EdCircuit Staff 
This 2016 edCircuit opinion piece, with excerpts from Carolina Blatt-Gross at CNN and Alison Gopnik at Smithsonian, asks why students are made to sit still. The section below adds what the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say about play-based learning, recess and movement.
edCircuit Opinion:
My most memorable course in college was not because of its gripping content, but because of its length. Every Monday and Tuesday at 9 am, I sat in my chair for four hours and listened to my professor regurgitate information. Immediately following this class, I had another which was three hours long. While I cannot recall all that I learned, I do remember how I felt every time I reached the halfway point. In her article for CNN, Carolina Blatt-Gross raises the question: why do we make students sit still in class? If it’s hard for a college-age student to remain focused, imagine what those in K-12 grades experience. We learn and draw in new information through our bodies, and our mind is within our physicality. Research has shown that physical activity helps students learn. Do you believe that sitting still forces the student to focus their energy on physical restrictions? If so, what impact does this have on their learning?
At a Glance:
- Meanwhile, commitment to recess, art, labs and nearly any type of learning that involves the body is generally dwindling.
- Play is under pressure right now, as parents and policymakers try to make preschools more like schools.
Around the Web:
Why do we make students sit still in class?
Carolina Blatt-Gross | CNN
As a graduate student, I had the opportunity to observe a number of idyllic, progressive classrooms where students danced to the pencil sharpener or sprawled across beanbag chairs while completing their work. I read countless books and articles about research that supports physical activity as part of academic success. It made sense to me — theoretically — that children should be allowed to move their bodies. Asking them to do otherwise, I came to believe, could be detrimental to both the student and the teacher.
Then it got personal. I had two children of my own, two fearless boys who are so busy they don’t have time to stop for uninteresting activities like eating, sleeping or potty training. Our eldest son lobbed himself out of his crib at 10 months and hasn’t stopped climbing since. Putting clothes on our younger son currently involves a high-speed chase followed by a wrestling match and, if we’re lucky, ends with at least one piece of clothing partially in place.
Obviously, it takes more than a little mental and physical effort for them to keep their bottoms in a chair.
To read more visit CNN
Let the Children Play; It’s Good for Them!
Alison Gopnik | Smithsonian
Walk into any preschool and you’ll find toddling superheroes battling imaginary monsters. We take it for granted that young children play and, especially, pretend. Why do they spend so much time in fantasy worlds?
People have suspected that play helps children learn, but until recently there was little research that showed this or explained why it might be true. In my lab at the University of California at Berkeley, we’ve been trying to explain how very young children can learn so much so quickly, and we’ve developed a new scientific approach to children’s learning.
Where does pretending come in? It relates to what philosophers call “counterfactual” thinking, like Einstein wondering what would happen if a train went at the speed of light.
To read more visit Smithsonian
Play based learning in 2026: what pediatricians and the CDC recommend
Play based learning is a phrase used for several different things, and the differences matter when a school decides what to protect. Free play is play that children direct themselves. Playful learning is a lesson that a teacher designs so children explore, pretend or build as they learn. Recess is a scheduled break. Movement in the classroom means physical activity built into lessons. The excerpts above, from Alison Gopnik on pretend play and Carolina Blatt-Gross on sitting still, touch the first and last of these.
The pediatric position
In August 2018 the American Academy of Pediatrics released a clinical report on play, The Power of Play: A Pediatric Role in Enhancing Development in Young Children (Yogman and colleagues, Pediatrics, September 2018). According to the Academy’s summary on its parent site, the report describes play as central to executive function, the set of skills used to plan, focus and manage impulses, and as a buffer against stress. It also recommends that schools protect unstructured play and playful learning, promote recess and daily physical activity, and let children follow their own curiosity. The same summary cites research that children’s play time fell by 25 percent between 1981 and 1997 and that 30 percent of kindergartners no longer had recess, which had been replaced by academic lessons. Those figures are old, so they describe a trend and not today’s classrooms. A clinical report from a professional body is also a statement of expert consensus, not a single new experiment, and the summary does not rank the strength of each claim.
What the CDC says about recess and movement
The CDC’s recess page, reviewed in July 2024, lists the benefits of recess as more physical activity, better memory and focus, staying on task in class, and fewer classroom behavior problems, along with social and emotional gains such as learning to share and negotiate. The page gives no required number of recess minutes. It refers to the nationally recommended 60 minutes or more of moderate to vigorous physical activity each day for students, which recess, physical education and classroom activity all contribute to, and it points schools to the CDC and SHAPE America guide Strategies for Recess in Schools. The page lists benefits without describing the studies behind each, so a leader who needs the evidence in detail should read that guide and its references.
Reading the original piece fairly
The original opinion asks whether sitting still forces students to spend energy on physical restraint. That is a reasonable question, and the sources above support giving children more chances to move. They do not show that every lesson should be a game or that direct teaching has no place. The pediatric summary speaks of protecting play and of playful learning, which sits alongside teacher-led instruction. A school that adds play and movement is changing the balance of a day, not replacing teaching. The Gopnik excerpt makes a related point about pretend play and the kind of thinking it supports, and the original connects it to research from Gopnik’s university lab, which readers can follow through the Smithsonian link above.
Decisions for a school or parent group
- Check the schedule. Count the minutes of recess and physical activity students actually receive, since the AAP summary describes recess being replaced by lessons in some kindergartens.
- Separate the three needs: unstructured recess, structured physical activity, and playful learning inside lessons. Each is protected in a different way, through the timetable, the playground and teacher planning.
- Ask teachers where a lesson could include movement without losing its purpose, for example a sorting task, a walk-and-talk discussion or a station rotation.
- Where parents worry that play crowds out academics, share the AAP and CDC statements, which describe play and recess as supporting focus and learning.
The pediatric report is written mainly about preschool and the early grades, and the CDC page speaks to school-age children in general. Teachers of older students can use the movement ideas above while keeping the evidence in mind: the strongest statements concern younger children.
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