By Kurt Woodman – Outdoor Play Visionary

When we think of learning, the conversation often starts with outcomes. Can the child recite the alphabet? Can they solve math problems? Are they hitting developmental milestones?

But early learning isn’t just about results. In fact, the most important learning in the early years happens through process, not product. It’s how a child approaches a problem, not just whether they get the answer right.

These approaches — the way a child engages, persists, and adapts — are called learning dispositions. And they’re a far stronger predictor of lifelong success than any cognitive skill.

What Are Learning Dispositions?

Dispositions are internal traits and tendencies that shape how a person learns, interacts, and responds to challenges. Unlike academic outcomes, they’re not about what a child knows — but how they go about knowing.

Foundational dispositions include:

• Perseverance – continuing after a setback
• Attention and focus – staying engaged over time
• Strategic help-seeking – knowing when and how to ask for support
• Risk-taking – being willing to try, even without guarantees
• Perspective shifting – exploring different ways of approaching a problem
• Curiosity and initiative – starting play and discovery independently

As neuroscience educator Nathan Wallis points out, these dispositions form early — often before age seven — and shape how a child learns for life.

Under age seven, a child’s brain is laying down the “wiring” for how they handle difficulty, success, collaboration, and change. Dispositions developed during this time don’t just support academic achievement. They influence emotional resilience, creativity, and executive functioning.

Why Outcomes Can Be Misleading

It’s common to view learning through checklists — reading, counting, writing — as if these skills define intelligence. But research shows cognitive skills like reading plateau by age eight. In other words, children who learn to read at age four perform about the same as children who learn at age seven — by the time they’re eight.

So starting early doesn’t always mean finishing stronger.

Meanwhile, children who learn to:

• keep trying after failing
• find new strategies when one doesn’t work
• stay focused through distraction
• collaborate and communicate under pressure

…are developing skills that last far beyond the classroom.

Nathan Wallis frames it simply:

“What predicts success under seven isn’t outcomes or academic skills — it’s the dispositions that shape how a child learns.”

Play: Where Dispositions Are Born

Children don’t learn perseverance from flashcards. They learn it by building a tower that falls — and trying again.
They don’t develop curiosity from instructions. They develop it through open-ended play — where there’s no single path, no correct answer.

The right kind of play activates and embeds learning dispositions:

• Risk-taking happens when a child climbs or explores the unknown
• Perspective-shifting happens when a child repurposes objects or imagines new scenarios
• Help-seeking happens during collaboration, not lecture
• Resilience happens when play includes room for failure and success

This isn’t random play — it’s purposeful, process-oriented exploration. And it’s the backbone of true learning.

How Environment Shapes Dispositions

Environment matters. Children need spaces that allow for:

• Freedom of movement
• Open-ended materials
• Opportunities to fail safely
• Peer interaction and shared exploration

Outdorable’s play designs embrace this philosophy. From smooth planks to wobbly logs, overhead branches to modular climbers — each element invites challenge, creativity, and risk.

There’s no “right way” to play with a riverbank climbing wall or a beaverlodge structure. That’s the point. The child decides. The child leads. The disposition grows.

The Educator’s Role in Supporting Dispositions

Child-led play does not mean educator-free play. In fact, learning dispositions deepen most when adults are present and responsive.

Educators support disposition development by:

• Observing without correcting
• Noticing strategy shifts and naming them aloud
• Encouraging effort, not just success
• Provoking curiosity through thoughtful material placement
• Offering support when invited by the child

Wallis emphasizes that it’s not about giving answers — it’s about scaffolding learning through experience. Teachers become partners, not directors, in the child’s journey.

“These early dispositions are the greatest predictor of future success — not reading or counting skills.”
— Nathan Wallis, Neuroscience Educator

Dispositions aren’t easily measured. But they are deeply meaningful. They shape how a child learns, how they recover, how they grow.

At Outdorable, we build environments that honor this truth — with equipment that invites process over product, wonder over instruction, play over performance.

Because childhood isn’t a race to recite facts.
It’s a dance with discovery — messy, wild, imperfect, and profoundly formative.