Rebecca London spends a lot of time observing school play yards. While doing so, the community-engaged researcher and professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz has seen students engaged in the best of what recess can offer—cooperation, healthy competition, and negotiation—and the worst, like bullying and boredom.
London, an ardent advocate for ensuring all children have access to positive recess experiences, launched the Global Recess Alliance in 2020 in concert with colleagues from around the world. The alliance advocates for dedicated and sufficient recess, seeing it as essential for all children through their school years.
London recently spoke to Education Week about the role of recess. She addressed both best practices for recess—like how to structure it and when to schedule it—as well as the big-picture ramifications: Recess, she said, has the potential to elevate the school experience for all students, and teach them lifelong skills they can use long after they’ve left playgrounds behind.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why study recess?
My Ph.D. is in human development and social policy, so studying recess is sort of a natural fit into the way I was taught to think about the world. To me, it’s super interesting to think about how to embed this whole-child opportunity in the middle of the school day, which is really just focused mostly on academics.
I think the goals of recess should be to support children’s development. And by development, I mean academic, social, emotional, and physical.
More than half of states don’t require schools to include recess. What are your thoughts on that?
I don’t think even close to half of all states have any kind of [recess] requirement. And of those that do, the majority require 20 minutes of recess out of the whole school day. That’s not that much time. Think about your lunch break as an adult; it’s probably longer than 20 minutes. And these are small children, and play is how they learn.
What is missing from conversations about recess?
Well, even among states that have mandates, there’s no mechanism for supporting the training of adults in how to create and maintain and engage students in healthy play. You can’t just throw 400 kids out on a play yard for 20 minutes with a couple of balls and expect it to go well.
But no state has put out any kind of guidelines or requirements or funding in support of that work. There’s also no accountability. The laws are important, but I also think they’re really just like a baby step.
What do you see as the baseline role of recess?
It allows students a break from the school day, where they can have their needs met, whatever those needs are. For some kids, their needs are to run. But for other kids, their needs are to have some quiet time, to be able to play a game, or to pick bugs out of the grass—to do something that’s a little bit less intense than school work, because that’s how they reset.
Not everyone’s recess needs to look the same. I think there needs to be local control and decisionmaking, ideally involving the young people themselves to create the space that’s going to engage them the most.
How does recess look different on various school playgrounds?
The primary distinction is between structured and unstructured recess. Structured recess, in the literature, looks like a gym class. There’s an adult who is saying, “Today we’re playing soccer, today we’re playing basketball.”
An unstructured recess would go something like this: “We’ve got ‘found objects’ on our recess yard. There’s tires, there’s pieces of wood, there’s big blocks of whatever, and you’re on your own kids, figure it out.” Australia is really big on that approach.
I’ve been to schools where, if you put found objects like pieces of wood on the playground, kids are going to start hitting each other with them. So that is not an approach that would work everywhere.
What do you recommend recess look like?
What many recess advocates recommend, and what I’ve adopted in my own work, is facilitated recess. It’s not structured. There’s free choice. There’s lots of opportunities. There’s different games and specific zones that kids can play in. Everybody knows what’s out there for the offering. There’s appropriate equipment. You can go from one game to the other. You don’t have to pick one for the day; you can hop around.
Or you could do nothing. There are safe places where kids can sit and talk. Some schools have a “walk and talk” track, where students can just walk and talk if they want. That’s an especially good strategy for middle schoolers. Sometimes the counselors or the assistant principal will also walk the track, and then they can be available to interact with students if they’re open to that.
Adults shouldn’t be just standing by on their phones, or wearing a yellow vest and yelling at kids when they run across the blacktop. They should be engaged in supporting youth, for instance, by initiating or maintaining games.
You can't just throw 400 kids out on a play yard for 20 minutes with a couple of balls and expect it to go well.
We know that it’s important for teachers to model good social and emotional skills. And there are a lot of SEL programs in schools designed to do this, but they’re usually in classrooms where there’s a lot of structure and rules. Recess is that time when kids can go out and practice those [SEL] skills in a setting that’s not as regulated.
Adults can help with scaffolding, helping to create healthy patterns in terms of things like social engagement with other students and conflict resolution. For instance, if you lose a game, you don’t have to break down or storm off, but rather just accept that you’ve lost and keep going.
Where can schools get guidance on recess best practices?
There are systems and routines that schools can put into place, but I haven’t seen any guidance from any state that does that. That type of guidance is coming from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is about to release a new statement in support of recess. The Global Recess Alliance, of which I’m a founding member, is also about to release a statement in support of healthy recess.
What I’ve discovered working internationally with the Global Recess Alliance is that their recess programs are grounded in the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the U.S. never ratified. It’s very hard to build something into legislation, into policy, if there’s no precedent for it. In these [196] other countries, there’s just a strong precedent for recess, and they use it as a way of justifying the time for it during the school day.
Have you had the opportunity to observe recess in other countries?
I haven’t. But I would love to, and if I were going to pick one country to visit, I would go to Finland, where they have 15 minutes of recess for every hour of instruction. I would love to see that. I would love to see what the kids are doing there.
Without the luxury of multiple recesses, what time of the day do you recommend for recess?
By the middle of the day, kids want to get out and see their friends. And I think that’s fine. There’s a lot of discussion, especially in the nutrition world about, do you eat first or play first? How do we get kids to actually eat their lunches when it’s paired with recess, and kids want to play?
From the nutrition perspective, it’s play first, then eat, because the kids would then be more likely to actually eat their food.
What about morning recess?
It really depends on the school population. For those whose kids come to school well-fed, or they have a snack program or a breakfast program, that’s great. The science really does show that when children engage in moderate to vigorous physical activity, it can improve their ability to concentrate and their ability to sit still and to learn. But morning recess might not work if you have a population of students who are hungry. So it depends on the school context.
What do you consider the ideal number of recesses per day?
We at Global Recess Alliance advocate for more than one recess a day. We think kids need a couple of different breaks: minimum of two, three is better—one in the morning, one at lunch, one in the afternoon.
They don’t all have to be half-hour breaks each time, but just a brief opportunity for students to reset.
What’s your response to critics of multiple recess breaks who balk at lost instructional time?
What we know from the science is that having a break, especially one that involves connection and physical activity in a positive environment, helps students to behave better when they come back into the classroom. It helps them to concentrate better on their schoolwork.
We did one big study with the nonprofit Playworks, where we found that when a well-implemented recess was put into place, teachers actually gained an entire day of instruction back into their school year because they were spending so much less time after recess helping students work through their hurt feelings, or their anger or resentment—all the things that happened at recess.
When recess was well-designed, those things didn’t happen as frequently, and so teachers didn’t spend as much time on the back end, trying to help their students re-adjust after recess. Rather than taking away from learning, recess can augment learning for students.
Can you elaborate on how recess can boost learning?
It’s an opportunity for kids to practice their social and emotional skills in new ways outside the classroom. Students who have built these skills early on can deploy them the rest of their lives. They know how to resolve conflicts. They don’t have to blow up at a meeting.
There are examples in our current world where you wonder: Did those folks learn what they needed to learn in elementary school, because they don’t seem able to deploy those good habits later in life?
Still, isn’t recess sometimes withheld as a form of punishment?
Yes. I’ve seen this happen in several different ways. A whole class doesn’t get recess because some people aren’t behaving properly, and so nobody gets recess that day. I’ve seen it happen as a punishment for misbehavior: “You can’t sit still. You’re not behaving. No recess for you today.” And I’ve seen it used a lot as a threat: “If you don’t do this, you’re not going to get recess today.”
There are no studies demonstrating the efficacy of that approach. Zero.
Are some students more likely to have recess withheld?
Black students, especially Black boys, and Native American students, especially boys, are disciplined more heavily. I have likened this to the first steps in the school-to-prison pipeline, because it’s often the case that it’s the same kids over and over who have recess withheld. They’re taught: “You don’t belong. You don’t belong at recess, you don’t belong in a play environment, you don’t deserve to play.” And then they start to believe it over time.
You can’t go outside and hit other kids or take out your anger on them, and there are children in schools who have very severe behavioral problems that need to be addressed. But punishing them so they’re not able to learn how to interact with other kids is counterintuitive. When you have a child who has trouble interacting, you want to scaffold them to interact better. If you just remove them continually from the environment, they don’t actually learn how to do it better.
Any final thoughts on the role of recess in education?
I think we need a radical shift in how we think about the role of education, and what it means to be an educated person. You can graduate from the top schools and not know how to interact with other people.
If we value children who know how to regulate their emotions, who can interact and resolve conflicts, who can collaborate, who can communicate—not in an artificial way but in an authentic way—I feel like that’s where we need to reorient ourselves as a society. And if we do that, I think the rest will follow.
Recess is really about providing this space. Play is healing, connection is healing. It’s really about providing this space for everybody.
