Giving Thanks

It gets dark so early these days.  And wind whips around gray skies.  And the rain falls and snow flies.  November is soon to turn to December.  Winter and darkness are upon us.  And in the midst of all this is the season of holidays, time with family and friends and warm fires and candlelight.  

We hope that all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and a rest from everyday duties.  We did.  We had a house full of our sons and daughters-in-law and two grandchildren, 5 and almost 3.  We feel so grateful for all of them.  

There is so very much written about gratitude and its benefits in our lives and I am pretty sure all of it is true.  I don't know if many of you know On Being and Krista Tippet's interviews with all kinds of people.  It always inspires us to listen.  On the On Being website, there is this archive dedicated to many interviews and articles focused on gratitude.  And have you heard this TED talk by Brother David Steindl-Rast? I listen to it often and try to remember every day what Bother David says.  

We are grateful for all of you with whom we work...grateful for the chance to make a difference in the lives of children, grateful to spend meaningful moments with teachers and children in schools,   and to continue to be able to engage in wonderful work with wonderful people. 

With gratitude to all of you and best wishes for a wonderful December! 

Louise and Ashley

Rounds at Harvard Graduate School of Education

On October 28th I attended my first Rounds with Steve Seidel, Director of the Arts in Education Program at Harvard Graduate School of Education.  I have heard about Rounds for years and finally I was able to show up to participate in a wonderful morning of professional development with a diverse group of professors, students and teachers from around Boston. 

This is the origin and the thinking behind Rounds as it appears on the Project Zero website:

Education has very few opportunities for the kind of lifelong professional learning that those in the medical community can access. At Project Zero we have been engaged since 1995 in an effort to create a powerful learning community based on the medical model of "rounds", where doctors young and old come together to share knowledge and practice clinical diagnostic skills...ROUNDS is a monthly discussion group giving educators an opportunity to gather and discuss emerging issues in educational practice, to present their personal puzzles about teaching and learning, and to practice looking at student work together... Everyone is considered to have special perspectives and expertise to offer the group, and those who attend engage in serious and spirited dialogue about educational matters.  

The morning that I attended, a question was posed by Mara Krechevsky.  Mara first reviewed some of the current thinking emerging from the Pedagogy of Play research of Project Zero, and then framed her question:

How do you create a classroom culture where learning is seen as an adventure of joy, challenge and the unexpected, also when addressing serious and sometimes troubling learning topics? 

Such a range of thoughtful responses to this question ensued with many examples that demonstrated how this kind of teaching and learning can be put this into practice...often through students making beautiful work that contributes to their communities' health and well being, innovation and problem solving, healing and growth.  

The second part of the morning was dedicated to looking at a collaborative drawing done in a free period by a group of third grade students. We followed the Collaborative Assessment Protocol carefully.  I have facilitated this protocol with many groups of teachers and it was such a joy to participate with Steve who is the author of the protocol and a master at leading it.  The drawing was a Halloween drawing and full of fun and fantasy.  We all learned  much through paying such close attention to what the students had created. 

I can't wait to go back to Rounds. Undoubtedly, attendance will inspire me to spiral outwards with what I learn and to design ever more thoughtful opportunities for learning with the teachers with whom we work.  If you are in Boston on a Saturday morning, check and see if Rounds is scheduled.  I promise you, you will learn in adventurous, joyful, challenging and unexpected ways!  

Thinking Like a Scientist...Thinking Like an Artist

An early childhood colleague recently emailed me a query something like this:

I've been ruminating on how to get better input from the students for our newsletters. Here's my idea - I’d like to focus on one area a day and have a conversation with children in that area. The purpose would be different than listening for a “story.”  In these brief conversations, we would be looking for descriptions of what children are doing and what they like about the area so that we could include their ideas in the newsletters with photos.

I share my response here because I think it could be useful to others. 

First of all, your newsletter is extraordinary. 

I think the idea to focus on one area a day is a good one. 

You might think of it as a research project.

    What are the children doing in the area?

    What materials are most “fertile” for generating creative ideas?

    As you observe, what connections are the children making?

Remember during our last Skype meeting, we talked about one way to enter into conversations with children…are they:

• thinking like a scientist (left brain, logical/mathmatical): observations, noticing, sharing, discovering
• thinking like an artist (right brain, intuitive): poetic language, comparisons, using materials,
• and in both…what are the connections they are making between two different ideas…are they inventing something new by putting two or more ideas or materials together?

Looking for the scientist and/or the artist may sound too simplistic, however, what I like about your original proposition is that you are choosing a focus for your observations: the areas of the room.  To then look for the scientist and/or artist might further focus your research.

I don’t mean to exclude seeing and hearing other things.  You will always have your peripheral vision open.  It’s just that sometimes the classroom is like forest, or even a jungle, of so many different things going on that you, the teacher, don’t actually see or hear the thoughts being developed.  That’s why I like your idea to chose one area of the room each day.  Over time, you will collect a collage of ideas, a mosaic of your classroom.

* the images in this post are from The St. Michael School in St. Louis, MO and Opal School in Portland, OR

Circles of Learning

This summer and fall I have noticed circles everywhere I turn...the moon, ripe tomatoes on the vine, white round blooms of Queen Anne's lace, and shining red apples ready to pick from our old orchard trees.  I have also noticed circles of Adirondack chairs waiting for groups to sit, talk, and notice the world around them.  Circles put us in a form ideal for dialogue, for meaningful conversations, for delight, for roasting marshmallows and making s'mores, for warmth around a fire, for closeness and friendship and for welcoming new comers. No one is left out. One photograph that I love from this past summer is an arial view of the Middlebury College Organic Garden with a circle of chairs, each a different color, inviting gardeners and visitors to take a break and engage in conversation or silent appreciation of a beautiful hillside in Vermont.  We have dear friends whom we visit each summer in Maine.  As a circle of friends, we have all given our hosts chairs over the years to expand their and our sphere of friendship over time.  Sitting around their fire by the lake is one of my most thankful memories.  Now we have our own fire and chair circle, down by a stone wall where we have been cooking with fire all summer long.

In the schools for young children in Reggio Emilia, having conversations with children in the form of dialogue where children's ideas and imaginations are completely engaged is one of the seminal practices that they are well known for.  The same is true for the educators in Reggio Emilia...dialogue and making meaning together, in collaboration, in encounter, in wondering together is at the center of their practice.

Recently, our sister-in-law, Kathy Cadwell, received a Rowland Fellowship to study Socratic Dialogue and how to use this way of teaching and learning as the foundation of her teaching and her students' learning in learning history.  A film was just produced about her work and her students' work that features a class she taught last spring at Harwood Union High School as they engage more and more skillfully in the practice of dialogue with the classroom in a circle of chairs.  You can view this inspiring short film here.  You can also visit her website to learn more about student driven inquiry.

Last weekend I was visiting my sister in Minneapolis and read a heartwarming article in the Star Tribune Sunday paper about the mayor of St. Cloud, Minnesota, Dave Kleis, who invites a diverse group of citizens to his home every week to share a meal of chili that he makes and pays for out of his own pocket. He wants to encourage conversation and a place to feel at home for a group of people who have never met before but live in the same city.

And just before I went to Minnesota, dear friends, John and Rita Elder hosted a morning renga session for 9 of us at their home in Bristol with tea and muffins. Renga is a practice of collaborative haiku, spoken rather than written, of short phrases of images, seasonal references, without personal pronouns.  Here are a few snippets from that morning.

Darkened white streetlamp light

awaiting night.

Circle of the year,

circle of our lives—

Equinox.

Circle of muffins gets eclipsed,

carrot, coconut, raisins—

morning glory.

Here's to circles of dialogue, learning, friendship, wondering and making meaning together of our life on earth...where everyone and everything is included. Nothing is left out.

I Need you to Write the Curriculum for a Reggio School...

I need you to write the curriculum for a Reggio Inspired school. That was the request by a good friend and colleague, an architect who is charged with designing a new early childhood center where the benefactor/founder wants it to be Reggio Inspired.

We have requests that are similar to this one from time to time.  For example, this blog in a response to an email query addresses how to start to make learning visible, and this one explores how to compose student work in a book form for a public audience.

My written response to the request to write a curriculum for the Reggio approach follows:

Let’s be clear that there is no “written curriculum” to be followed for “The Reggio approach;” though there are: architectural patterns for setting up aesthetically pleasing learning environments, lists of highly recommended materials and their organization, ways to integrate different disciplines, the 3 R’s and all the others including all the arts in skilled and inventive ways, methods for developing authentic and meaningful experiences that generate deep learning, mediums for documentation and assessment of learning in ways that make the learning visible, protocols for collaboration between teachers that results in evolved and advanced practice.

In fact, this way of teaching is a paradigm shift…something completely different than what most of us have experienced as the norm. It’s a bit like the difference between jazz and classical music…while both require fundamental knowledge of the instruments and the ability to read music, jazz has only a skeletal outline, a melody (not a complete score) that is an open “provocation” for each player to innovate…and much of the innovation is inspired by each player’s attuned listening to the others in the group.

All that said, can teachers learn to teach using the Reggio approach? Absolutely, but in our experience it requires systemic changes in thinking and ways of doing.

First: hire teachers who believe in their hearts that this is the right approach. Before their interviews require them to read The Hundred Languages of Children, and Bringing Reggio Emilia Home. In the interview, ask open ended questions like: What in all this makes sense to you?; and What do you wonder about? From their answers you’ll know which ones are really “on the bus.”

Second: with the new teachers, convene a series of collaborative discussions around shared readings…to develop thinking about and context for the work of creating a classroom and a school community.

Third: set up the classrooms and common spaces with well organized, beautiful materials, in aesthetically pleasing ways.

Fourth: plan/outline/map a series of authentic and meaningful experiences…”provocations”…and prepare to listen to the children and to document their thinking.

Fifth: schedule regular meetings of teacher teams for collaborative reflection on the dynamics of the classrooms, the specific experiences recorded, the composition of documentation of the experience (making the learning visible), and ideas for next experiences.

Sixth: schedule learning experiences for the teachers throughout the year.

This is clearly a simplified and synthesized outline of how to think about a curriculum inspired by the work in Reggio Emilia in a new and transformed way.  To launch this work is a challenge and a great journey as well as an enormous contribution to children and families and communities.  This way of thinking about and creating school honors our intelligence and creativity as human beings on the planet and creates the context for real, engaging, lasting learning for everyone. Let's do it!

*the images in this post come from archives of the St. Louis Collaborative, The College School and The Principia in St. Louis and Buckingham Browne & Nichols in Cambridge, MA.