, leading learning and then finding joy. And Ashley just mentioned that finding joy,

Ashley O'Neil: 7:44

yeah, and we will link that graphic in the show notes, so that you can have that visual alongside this conversation. But really this idea of playful learning, which came up a lot last semester in our conversation, and just comes up in our space in general. We know I remember a hearing in like edu 107 my freshman year, that when kids learn through play, it takes much, many fewer repetitions of an of a thing, of a concept, to understand it than if they learn in under duress or in a more stressful environment, right? And I think that we as educators, it can be really easy to dismiss or to minimize or to make joy and delight and enjoyment to take a back seat to learning, because learning feels so serious, and it feels like we have so many things to get done and so many things to do. And so I think for us, posturing this playful learning and community and agency and saying it matters that students have choice and ownership. It matters that they have wonder, that they're making meaning, that they're exploring the unknown, and it matters that they find joy in that activity. I think reminding ourselves that it is a three legged stool that functions the best is really powerful, but

Julie Cunningham: 8:55

also it helps us situate playful learning at the center of those three sort of bubbles, or those three sort of areas, and it helps me to think about, how is this leading learning, this choice, ownership, empowerment and autonomy. How is that related to community and then also to the other pieces of exploration and finding joy.

Ashley O'Neil: 9:25

The other thing I want to bring up from that playful learning the same source is the characteristics of play and how learning and play is social, and we're looking the characteristics as defined by that source. Is finding joy, making meaning. Is that playful learning iterative? So do students get to revisit things? Are they actively engaged, and is there social interaction? And we talk about the fact that we know that students learn from others and by encountering new perspectives and ways of thinking. And so individual work supports that, but so does small group. Work, and so does whole group work, and so do formal and informal interactions. So one other thing we're thinking about when it comes to playful pedagogy, not to that we're trying to make a case for you a little bit, but I think we're just trying to lay the groundwork for where these conversations are headed, and to try to create a through line for you to see how we can go from giving students what feels like a very individualized thing of agency and choice to thinking about the collective or thinking with the group. Is that when we give students and when we approach learning in this playful way, we can use play to build relationships. And I don't mean I know if I say play, you have a maybe a stereotypical thing in your head, right? Maybe it's a young child. Maybe it's the play that you see in your own space, but I want you to think of playfulness. So if we use playfulness to build relationships, we can encourage students to have positive relationships with us as the adults in the space, but also meaningful relationships with their peers. We can facilitate purposeful conversations to build knowledge. So if we're focusing on creating a community and creating a respectful community where the students can talk with each other and they can speak with us, we're also fostering that culture of feedback. So I hear all the time teachers say that they want students to be reflective about their own work. They want them to be able to critique each other and be reflective about what's going on. But how do we get there? And we can give students sentence frames, we can give students talking structures to work inside of but it's a lot harder for us to facilitate that, that intangible thing where students feel safe and trusted, where students feel like they can share with each other, that I can give and receive feedback, and it will be done in a respectful and positive way. And again, that piece, if we go back to that Venn diagram, a bit of that is finding joy and the community that we've created that comes from that joyful place, I'm much more likely to receive feedback from someone, to learn from my own mistakes, to learn from the experiences of others, if I trust them, if I enjoy their company. And that's not to say that we're expecting our students to be best friends all the time, but what we are saying is it's really important when we think about the type of community that facilitates and fosters that positive learning. So with that in mind, we want to make a case, and we want to talk and explore more about how agency in the classroom affects how we build classroom community. And I just want to take a minute and share an example. That I'm thinking about from our own space, because we have been thinking about this a lot and putting some tools, or some I don't know, practices into place on our own work here to see how this works. So we oftentimes we have field trips. So field trips are a one off, but we also have an ongoing group of homeschool students who come once a month. And with that homeschool group, I work with the younger group, so ages four to seven, we may have an eight year old now. We probably have had a birthday, but mostly it's ages four to seven, and I have been taking a lot of that advice from last semester to heart about fostering their agency and their independence. So I've been working on intentionally stepping back, pausing and making observations before I intervene in any social interaction, and really trying to facilitate their own independence. And interestingly, as I have done that a community has taken shape, and I think that in large part, I can see the through line between my stepping back and making more space for student independence and the community that has come from that the students, when we had done this activity, we had a community, a similar group. In years past, the students didn't all know each other's names. They met once a month, and we met for a whole year, and by the end, they didn't really know each other's names, despite me doing some tricks with popsicle sticks and naming everybody and having those intentional conversations and trying really overtly to foster that community. But this time in my stepping back, the students have talked to each other more. They have interacted with each other more. It has created more space for them to negotiate play rules and activities that they have wanted to do. I've seen them branch out and form connections over the choices that they're making. So they have a lot of choice when they first come into our activity. I have an invitation on the table, but if they're not interested, there are other things that are set up for them to do. And I've seen students form friendships or form relationships, because they both are interested in building with the fort boards, and they're both interested in creating some sort of game in the rice bin. And in doing that, the less space I take up, I can see that their personalities are just really blossoming. And the community. Has come from that, and the social interactions that have come from that are what we've been wanting. But when I tried to build it, and I like had all these really intentional community building things, it felt contrived and it always I was the point at which all of it had to revolve around. Now that I've removed myself and left space for the students, what I can see is a much more authentic and organic set of interactions with the students, because they rely on each other. They ask each other for help before they ask me. They ask each other to play before they ask me. And that has been a really beautiful thing to see. I was,

Julie Cunningham: 15:36

I think Ashley articulated a lot of the pieces there, the making it an authentic situation, right? And allowing the community to sort of build itself around a shared experience or experiences? And I was also thinking that if I'm a listener, I might say, Okay, you're talking about playful learning and playfulness, and you're talking about informal education, essentially right by this, these field trips that are not in a K 12 classroom. So I like to try to also situate it in terms of like what it might look like with content in a K 12 classroom. And so for me, science is my background. So it's simplest for me to think about science content, but listeners, you all are content experts in your own area, and I'm sure you can translate this into your areas as well. So I think about inquiry and science as being a way of allowing students to be playful or to engage with the material in a way that we might say could be sort of like learning through play, right? Because if there are, if they are allowed to interact with materials in a way that doesn't have a set outcome, like it doesn't have a teacher goal, but rather it's what can you discover, or how can you look for patterns, or what do you see happening? Then that's more playful than measure this data to make this graph or whatever the other outcome might be, right? So if it's a small group work, and they have a community in which they're having to work together for a shared goal, and they have materials to interact with in a way that we would say is inquiry based, then you've set yourself up for this community needs one another to be successful. And if there's classroom norms in which we work with one another in a way that's respectful towards our goal, I don't think it's really hard to see that the outcome of that would be a community driven classroom where students were able to investigate or go through inquiry for your science concept or your math concept, or whatever your content is, in such a way that they're looking to meet the goal using one another's experiences and knowledge.

Ashley O'Neil: 18:16

And I think another example that comes to mind as you were talking about it, I was recently in a kindergarten classroom, and that kindergarten teacher, because you say you think of science right away, I actually think of language arts, which is probably due to my background. But this teacher is a kindergarten teacher, and for literacy stations, she was just finding that something about it wasn't working. And so rather than having students in set groups kind of rotate through. You see that a lot in classrooms, right? Like I'm the blue group, and so I go to the station and the station is the station. That's what I did when I was teaching kindergarten and first grade. She has a schedule by which she and her pair Pro will pull students throughout the week, and so they know that what group they're in and what when they're coming to her table for small work, small group work, but until it's their time to be pulled they have free choice over the space. She has different stations set out different activities. Some of them are very related to literacy. Some of them are are what you would think of as a more traditional PlayStation, and the students get to choose where they go, how long they stay there, when they move, and they can do all of those negotiations. And she found two things were happening. Thing One was that her small group time with the students that she had at her table was much was of higher quality, meaning that she wasn't going over and interrupting and dealing with social interactions or navigating frustrations that students had at the station that they were at, or helping them find their space, right? I've been in those situations where you're up and down and up and down and helping kids and your actual literacy small group time at that table is interrupted a million times, right? So. So that was one thing, but then the other piece was the students were much more they were engaging with each other in some really interesting ways. She saw that that playfulness resulted in more sophisticated social interactions between the two, between the students. She was able to see that they were negotiating sharing things and all of those skills that you want a kindergartner to learn, or wish that they would come to kindergarten with right, the social navigations that they have to do for is it my turn? Can I go to this place? Do I need to clean up my materials when I'm done right? All of those things were happening much more readily, and the students were managing themselves and each other in a really positive way. Then the other thing that she found is when those students came to the table, they were in a really good space headspace to do that tough literacy work, right? They had all this time for choice. They had these really positive social interactions with their peers, and then when they came to the table, they were really ready to do the work that she had there. So I think it's a great example of how stepping back, giving choice, resulted in more social interactions and a building of a community where the students were really working together in a positive way, and how it increased productivity for them to be ready to learn, which is I get as a classroom educator, we've got to do both things right and do Both things really

Julie Cunningham: 21:19

well. That's a really interesting example, because you talk both about autonomy, choice for where I want to go and what I want to do with my time, as well as the community social interactions, the community of the peer interactions, but also the community of the general classroom, right? And then the community of how the students were then working with the or the social interactions of how the teacher then was interacting with the students and the the more productive time. But I also think then, when I think about setting up a space like that, right? So the other thing that the other conversation that often comes up when we talk about any sort of change in the classroom, or any sort of consideration of different dynamics, right? Is this okay? So where is my time as a teacher put in? And it sounds like really my time as a teacher in this case, is put in upfront right to really intentional setup and planning of what will those stations look like, and how do I set it up so that students will feel engaged and interested, right and joyful, perhaps while they're at those stations, but then also be ready to work with me as the instructor when I indicate that it's their time to work with me, which sounds like it was communicated in advance as well. But then secondarily, like, what time do I give up in my classroom? And how do I get that back in terms of learning, right? So? So if we're going to say, as a instructor, like, I'm gonna give up some time in my day to essentially allow students to engage in what we're calling playful learning, engagement and joy and social interactions, being all of a part of it. Right then what I'm getting back is this in depth time when the students are with me. And so I think sometimes we talk about time as though, like there's some sort of equivalency, or there's some sort of like, if I give this up, I should get this back, right, whereas in this case, we're maybe giving time to the students, but also the productivity, the more engaged time is what we're getting back

Ashley O'Neil: 23:46

Absolutely. And I know I was in two school districts in which we had to have these, like 90 minute literacy blocks, right? And I remember thinking, okay, all of my stations have to have this outcome. And so they were all really academic tasks. And yes, I had stamps and different modalities, and I tried to make it fun with games and whatnot, but they were all doing these really taxing literacy tasks the entire time. And when I saw these literacy stations in which one could argue that students were doing less now, now that I'm a more practice teacher, I would argue back that all of those social interactions are a language arts skill, right, and that we undervalue speaking and listening, but I can see how on paper, you would say, Well, they didn't get through the three worksheets that the other class got to because the other classroom had three worksheets at their stations, and those kids did those stations, but the fidelity, Which with they did those right, I would argue matters. And I think over time as a classroom teacher, I would rather have a really good 15 minutes of focused, intentional, regulated kids who wanted to be there right and got the stuff done and did it and felt really good about. It then trying to work with students who are done right, who are tired, who are distracted, who are dysregulated, who have done something at nauseum for an hour and a half, and they need a break. And so I think that's the other part. When you talk about equivalencies, I think early teacher me would say, gotta do my 90 minute literacy block. And now I would say a 90 minute literacy block may still only have 15 really good minutes in it, so why don't we just go for that really good 15 to 20 minutes of literacy and give those students that choice and the autonomy that they need to get there

Julie Cunningham: 25:37

Well, plus, I think you also have to, you can't, I mean, take it as an isolated unit, or instance, or your week, or your day, or your hour, or whatever your your chunk of time is, but look at the investment towards the future of your classroom also, right? So if your students are engaged and finding joy, and their social interactions are such that there's growth, because you've set them up in such a way that they are talking to one another and listening and sharing and collaborating and communicating, right? Those are all like an investment of perhaps less skills that are less able to be evaluated on some sort of a report card, perhaps. But also there's like this investment, not only in your classroom this year, but then students growth towards the next grade level. So I think although sometimes we tend to talk about things in isolation, with very concrete sort of evaluations or assessments at the end, right? Really, there's this overall child we're talking about, who, in order to be prepared for their future, needs many of these skills, and I know we're not going here on our podcast today, but at a time in which many of us spend a lot of time on our electronic devices and less time face to face socially, these are skills that don't perhaps get practiced As much Absolutely,

Ashley O'Neil: 27:21

this has been another episode of teach wonder. Thank you for listening. You can find important links and information in our show notes. You.