I know a few lawyers who could benefit from Make-Believe Play Practice: If the firefighter hat fits . . .

A new method of teaching young children incorporates much play. The creators of the Tools of the Mind program believe playing is the best way to increase the kids' executive function. What's executive function? This definition comes from an article about the program "Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?" (New York Times).

Originally a neuroscience term, it refers to the ability to think straight: to order your thoughts, to process information in a coherent way, to hold relevant details in your short-term memory, to avoid distractions and mental traps and focus on the task in front of you.

As you might imagine, executive function is very important.

The ability of young children to control their emotional and cognitive impulses, it turns out, is a remarkably strong indicator of both short-term and long-term success, academic and otherwise. In some studies, self-regulation skills have been shown to predict academic achievement more reliably than I.Q. tests.

How could play increase the ability to think straight? To me, the answer to that question is the most intriguing aspect of the program.

Vygotsky [Tools of the Mind is based on his ideas] maintained that at 4 or 5, a child’s ability to play creatively with other children was in fact a better gauge of her future academic success than any other indicator, including her vocabulary, her

counting skills or her knowledge of the alphabet. Dramatic play, he said, was the training ground where children learned to regulate themselves, to conquer their own unruly minds. In the United States, we often associate play with freedom, but to Vygotsky, dramatic play was actually the arena where children’s actions were most tightly restricted. When a young boy is acting out the role of a daddy making breakfast, he is limited by all the rules of daddy-ness. Some of those limitations come from his playmates: if he starts acting like a baby (or a policeman or a dinosaur) in the middle of making breakfast, the other children will be sure to steer him back to the eggs and bacon. But even beyond that explicit peer pressure, Vygotsky would say, the child is guided by the basic principles of play. Make-believe isn’t as stimulating and satisfying — it simply isn’t as much fun — if you don’t stick to your role. And when children follow the rules of make-believe and push one another to follow those rules, he said, they develop important habits of self-control.

[R]esearch conducted by some of Vygotsky’s followers that showed that children acting out a dramatic scene can control their impulses much better than they can in nonplay situations. In one experiment, 4-year-old children were first asked to stand still for as long as they could. They typically did not make it past a minute. But when the kids played a make-believe game in which they were guards at a factory, they were able to stand at attention for more than four minutes. ...

During hour after hour of what is called Make-Believe Play Practice, these children do lots of dressing up, engaging in activities such as fighting imaginary fires, cooking imaginary food, and pouring pretend tea. Tools of the Mind has many other components, too, including a Friday conference with the teacher to review the past week and plan the next.

There is no Tools of the Mind for adults but I suggest a remedial program for some grownups. Although most lawyers are bright, not all that I have met exhibit good executive function. Some do not think straight; a few cannot play creatively with others. Maybe certain lawyers would benefit by playing frog, firefighter, or factory guard for a while each week. And that weekly check-in practice? I'd recommend that, too.

Comments

[Tracy]

I luv info like this that shows what we do and use to teach children could and should be applied beyond the toddler and adholesent years...

Thanks for Sharing!

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Tracy
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[Julie A. Fleming]

I think that we graduate into new forms of make-believe play practice. Many lawyers consider possible scenarios for their cases, for future cases, or for networking and client engagement opportunities. For each of these, they play out what would happen if they tried different strategies or if unexpected twists arose. These types of make believe are important because they keep the mind strong, active, and able to quickly come up with multiple creative solutions for everyday work-related issues.