The Play-Based Toolbox.
Integrating Instruction with Play
I shared a sketchnote about explicit instruction in a play-based classroom a few months back, a quick visual on what it can look like inside an inquiry-rich classroom. But the conversation around explicit teaching has gotten a little louder, and I don’t think it is an either/or conversation.
Increasingly, it is framed as the only way children genuinely learn, and the theory most often used to support that case is cognitive load theory.
John Sweller developed this theory, arguing that instructional design should respect the constraints of working memory rather than against them. Sweller draws on a distinction from psychologist David Geary between two categories of knowledge: biologically primary and biologically secondary.
Biologically primary knowledge covers general problem-solving and thinking skills, learning to speak and listen in a native language, generalising, and transferring. Cognitive load theory argues this is knowledge we’ve evolved to acquire, so it’s picked up unconsciously, through immersion, without instruction, and it doesn’t impose a heavy cognitive load. Biologically secondary knowledge is different: things like reading, writing, and formal mathematics don’t come pre-installed. They’re culturally invented, they take effort, and for most learners they’re best acquired through explicit instruction.
It is that last line that people cite as blanket proof that children “can’t learn by discovery or play.” But the theory isn’t arguing that exploration doesn’t work at all; instead, it argues that, for biologically secondary knowledge, working memory can get overwhelmed if a novice is left to find it on their own, and that’s where explicit instruction tends to help.
However, there is research that runs counter to the explicit teaching points. A well-known study by Elizabeth Bonawitz and colleagues gave children a novel toy with several hidden functions. One group was explicitly shown a function by an adult; another group was simply handed the toy without instruction. The children who were taught the one function explored fewer of the toy’s other functions than the children left to explore on their own. Being told narrowed what they went looking for; those who were left alone found more.
So, when content is complex, unfamiliar, and culturally constructed, explicit teaching may be needed here, but that doesn’t mean children learn only when they are explicitly taught. And the Bonawitz research highlights this; tell them something they were about to discover on their own, and you can narrow their thinking rather than extend it.
It is important to note here that cognitive load theory isn’t uncontested. Alfie Kohn has argued that the theory rests on an oversimplified model of working memory that doesn’t account for the biological mechanisms actually involved in learning, and points to research that contrasts explicit, teacher-centred instruction with child-centred approaches. Others have pushed back on the primary/secondary knowledge split itself; some researchers argue that even something as apparently automatic as native language acquisition involves far more scaffolding and repetition from caregivers and educators than Sweller’s model accounts for, and isn’t simply absorbed through immersion. The case of Genie, a child discovered in the early 1970s after years of severe social isolation and deprivation, with almost no exposure to language during childhood, is a good example that despite years of exposure to language after she was found, she never developed full grammatical competence. Researchers suggest that language isn’t passively absorbed through mere exposure to speech; it is a more demanding process than immersion alone implies.
So where does my thinking sit on this topic?
I see play as the toolbox that contains all the tools I use as a practitioner: inquiry, provocations, invitations, the classroom itself as a third teacher, questioning, prompting, scaffolding, and explicit teaching. It is one of several tools I use daily, and here’s what that looks like in my classroom.
A group wanted to stage The Nutcracker. They needed dancers, so they sought out our librarian, who is also a dance teacher, and she explicitly taught them choreography. There was plenty of back-and-forth about which moves they wanted to keep, but the moves themselves were taught directly and deliberately. In the same project, another group tried making their own tutus. Their first attempts didn’t stay on, so I explicitly taught them a simple tutu-making technique they could then use independently.
Another child wanted to learn to wash dishes, as part of a discussion about things you’ve always wanted to do but can’t do yet; she wanted to help her nanny at home. A few other children were curious too, so I taught the group directly: how to wash, rinse, dry, and put the dishes away.
A group building a city out of blocks needed street signs. I told them I had no idea where anything in their city was. They were surprised; to them, it was obvious, but when another child joined and didn’t know where everything was, they realised they needed signs, something to tell a visitor, or a new child, what everything in their city was. So we sat down together and got explicit about signs and symbols, leading to writing and letter sounds. Some children were listening for the initial sound in a word; others were at letter-sound correspondence, where I’d say a sound and they’d look for the letter that matched it, checking against the alphabet chart; others, further along, were sounding out full words.
A child noticed the small yellow clocks we keep in the classroom. One child’s curiosity about how I know what the clocks are telling time led to an opportunity to learn to tell the time. That meant I needed to be explicit about what the hands mean and how you read them.
A group building robotic cars got stuck moving from a 2D sketch to something that could actually stand up in three dimensions. I flipped an outdoor trolley on its back and explicitly named the parts: the axle, the chassis, the frame, the vocabulary and structural understanding they needed to keep designing on their own terms.
A child working with numicons wanted to move past 10. Exploration had carried him a long way, but “fifteen” needed a direct instruction to know that a ten comes first, and then the five. Without naming it explicitly, he might have lost interest in that moment and moved away before he got there.
And when a group encountered a circuit for the first time, no amount of open exploration would get them any further as they had no reference point. So I showed them a closed loop, let them take it apart, and then asked them to explore themselves.
Each of these examples emerged directly from a child’s genuine interest. As a play-based teacher, I believe all children are capable, competent learners who, given the right opportunities, can often arrive at these points independently. However, they can just as easily become frustrated, lost, or disengaged, stalling before they ever reach that point. It is my role to observe, engage, and listen closely to know when a scaffold, a prompt, or a piece of explicit teaching will open up that ‘zone of proximal development.’
Vygotsky defined this zone as the space between what a child can already do alone and what they can do with the right support beside them. In my practice, explicit teaching is simply scaffolding support offered inside that zone, a bridge for the child to cross once they’ve already opened the path through their own interest, which I then withdraw once they can stand in that zone independently.
Every one of those moments started with the child; the learning was meaningful and contextual, leading to a deeper conceptual understanding than adult-driven learning could provide.
I do not believe explicit teaching is the only way children learn, nor is it mutually exclusive from play. However, we must ensure they do not undermine the value of play. After all, these frameworks are human constructs, built by adults who grew up in their own childhood play. It isn’t lost on me that these models are being used to optimise that same play out of existence for children today.
Remember, these frameworks are just tools in the kit; they are not an either/or but an ‘and’ that is here to serve play, not replace it.