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Education 3-13: International Journal of Primary,

Elementary and Early Years Education
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Time to relax a little

Rod Parker-Rees
Published online: 30 Jul 2007.

To cite this article: Rod Parker-Rees (2000) Time to relax a little, Education 3-13: International Journal of Primary,
Elementary and Early Years Education, 28:1, 29-35, DOI: 10.1080/03004270085200061
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004270085200061

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TIME TO RELAX A LITTLE

Making time for the interplay of
minds in education
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Rod Parker-Rees

Efforts to impose improvements on education by prescribing what must

be done make it increasingly difficult for teachers to enjoy their work.
This paper makes a case for the need to relax the pressure under which
teachers work and suggests that this may be achieved by increasing
opportunities for conversation at all levels of education. Conversation
contributes to a sense of community which can make teaching more
enjoyable. It can also help to develop a confident voice with which
teachers can engage their managers in conversation, suggesting ways in
which policy might be developed and improved.

Suggesting that education might benefit from loosening up a little will expose me to accusations on the one
hand that I am merely stating the obvious (who doesn't
already know that teachers' creativity is inhibited by
excessive external pressures and constraints), and on
the other hand that I am just another whingeing teacher
who doesn't know the meaning of hard work, personal
sacrifice and competition in the market-place. I would
like, nevertheless, to suggest that relaxation is not just
for wimps and that it need not result in falling standards
or a lapse into anarchy. Relaxation does not have to be
seen as a threat to the ties that bind societies; indeed it
may be our best hope for keeping these constraints
flexible enough to adapt to the rapidly changing circumstances of life in the third millennium. I have been
meeting with two groups of teachers over the last year
to talk, in a relaxed and playful way, about possible
ways of increasing opportunities for children to talk
with each other in relaxed and playful ways and these
informal conversations have made me increasingly
conscious of the importance of reciprocal communication in education.

We have become too accustomed to the assumption that

educational practice must be tightly controlled by
policy and that management must determine, from
above, what teachers should deliver and how they
should deliver it. The Chief Inspector of Schools knows
what must be done and he has established systems of
rewards and punishments to ensure that headteachers
will manage their staff and teachers will manage their
children in ways that will ensure increasing levels of
educational productivity. Two recent publications, A//
our Futures: Creativity Culture and Education
(NACCCE, 1999) and the new Early Learning Goals
(QCA, 1999b) may, however, offer some hope of a shift
of mood away from this 'new managerialism' (Ball,
1997; Randle and Brady, 1997; Welch, 1998) which has
marked New Labour's early initiatives in education. A//
our Futures seems to acknowledge the suspicion that
the pursuit of effective education may have adverse
consequences on affective education; in a time of rapid
change, when employers want 'people who can adapt,
see connections, innovate, communicate and work with
others' (NACCCE, 1999, p.13), how children come to
feel about learning may be at least as important as what

EDUCATION 3-13 March 2000

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they learn. The early learning goals also acknowledge

the importance of 'supporting, fostering, promoting
and developing children's ... positive attitudes and dispositions towards their learning' (QCA, 1999b, p.9).
The clear focus on play and creativity in both publications forces us to recognise a fundamental tension
between the top-down prescriptions of new managerialism and the need to protect space for flexibility,
contingency and exploration: 'A well planned and well
organised environment.., provides the structure for
teaching within which children [and teachers?] explore,
experiment, plan and make decisions for themselves,
thus enabling them to learn, develop and make good
progress (QCA, 199b, p.5).
But 'teachers cannot develop the creative abilities of
their pupils if their own creative abilities are suppressed' (NACCCE, 1999, p.90) and it is unreasonable
to expect teachers, who feel increasingly constrained
simply to do as they are told, to encourage children to
take risks, innovate, enjoy challenges, explore alternative possibilities and engage actively in educational
conversations.
Studies of brain functioning have shown us that we
respond to stress by playing safe and channelling the
flow of thought along the quickest routes or the deepest
ruts, much as we will travel on motorways when we are
in a hurry (Claxton, 1997). While this does allow us to
maintain a brisk pace, it may actually interfere with our
ability to be creative. It is only when we have the leisure
to wander off the beaten track and explore what lies
between the motorways that we are likely to think
laterally (de Bono, 1992) and discover new connections.
As pressure builds up throughout all levels of the
education system it becomes increasingly difficult for
anyone to be the first to relax. Peter Woods (1995) has
shown that it is still possible for teachers and schools to
develop creative and inspiring approaches to teaching
but he acknowledges that these individuals often pay a
high price for holding out against the downward force
of managerialism. It requires high levels of self-confidence and a great deal of personal commitment and
energy for individuals to sustain personal values and a
personal voice in the face of OFSTED inspections,
league tables and other official instruments of conformity: 'Many schools are doing exciting and
demanding work but often they see themselves doing
this in spite, not because, of the existing climate'
(NACCCE, 1999, p.8). It may, however, be easier to
make a personal contribution to the development of
policy if one has the support of communication with a
network of colleagues. As the age of the atom gives

30

way to the age of communication, community and

interdependence seem to be displacing the individualism and independence which were the hallmark of
the last decades of the twentieth century.
It may be necessary to restore the original meaning of
communication which was closer to "making common'
than simply 'making k n o w n ' - one communicates with,
rather than to, other people; negotiating meanings
rather than simply delivering them. MacIver and Page
(1950) have pointed out an important distinction between having 'like', or similar, interests and having
common interests: "the like is what we have distributively, privately, each to himself. The common is
what we have collectively, what we share without dividing up' (MacIver and Page, 1950, p.32, in Clark, 1996,
p.35).
It is interesting that the section on play in the early
learning goals recommends that children should 'communicate with others as they investigate or solve
problems' (QCA, 1999b, p. 12, my emphasis) but in the
language and literacy section, where play begins to give
way to working towards later assessments, practitioners
are encouraged to 'plan for opportunities for children to
communicate thoughts, feelings and ideas to an adult
and to each other' (ibid, p.24, my emphasis).
Conversation, talking face-to-face with other people, is
the definitive form of communication because the
unplanned contingency of conversation can result in the
emergence of genuinely common understandings. It is
this openness to what Cohen and Stewart (1994) have
called complicity (a process by which simple forms can
emerge out of interactions between extremely complex
systems) which makes conversation very different from
written or broadcast communication. Postmodernist
critics may argue that meanings are negotiated between
readers and texts but it is more difficult to claim that
reading allows us to communicate with authors.
We use conversation as a social tool, to negotiate the
extraordinarily complicated webs of relationships that
constitute our communities. The loose structure of
conversation allows us to make inferences from the
ways in which people choose to say things (or not to say
things), but we can also talk about other people: 'That
conversations allow us to exchange information about
people who are not present is vitally important. It
allows us to teach others how to relate to individuals
they have never seen before' (Dunbar, 1992, p.31).
Dunbar also argues that talk is often less about conveying information than about interaction for its own sake,
a form of social grooming like chimpanzees' nitpicking, and Csikszentmihalyi (1992, p. 129) has also sug-

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gested that 'the main function of conversation is not to

get things done but to improve the quality of
experience'. Conversation is much more complicated,
rich and subtle than writing because, although language
is its principal medium it is by no means the only one:
'With small talk and chitchat the meaning conveyed by
our verbal language is usually subordinate to our socalled body language - and is often subordinate to the
very fact that we are making an effort to vocalise'
(Locke, 1995, p.33).

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Because, in conversation, we engage with people, and

not simply with their words, this form of communication allows us to get to know each other in ways which
we would find difficult to talk about, and this tacit
knowledge lends a special aura to the feelings of community that emerge between people who make time to
chat with each other.
'I was doing cooking with my children today, just a
group at a time and, I don't ever do that because my
ESA [Education Support Assistant] does it and I
just thought it was lovely because you had, well I
had one group o f seven and three groups of six to
get through with the bits and it was just so...
chummy, yes that we were talking about what we
were doing, but we were also talking about other...
we got onto talking about names and, oh, because
we were making this cake for my ESA because it's
her day off and it's her birthday tomorrow and Mrs
Smith was called Jane, 'My mum's called Jane' and
three of them in this group had mums called Jane
and we were trying to find out what other people's
mums were... It's just that nice little social
conversation which, because you're doing things,
you're not, it's not quite the same sort of atmosphere as sitting, you're more equal to them rather
than in any other situations that you are in a classroom. You're very much the teacher but, ... you
know?' (Reception/Year I teacher in teachers'
conversation group, 19/5/99)
This sense of community, of having things in common,
also makes it much easier for conversants to trust each
other in ways that make formal systems of management
unnecessary; we do not need written plans or policies
to police our relationships with friends or family because the iterative process of regular conversations
allows our relationships to adapt, evolve and repair
themselves as our circumstances, and we ourselves,
change. We should, perhaps, be paying more attention
to the development of conversational relationships,
caring communities and the development of positive
learning dispositions in our schools:

'Schools should become places in which teachers

and students live together, talk to each other, reason
together, take delight in each others' company. Like
good parents, teachers should be concerned first
and foremost with the kind of people their charges
are becoming. My guess is that when schools focus
on what really matters in life, the cognitive ends we
are now striving toward in such painful and artificial ways will be met as natural culminations of
the means we have wisely chosen.' (Noddings,
1991, p.161)
In his fascinating study of the effects of printing on
western thinking and social structures, Marshal
McLuhan noted that neither Socrates nor Jesus used
writing to communicate their teachings, 'because the
kind of interplay o f minds that is in teaching is not
possible by means of writing' (McLuhan, 1962, p.23).
Conversation has the potential to be a powerful tool for
teaching but it is being squeezed out of both classrooms
and staffrooms. We in the UK are peculiarly obsessed
with imposing literacy on ever younger children, valuing reading and writing over talking and listening and
hurrying children out of the interplay of minds and into
formal learning. Literacy is the foundation stone of
formal learning, learning that focuses on the symbolic
forms in which meanings are expressed, disembedding
them from the complications of particular contexts.
Formal learning directs attention to what words mean
rather than to what people mean. There is a danger that
if children are moved too quickly into formal learning
they may find it difficult to make connections between
abstract concepts and their still very limited personal
experience. It is this inability to 'colour in' formal
structures with the warmth and intensity of one's own
lived experience that can result in disaffection. It is not
so much that children become disaffected, as that, for
them,formal knowledge remains unaffected - cold, dry
and devoid of the richness of personal meaning.
Early opportunities to play with objects can arm
children with a store of personal 'colours' with which
to make sense of formal concepts, but it is play with
other people, adults and children, that provides the
essential bridge between private and public worlds. The
interplay of minds does not depend on language alone.
Babies can engage in conversations with their parents
from birth (Trevarthen, 1995) and young infants
converse with each other through patterned sequences
of imitation (ibid). For 3 and 4 year olds actions speak
louder than words and much of their interaction is in
the form of shared play with objects and props. Their
confidence with these forms of conversation feeds their

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confidence with language and many 4 and 5 year olds

will spend as much time talking through their play as
actually playing. But even before they have reached this
mastery of the conversational potential of language,
and for reasons which baffle early years educators in
other countries, we hurry our 4 and 5 year olds into
learning to read and write. As we train them to 'maintain attention, concentrate and sit still' (QCA, 1999a,
p.8) we introduce them to the top-down, managerial
model of learning to 'submit ... to being taught,
instructed or trained' (Harri-Augstein and Thomas,
1991, p.4) before they have had a chance to learn how
to learn.
Conversation, the interplay of minds which we enjoy in
social interaction, gossip and casual chat can be seen as
a form of playfulness and, when internalised, it can
allow us to think playfully. Enjoying the unpredictable
flow of ideas in conversation can help us to enjoy uncertainty in other situations, to see diversity and complexity as valuable sources of variation rather than to
worry about them or seek to bring them under control.
Like play, conversation seems to require a degree of
protection from the potentially threatening consequences of 'real' activity; it is easier both to play and
to talk freely with known and trusted friends than with
strangers. But, once internalised, both play and conversation can become powerful and resilient dispositions that enable us to make our own, internal space in
which to talk to ourselves and play with ideas. A 'disaffected' child may withdraw from formal learning into
a more satisfying internal world of daydreams, but
internalised conversation can also enable children to
engage more actively and more effectively with the
peculiar experiences they will encounter in school.
Research into mastery orientation (Messer, 1993;
MacTurk and Morgan, 1995; Hauser-Cram, 1998) suggests that children who are encouraged to make their
own choices and decisions in their early years are more
likely to develop this disposition to rise to challenges,
to try different approaches when difficulties are encountered and to seek out opportunities to practise and
extend their skills and knowledge; in short, to enjoy
learning. Children who do not develop mastery orientation exhibit 'learned helplessness' (Dweck and Leggett,
1988); they avoid challenging situations, give up easily
in the face of difficulties and are quick to turn to an
adult for help. Playing and engaging in conversation
with friends seem to provide excellent opportunities for
young children to develop the cognitive skills that will
enable them to imagine possible courses of action and
to choose between them. Both play and conversation
help children to articulate concepts from the un-

32

differentiated flow of experience, loosening and

disembedding them so that they become available for
creative rearrangement or re-membering. Play with
objects provides repeated and varied experiences which
enable the child to notice what changes and what stays
the same. Conversation with other people (whether or
not language is involved) also allows a child to come
into contact with other perspectives, other ways of
doing things and other interests and concerns which
can help to loosen early assumptions about how people
behave. Neither play nor conversation is passive; it is
the active interaction between child and objects or other
people that makes them such powerful tools for
learning and that equips children to enjoy coping with
the constraints that make social life possible. Children
who have learned to be playful and creative, to engage
themselves and others in conversation and to enjoy
learning are well equipped to cope with the formal
education they will encounter in school, but if they are
subjected too soon to formal education they may learn
only helplessness.
So what can we do to begin to ease the pressures that
threaten to stifle creativity in teaching? It may be
tempting to try to keep our heads down, hope for the
best and wait for things to get better, but this response
may allow things to become even worse. An angry
adult attempting to reason with a frightened child may
get increasingly frustrated as the child cowers in what
is seen as obstinate silence, but a child who is confident
enough to speak out may find that the adult becomes
less frightening and less angry once lines of communication can be established. Similarly, although a
few teachers or managers (at any level) may object to
getting feedback from their pupils or workforce, many
are glad of an active response. Teaching a responsive,
interested group is more enjoyable than talking to an
impassive wall of blank faces even though a lively
group is less likely to allow its teacher to stick precisely
to a pre-planned schedule.
If teachers can make themselves relax a little, make
more time to talk to and with each other, develop small
communities and develop confidence in the common
voice that communities can foster, then we may find
that we can engage our managers in conversation, not
confronting them and refusing to do their bidding, but
letting them know how we feel about their plans and
suggesting ways in which they might be made more
appropriate to our particular circumstances: 'To treat an
order, or any kind of rule or instruction, as merely
suggestive - to turn it into something a little more to
one's taste - is radically to revise the nature of
authority' (Phillips, 1998, p.87).

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Teachers cannot simply take the curriculum into their

own hand, but they can help to change a simple
managerial model of top-down control into a more conversational one if they recognise that they have a
responsibility to their pupils and colleagues as well as
to their managers. Making time for conversations, between children, between teachers and children, between
teachers and between teachers and advisers, could
make a radical difference to the culture of education,
strengthening the voice of the roots and developing
their ability to engage the branches in conversation. I
have argued elsewhere (Parker-Rees, 1999) that this
pattern of conversation between the bottom-up voice of
local experience and the top-down voice of social conventions or rules informs the learning o f individuals,
communities and cultures but, at each of these levels,
the conversation is dominated by pressure to contain
and control the awful chaos of the nether regions:
'Talk can be anarchic, if you've got 15 pairs of
children talking and you can't get a handle on it and
what have you got to show for it at the end. We are
moving away from that now, with something like
this, [the teachers' conversation group] but for
someone doing something like drama, when
they're not very confident with it, it can be really
scary, that you're taking the lid off this thing and
it's all alive and bubbling and 'where will it end! '.
So you've got to take a deep breath and.., hope nobody comes in! (Reception teacher in teachers'
conversation group, 16/6/99)
David Clark (1996), writing about schools as learning
communities, has observed that communities offer
their members security, significance and solidarity, all
of which can help people to cope with the tensions
between the desire to be differentiated and the desire to
be integrated, to be able to be oneself but also to have
one's finer qualities appreciated by others. What prevents learning communities from closing in on themselves and becoming cosy cliques or cults is their readiness to look outwards as well as inwards, to engage in
conversations beyond their boundaries as well as within
them. In education, it can be particularly valuable for
teachers to have opportunities to talk about their
practice with the support of outside advisers whose
wider experience enables them to suggest connections
and alternative possibilities. The Effective Early Learning (EEL) project (Pascal and Bertram, 1997), a professional development project led by Angela Anning and
Anne Edwards (Arming, 1998, Edwards, 1998, 1999),
and accounts of the role of the 'pedagogista' in supporting the professional development of early years
teachers in Italy's Reggio Emilia (Edwards et al, 1993)

have all demonstrated that conversation between

teachers and 'experts' can have benefits beyond merely
disseminating knowledge about good practice.
John Abbott (1999), drawing on work by Bereiter and
Scardamalia, has recently drawn attention to an important distinction between 'specialists' and 'experts'.
Specialists' comprehensive knowledge of their field
gives them a confidence which can make them appear
arrogant, particularly because they are unwilling to
venture beyond their field to consider how it might fit
within a bigger picture. Experts, on the other hand,
though they share the specialists' depth of knowledge,
have an additional 'vital attribute ... they are intentionally 'playful":
Experts with such high level 'open thinking' are
vastly important people in a culture which is
changing so rapidly that it is hard to see where we
are headed. Unlike the specialist's supreme confidence within a specialism (not much use when the
walls of that specialism are falling apart!), the
expert is essentially humble and questioning, more
aware of what he doesn't yet know rather than what
is already known. Experts of course know the rules
but they also know how to reformulate them, even
when to break them so as to fit new circumstances.
They are persistent, industrious and always curious,
and they are always searching for perfection. 'Let's
back up on this problem. Think this one through
again. See it from another perspective; imagine it in
another way. Give ourselves a breather, and ask
somebody else what they think.' These are the
words of the true craftsman. These are the real
experts.' (Abbott, 1999, pp.77-8)
It is easy to see why conversations with an expert are
likely to be more useful than conversations with a
specialist, but we can also see clear parallels between
this view of expertise and what we know about mastery
orientation. Experts make better conversation partners
because their thinking is more conversational, more
contingent, flexible, playful and relaxed. When they
engage other people in conversation they can encourage them to loosen up their thinking, helping to
prevent communities from becoming closed and
isolated. Teachers may be unwilling to see themselves
as experts but they could certainly recognise the value
of acting more like experts than specialists in their
conversations with children; being prepared to listen
and looking for ways to interpret the curriculum to the
children's own circumstances and interests rather than
always trying to fit the children to the demands of the
curriculum:

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'I do sometimes, if ... Sometimes I let that, or I give

an opportunity for that to happen [children exploring ideas in conversation, without necessarily
having to arrive at a conclusion or answer] when I
realise they're talking, you know? We've had a
story or we've done something and I've got a very
talkative class and they really start talking a lot and
although I perhaps want to go on to the next thing,
but I try to stop myself saying, 'Everybody be
quiet!' and instead say, 'Right! Let's just have a
couple of minutes and talk to somebody near you
about what you want to talk about', whatever it
happened to be, a story or their pet or, you know,
someone's been on holiday and it's usually about
things like, about their lives, that they really want
to talk to each other about. So, and I try and listen
out for when they're really talking a lot and make it
an opportunity rather than getting, trying to get
everyone immediately quiet.' (Year 3 teacher in
teachers' conversation group, 8/6/99)
A conversational approach to planning the curriculum
(and to planning educational policy) may at first seem
worryingly uncontrollable. We tend to believe that a
plan should set out the means by which pre-specified
outcomes will be achieved. This kind of 'ballistic'
planning requires a very precise aim because the trajectory cannot be adjusted after launch - it can be likened
to the lesson planning of novice student teachers whose
concern to keep on track does not allow them to adapt
to children's responses until they evaluate the lesson,
after it's all over. Ballistic planning leads to a series of
lessons or policy initiatives with the precise aim of each
being adjusted according to the accuracy with which
the last met its target. Conversational planning, on the
other hand, is a continuous and iterative process. Expert
teachers continue to plan and evaluate while they are
teaching and they are prepared to explore alternative
routes if they find themselves diverted by an unexpected response from the children, but they do not
simply abandon their intentions and follow where the
children lead. Instead of assuming that children are not
yet ready to take an active part in their leaming, these
teachers recognise that they can help children to
develop a confident voice, to become active rather than
passive learners.
Unfortunately, the clear shift over recent years from
teacher education to teacher training may make it
increasingly difficult for student teachers to see beyond
becoming specialists. The culture of competences,
targets and goals promotes a view of learning as the
acquisition of things rather than as a continuous process that can never be completed - becoming a learned
specialist rather than a learning expert.

34

The start of a new millennium may be a good time to

make a stand against the culture of instruction and to
insist on the importance of playfulness and enjoyment
in teaching and learning. Education must not become
over-managed to the point where it is 'just a job',
neither requiring nor allowing any affective engagement from teachers or learners. Neither children nor
their teachers should be expected simply to submit to
being instructed. Making time for conversations with
children and with colleagues is a manageable and effective way to strengthen the learning communities within
and between schools and to develop the confident
voices that will be needed for conversations with
managers. The new early learning goals appear to acknowledge that creative development depends on
'opportunities for all children to explore and share their
thoughts, ideas and feelings' (QCA, 1999b, p.10) and
the 'Common Features of Good Practice" include
'encouragement for children to communicate or talk
about learning and to develop independence and selfmanagement. They are given time to progress through
sustained involvement in concentrated activity' (ibid,
p.ll).
But of course it is not only children who will benefit
from being given time to talk about learning, to share
their and feelings and to 'become engrossed, work in
depth and complete activities' (ibid, p.5). Constant
pressure to respond to top-down initiatives and prescriptions may effectively keep teachers and children
too busy to stop and think. The resulting appearance of
coherence may glitter with 'the rigid order of a crystal'
(Eigen and Winkler, 1982, p.3) but life requires a more
complicated and more flexible kind of order. It is our
skill in 'playing with ideas and trying out possibilities'
(NACCCE, 1999, p.30) that makes humans uniquely
creative and allows us to adapt flexibly to changing
environments: 'Creative activity involves a complex
combination of controlled and non-controlled elements, unconscious as well as conscious mental processes, non-directed as well as directed thought,
intuitive as well as rational calculation' (ibid, p.32).
My own experience o f engaging teachers in informal
conversation, outside the 'everyday' constraints of
decision-making and responding to external pressures,
has convinced me of the importance of the interplay of
minds for teachers as well as for children. Interplay
implies more than interaction; formal relationships,
staff-meetings and management hierarchies may not
allow enough space, or play, for community to flourish.
A l l our Futures describes the creative conversation between top-down and bottom-up processes in terms of
'mutual dependence between freedom and control'

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EDUCATION FOR THE MILLENNIUM

(NACCCE, 1999, p.38) and 'balance between closure

and openness, between tradition and innovation' (ibid,
p.51). In recent years education has endured a significant imbalance in favour of control, closure and
tradition and the resulting intensification, commodification and managerialism have been squeezing the
life out of schools, leaving less and less space for
teachers and children to be free, open and innovative. In
an ideal world we might hope that a General Teaching
Council could help to protect the space required for
creativity and innovation but we may have to create our
own space; coping with top-down pressures by
developing learning communities that can foster the
emergence of confident, bottom-up responses. We may
even find that some who have been coerced into
managerial roles will welcome the oppommity to relax
their control a little, to interpret or reformulate the rules
imposed by their managers and to trust teachers and
learners with a little more space to engage in conversations about learning.

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Eigen, M. and Winlder, R. (1982) The Laws of the Game. Allen

Lane: London.
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