Dive Brief:
- The Illinois state legislature passed a bill in late May that defines play-based learning as either “guided play” or “student-initiated play,” putting Illinois with a small handful of states to have codified such definitions.
- HB 4577, which awaits the signature of Gov. JB Pritzker, further delineates guided play as “intentional teacher-directed play with activities set up and led by a teacher that are aligned to learning goals or standards,” and student-initiated play as “child-selected opportunities to build, pretend, create, move, or explore in an environment intentionally curated by a teacher to align with learning goals or standards.”
- The Illinois chapter of the nonprofit Teach Plus, among other groups, advocated for the bill’s passage, which comes amid findings in recent years that play-based learning bolsters language skills as well as cognitive and social development.
Dive Insight:
Under legislation passed in 2023, the state of Illinois required districts to develop full-day kindergarten no later than the 2027-28 school year and strongly suggested — but did not require — that kindergarten “should” be play-based. That legislation, however, did not define what “play-based” should mean.
As a result, districts in the state were saying that they wanted to implement play-based learning but didn’t know exactly what the legislature had in mind, said Aubry Stapleton, Illinois early childhood education policy manager at Teach Plus, who helped advocate for the recent bill.
The Illinois State Board of Education has created the Kindergarten Individual Development Survey to assess readiness for kindergarten, she said.
”Kindergarten classrooms need to be play-based to get the best out of that assessment. Districts were saying they were struggling with that,” said Stapleton. “We wanted something that made sense for people who didn’t know what [play-based learning] means, and so people already doing play-based learning can see that they’re living within that definition.”
New Hampshire, the first state to mandate play-based learning, developed a definition with the help of a couple universities after hitting the same dilemma, Stapleton said. She added that Connecticut also requires play-based learning, while Oklahoma has passed a definition without requiring its use, and Iowa also recently passed a bill to mandate specific amounts of play-based instruction for preschool and kindergarten students.
As of 2025, only 89 of the 700-plus districts in Illinois have implemented play-based learning across the board, Stapleton said. “Otherwise, it varies, based on the teacher.”
In some kindergarten classes, she said, students fill out “a lot of worksheets, sitting at the table, with the teacher talking to them and teaching them,” which can create behavioral challenges. With play-based learning, students are usually not sitting at a table except for during an art project, she added.
But beyond that, students move from center for center, and the teachers move around, sometimes guiding play and sometimes letting students initiate.
“You might engage in the play, but it’s totally based on what they’re doing,” Stapleton said. “If they ask a question, you’re there to answer it and enhance learning that way. But you’re not guiding it, you’re not telling them what to do.”
If a student needs to learn comparison words, for example, a teacher might sit down with them at the block center and build a wall, asking students questions as they go or offering advice such as where to place a block because it is bigger.
The Illinois law probably gets more into the “nitty gritty” by dividing the definition into two types of play-based learning, but advocates wanted to make sure the definition was clear, since educators sometimes use the same terms in different ways, Stapleton said.
“That means different things to different people based on what they’ve done in their schooling,” she said.
“Some people hear ‘free play’ and they think, ‘free-for-all,’” Stapleton said. “We tried to stay away from words that already had a definition in somebody’s head that was totally different from what we were trying to say. We were trying to make this a very accessible definition for people who didn’t know what play-based learning was and were coming to this new.”
