Importance of Recess

This week’s article summary is  More Recess Time, Please 

While most independent schools have daily recess in their schedules, recess has all but disappeared in many public schools. (If it doesn’t directly prepare kids for the high-stakes tests they take—which then are used to measure school success—take it out of the schedule!)

What’s particularly interesting to me is the correlation between high academic achievement and ample recess in countries like Finland, China, Korea, and Japan. 

Obviously there are multiples factors that contribute to the success of a country’s educational system and philosophy. However, most of us in our professional and personal lives understand the importance of periodic breaks and physical movement in optimizing our performance. (Whenever I attend a conference or workshop, I make sure I sit neat the back row because after about 30 minutes or so I need to stand up and move around to maintain my focus and concentration on the presenter.) 

The same obviously holds true for kids.

Joe

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The average amount of recess time in most U.S. schools is 26 minutes a day, including lunch and snack time.

Most Chinese schools have a 10-minute recess for every 40 minutes of instruction, plus an hour of lunch and nap or rest time.

Shanghai’s policy is that each elementary-level class lasts only 35 minutes, and recess takes up almost 40% of the school day. In middle and high schools there’s more instructional time, but recess also increases.

Korea, Taiwan, and Japan have similar policies to China’s.

In Finland, students have 75 minutes of recess a day, which includes a 15-minute break after every lesson.

These countries believe strongly in liberal amounts of recess time, for the following reasons:

It improves learning by promoting intellectual and emotional development, elevating students’ energy, and improving concentration.

It improves classroom management by “resetting” children’s emotional and cognitive timers. Recess may help students avoid cognitive overload and the temptation to create distractions during instruction. Educators in New Zealand noticed a decrease in bullying after adding more recess time.

It fosters social development. In the unstructured space of recess, students have to be able to initiate, negotiate, cooperate, share, and build relationships with one another--skills highly valued in the adult world but that often are quite different from work or play under adult supervision and control.

It promotes physical well-being, including building fitness in ways that aren’t included in structured physical education classes. 

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