Children don’t arrive in your classroom as blank slates. Posts about development, learning theory, and the fascinating, complicated business of how young people actually grow.
Christmas presents a paradox. While widely celebrated as a season of happiness and gratitude, for some individuals, it carries a darker undercurrent. The pressure to feel joyful and festive transforms Christmas from a celebration into an ordeal to be endured.
As a teacher, I’ve witnessed this struggle in numerous children. Pupils who already face challenges with emotional regulation, or who contend with difficult home circumstances, often find the festive period particularly overwhelming. For these vulnerable children, our Pupil Well-being Worker has has made a real difference, helping them process their emotions more constructively.
Over the past 18 months, Aberdeenshire Council has introduced Pupil Well-being Workers across schools, a welcome initiative addressing a critical need. These professionals, working in both primary and secondary settings, focus specifically on children’s mental health and wellbeing. Their role encompasses supporting pupils through bereavement and loss, whilst also helping them develop strategies to manage social, emotional, and behavioural challenges.
During my time teaching in the Yukon, I first encountered this model of support. Every primary school had a dedicated individual focused on students’ emotional wellbeing. The impact was immediately apparent, not only did pupils benefit, but teachers were also better equipped to navigate challenging situations and behaviours. Our Pupil Support Worker fulfils a similar role here in Aberdeenshire.
The most immediate benefit is clear: students now have a trusted advocate, someone firmly in their corner, who can teach them coping strategies and provide space for restorative conversations when needed.
Over the past 18 months, broader positive outcomes have emerged. Class teachers spend significantly less time mediating conflicts between pupils, as children now have access to a dedicated forum with a specialist trained in these interventions. Similarly, Senior Leadership Team involvement in behavioural incidents has lessened substantially. The result benefits everyone: young people gain a skilled advocate supporting their wellbeing, staff can focus more effectively on teaching, and the entire school community enjoys a calmer, more supportive environment.
Aberdeenshire Council often faces criticism, and running a local authority must surely rank among the most thankless tasks. However, in this instance, they deserve genuine recognition. Whoever championed this initiative and saw it through implementation deserves considerable credit. Well done. Now the challenge is ensuring these vital positions remain funded and supported.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Here’s hoping 2026 brings kindness to us all, and that we find space to extend that kindness to one another.
Currently there is a great deal of time and resources being spent on the development of play, especially at early and first levels here in Aberdeenshire. It is somewhat ironic that when I did my initial teacher training in the past century, play was the main driver of early years education, which in those days was 4 to 8 year olds. It lost favour when it was discovered that facilitating learning through play requires significant skill and planning, especially when balancing it with the explicit teaching of literacy and numeracy. Now teaching P7, I found myself with limited knowledge about the benefits of play for older students. With time constraints already restricting play opportunities in my classroom, I wanted to understand what the research actually says about play at this stage.
Children engaging in collaborative play outdoors, fostering social-emotional skills and creative problem-solving.
The research is clear: play remains vital for P7 students, even as they transition toward secondary education. At ages 10-11, my students are developing increasingly sophisticated cognitive abilities while still requiring opportunities for creative expression, social negotiation, and physical activity. Studies consistently show that play enhances executive function, problem-solving skills, and emotional regulation, all critical meta-skills within Curriculum for Excellence. In fact, play supports the development of abstract thinking and hypothetical reasoning that P7 learners need as they tackle more complex mathematical concepts, scientific inquiry, and nuanced literary analysis.
What particularly struck me in the research is how play strengthens social-emotional competencies like collaboration, conflict resolution, and empathy, skills that become increasingly important as peer relationships grow more sophisticated during this developmental stage (Zhao & Gibson, 2021). Physical play and movement also remain crucial, with active play increasing blood flow to the brain and improving concentration and memory consolidation (Donnelly et al., 2016). Given the pressures my P7 students face around transition to secondary school, play provides essential stress relief and helps maintain their intrinsic motivation for learning.
The Challenge: Curriculum Time Pressures
Despite these well-established benefits, finding time for play within the P7 curriculum presents significant challenges. The reality of preparing students for secondary school transition, meeting numeracy and literacy benchmarks, and covering the breadth of Curriculum for Excellence experiences and outcomes leaves little room in the timetable for extended play opportunities. The pressure to ensure students are “secondary ready” can squeeze out the very activities that support their development as confident, capable learners.
Traditional classroom time is often dominated by structured lessons, assessment activities, and targeted interventions. While these are undoubtedly important, they don’t always provide the space children need for self-directed exploration, creative problem-solving, and social learning through play. The question becomes: how can we honour the developmental needs of P7 students while meeting curriculum demands?
Outdoor Education as a Solution
Outdoor education provides a powerful answer to this challenge. By dedicating one session per month to entirely free outdoor play, alongside regular outdoor learning opportunities, many of the benefits of play can be achieved without compromising curriculum coverage. In fact, outdoor education enhances rather than detracts from academic learning.
During outdoor free play sessions, students naturally engage in the kinds of activities that support executive function and social development. They negotiate rules for games, resolve conflicts, take managed risks, and exercise creative problem-solving, all without direct adult intervention. These sessions build resilience, independence, and collaborative skills that transfer directly into classroom learning.
Regular outdoor learning activities that blend curriculum content with exploratory, play-based approaches offer additional opportunities. Mathematical investigations conducted outside, scientific observations in natural settings, literacy activities inspired by the environment, and physical challenges all combine curricular outcomes with the developmental benefits of play. The outdoor context itself encourages different types of interaction, movement, and engagement than the classroom allows.
The physical benefits of outdoor play are particularly significant for P7 students. Running, climbing, building, and exploring provide the active movement their developing bodies need while also supporting cognitive function. The sensory richness of outdoor environments, varying terrain, weather conditions, natural materials, engages students in ways that indoor spaces cannot replicate.
Perhaps most importantly, outdoor education addresses the wellbeing needs of P7 learners during a potentially stressful year. Research with children aged 9-11 has found that exposure to the natural environment through outdoor learning plays a significant role in improving positive mental health and wellbeing, with particular benefits for stress reduction during the transition period (Marchant et al., 2019). Time outside, particularly in unstructured play, reduces anxiety and provides the emotional regulation support that formal curriculum time often cannot accommodate. Students return to classroom learning refreshed, more focused, and more motivated.
Woodland listening develops multiple meta-skills at once: self-awareness, emotional regulation, and mindfulness. This outdoor learning experience supports health and wellbeing while teaching children that wellbeing is an active practice, not just an abstract concept.
Achieving Play-Based Learning Goals Through Outdoor Education
By prioritising outdoor education, including dedicated free play sessions, I can achieve my goals for play-based learning without sacrificing essential curriculum time. The monthly outdoor free play sessions provide concentrated opportunities for self-directed play, social negotiation, and risk-taking that would be difficult to replicate in shorter classroom bursts. These extended sessions allow students to develop complex games, undertake ambitious projects, and engage in sustained collaborative activities.
Complementing these with regular outdoor learning sessions that weave play into curriculum delivery means students experience the benefits of play consistently throughout the year. A systematic review of 147 studies confirms significant support for the benefits of nature-specific outdoor learning, particularly for social and academic learning outcomes in primary aged students (Mygind et al., 2022). This approach acknowledges the reality of P7 curriculum demands while refusing to compromise on what children need developmentally. Outdoor education becomes not an addition to an already crowded timetable, but a strategic solution that serves multiple purposes simultaneously; delivering curriculum outcomes, supporting wellbeing, and providing the play experiences that research tells us are essential for this age group.
In this way, outdoor education allows me to balance the competing demands of P7 teaching, ensuring my students are both academically prepared for secondary school and developmentally supported through a crucial transition year.
References
American Academy of Pediatrics (2018). The Power of Play: A Pediatric Role in Enhancing Development in Young Children. Pediatrics, 142(3), e20182058. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/142/3/e20182058/38649/
Donnelly, J.E., Hillman, C.H., Castelli, D., Etnier, J.L., Lee, S., Tomporowski, P., Lambourne, K., & Szabo-Reed, A.N. (2016). Physical Activity, Fitness, Cognitive Function, and Academic Achievement in Children: A Systematic Review. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 48(6), 1197-1222. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4874515/
Marchant, E., Todd, C., Cooksey, R., Dredge, S., Jones, H., Reynolds, D., Stratton, G., Dwyer, R., Lyons, R., & Brophy, S. (2019). Curriculum-based outdoor learning for children aged 9-11: A qualitative analysis of pupils’ and teachers’ views. PLOS ONE, 14(5), e0212242. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6544203/
Mygind, L., Kjeldsted, E., Hartmeyer, R.D., Mygind, E., Bølling, M., & Bentsen, P. (2022). Getting Out of the Classroom and Into Nature: A Systematic Review of Nature-Specific Outdoor Learning on School Children’s Learning and Development. Frontiers in Public Health, 10, 877058. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2022.877058/full
Zhao, H., & Gibson, J.L. (2021). A Comprehensive Analysis of the Relationship between Play Performance and Psychosocial Problems in School-Aged Children. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(14), 7486. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9329709/
Critical thinking has become ubiquitous in educational discourse. It appears in policy documents, school improvement plans, and job descriptions with the confidence of settled truth. But scratch beneath the surface and the certainty crumbles: what exactly do we mean by critical thinking? Is it a discrete skill that can be taught on Tuesday afternoons? A general capacity that transfers seamlessly from analysing Shakespeare to evaluating scientific claims? Or something else entirely? The term gets thrown around with such frequency that we’ve stopped asking what we actually mean—and whether what we’re promising is even possible.
Tom Sherrington’s The Learning Rainforest fundamentally changed how I thought about teaching, and Dan Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? did much the same. So when Tom and Emma (Co-hosts on one of my favourite educational podcasts) sits down with Dan on the Mind the Gap podcast, it’s not casual listening—it’s leaning in, ready to have my thinking challenged again. This conversation didn’t disappoint.
One of the biggest claims I hear is that critical thinking is a transferable skill… however, cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham would disagree.
The Latin Fallacy
Dan traced this misconception back over a century to when Latin was commonly taught in American schools. The justification wasn’t primarily about learning a language—it was that Latin’s logical, orderly grammar would train students to think logically in all areas. Learn to parse Latin sentences, the argument went, and you’d become a more logical thinker everywhere.
Edward Thorndike tested this claim by comparing students who studied Latin with comparable students who studied French. After their language courses, did the Latin students get better grades in other subjects? No. The supposed transfer of logical thinking simply didn’t happen. The skills stayed tied to the context in which they were learned.
The Problem with “General” Critical Thinking Tests
Modern critical thinking assessments face a fundamental problem: they need content to test thinking, but they want to avoid privileging students who happen to know chemistry or economics. So they create problems they believe are “everyday” or “content-neutral.”
Dan described a typical example from an English A-level critical thinking exam: if you wanted to sell ice cream on a beach where another vendor already operates, should you set up next to them or further down the beach? The test designers presumably thought this was a universal reasoning problem. But as he noted, students who’d studied economics or business would immediately recognise the principle at work, why shops of the same type cluster together.
The same pattern appears in reading comprehension tests. Test designers know background knowledge affects comprehension, so they write passages about “ants and mountains and stuff that they figure most people know about.” But research shows that people with broader general knowledge, which correlates strongly with family income and learning opportunities, score better on these supposedly neutral tests.
What This Means for Teaching
Dan’s alternative is straightforward but requires a shift in thinking: stop trying to teach or test critical thinking as a free-floating skill. Instead, embed it in curriculum content.
His example: “The kids studied whales this year and the kids studied inductive reasoning. We’re going to test inductive reasoning in the context of knowledge about whales.”
This approach offers multiple advantages. Teachers know exactly what content and thinking skills the assessment values. Students aren’t disadvantaged by gaps in “general” knowledge that test designers assumed everyone possessed. And critically, it acknowledges reality: thinking well requires thinking about something, and thinking about something requires knowledge.
The Ice Cream Vendor Problem
The ice cream vendor question perfectly illustrates why “content-free” critical thinking is largely a fiction. Someone might reason through it using pure logic, but someone who understands market dynamics, competitive positioning, and consumer behavior has a massive advantage. Is that an unfair advantage? Not really—it’s just knowledge doing what knowledge does: making certain types of thinking possible.
As Dan explained, manipulatives and concrete examples work in teaching when they help students bridge from something they already understand to something new. The same principle applies to critical thinking. You can’t think critically in a void. You need something familiar to reason from.
The Uncomfortable Truth
What Dan leaves us with is somewhat uncomfortable: there’s no shortcut to critical thinking through generic skills training. Students become better thinkers by knowing more things, deeply, across domains.
The implication for schools is clear but challenging: instead of discrete “critical thinking” lessons divorced from content, we need rigorous subject teaching that deliberately develops reasoning within each domain. A student who thinks critically in history does so because they know history well enough to recognize patterns, spot contradictions, evaluate sources, and construct arguments—not because they completed a module on “critical thinking skills.”
The good news? This validates what many teachers already know works. The hard news? There’s no magic curriculum or quick fix. Deep knowledge takes time, and critical thinking comes as its reward.
If you would like to listen to the Whole Podcast on Mind the Gap you can do so here. If you would like to watch it on You Tube then that the link for that is here.
