Shifting from a Classroom of Reluctant Compliance to a Classroom of Responsive Curiosity

Ms. Castallanos's mentor teacher shows her a clip chart, the school's universal "behavior management system." [...]we offer recommendations for implementing playful learning with suggestions tailored to specific stakeholders (teachers, educational administrators, and teacher trainers and educators). The science of learning tells us that true engagement and deep learning come when students can try out their ideas, dynamically interact with peers, and work on interest-driven projects while teachers act as the "guide on the side" (King 1993; Smith 1993), curating stimulating environments and scaffolding learning (Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2015, 2020, 2022a; Zosh et al. 2018, 2022a, 2022b). Several authors of this article conducted a study that trained intervention specialists on book readings and related guided play sessions designed to teach vocabulary to children in Head Start programs (Toub et al. 2018).