Common Ground on Common Principles: Reflections on Reggio & Essential Schools

Synergy: CES Common Principles & Reggio Key Principles

When I started teaching in an arts-centered, project-based school, I was addicted to that exhilarating "build the plane as you fly it" feeling. We all were. It was a grand experiment. And yet, we had the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) 10 Common Principles to guide us in our planning, to tell us how but not what to teach. When our district curriculum people scrutinized our program, we could remind them that our mission was to emphasize depth over coverage. When parents questioned where our "honors" classes were, we could proudly state that our goals applied to all our students. At about the same time, my son began Kindergarten in a Reggio-inspired program and, out of curiosity, I volunteered to be on the curriculum committee. What I found as I immersed myself in the Reggio philosophy blew me away! Me finding the Reggio principles was like an arctic explorer discovering a cache of nutritious food - something to sustain and inspire me as I continued in the work of student-centered, emergent, project-based education. Reggio helped me connect the dots to understand why some of our CES principles worked, how they fit together, and how they might be leveraged for even greater civic good. For some time I have wanted to sort out the commonalities between what I think of as "little kid" (Reggio-Inspired) and "big kid" (CES) emergent learning. What I found in this project reminds me that, just as with all our students, what we're hungry to learn is what we're ready to synthesize.

Learning From What Is, and Isn't Clustered:

The diagram above is my visualization of the interplay between the 10 Common Principles of CES and the Key Principles of the Educational Project of Reggio Emilia, Italy (from Reggio Children's 2010 booklet, Indications: Preschools and Infant-Toddler Centres of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia). Principles are italicized (Reggio) or not (CES) to show their origin. The commonalities of the two approaches are shown as clusters in the same petal of the flower, and written in the same color (I have continued these colors throughout the post so you don't have to keep scrolling back up). This is still a work in progress with some rough edges. For instance, neither CES nor Reggio Children cluster their principles into broader topics. The names I've chosen for some clusters above are a somewhat uneasy fit, e.g., Reggio educators don't really think about "Curriculum" in the way that has been instilled in US educators. Still, when I clustered like ideas from the two approaches there was a clear clump of the what and how of learning, so "Curriculum" was the closest English word for this petal. 

Documentation completely defies categorization. It permeates every category and supports each of the other principles. This concept can be one of the hardest ones for US teachers to really wrap their heads around, and now I see why: depending upon the context of your question about it, you could get a valid answer that makes you think it is really part of Curriculum, Civic Engagement, School Logistics, Student-Teacher Relationships or View of the Child. And, really it is - the danger is in thinking that it is only related to one or two of them. Interestingly, there is no analogous principle in CES. Perhaps this is because older students are often the ones responsible for gathering their own work into reflective portfolios. Still, this misses the entire teacher/team reflection of Reggio-style documentation. One interesting development in the US is the Critical Friends Group (CFG) work that the National School Reform Faculty and others are doing. CFGs may start with data, but their questioning approach moves quickly into the personal beliefs, assumptions and actions of the presenting teacher, supported by other teachers as “critical friends.” It has transformative potential exactly because it encourages the kind of reflection on student work that occurs in Reggio-style teacher reflections on Documentation. CES has embraced this approach and included several sessions on its use at this year’s Fall Forum.  

There are a handful of principles that have roots in more than one cluster. For instance, when CES schools "Model democratic and equitable practices," they are both structuring their Logistics of school governance and inviting Civic Engagement. Similarly, requiring students to Demonstrate Mastery via Exhibition  is definitely a CES Curriculum mandate and, if adults outside the school community participate, also a powerful Civic Engagement tool. Even more subtly, the design of the learning Environment is part of the Curriculum - indeed, Reggio-inspired teachers I know invest a good deal of their time in preparing their environments - but it both requires and reinforces a view of the Child as Competent. If you close your eyes and imagine children in an environment that "fosters interaction, autonomy, explorations, curiosity and communication," you can't help but see Competent children, going about the business of Constructing learning as Protagonists of their education. 

CES Word Cloud

Comparing Apples to Apples?
After first focusing in on the commonalities, I next zeroed in on the contrasts. I then realized I needed to shake up the familiarity of these phrases to get a sense of the overall nature of Reggio and CES principles - so I reframed each as a word cloud. In fact, as I took a deeper look at the actual language, I realized that CES' principles are generally much more concrete. More of the words in its cloud are adjectives delineating the processes of learning: personalized, democratic, demonstrated. Many of the principles can serve as goal statements for program evaluation: do you require Demonstration of mastery via exhibition, or not?  

Reggio Word Cloud

This is quite different from the bulk of the Reggio 

principles, more of which are abstract nouns: environment, interaction, protagonist - not to mention progettazione! The principles themselves tend to be more conceptual: Assessment as ongoing public dialogue and interpretation is more difficult to quantify than Demonstration of mastery, and is itself less goal-oriented. Even where Reggio principles are at their most concrete (Organization of work, space & time assumes shared responsibility) CES takes one step further into the "how" of it (Develop budgets & student loads that support the principles). Sometimes, an abstract Reggio principle implies the concrete CES ones. Within Student-Teacher Relationship, Reggio's notion of a Pedagogy of Listening can include all of the CES specifics: Personalized Learning, Teacher as Coach, and Tone of Decency,Trust and Unanxious Expectation.

It's no surprise that the more concrete principles arose in response to the US educational system, where school leaders needed to be able to parse their philosophies in concrete terms. What’s more, CES got its start in high schools - where, for example, that Tone of Decency, Trust and Unanxious Expectation had often been abandoned - so they spelled it out for us. By contrast, in most US early childhood programs there is at least an awareness that children are developing social skills, and that modeling of decency, trustworthiness and respect are necessary.

Iceberg Model 

Perhaps the reason that the concrete of CES can be implied in the abstract of Reggio can be explained by Stanley Herman's Cultural Iceberg model. The Reggio principles are the why of the matter, the values underpinning the visible iceberg of the school, the “if . . .” to the CES “then . . .”  If you see children as competent protagonists of their own learning, then your goals will apply to all. If you value shared inquiry across 100 languages in carefully prepared environments, then you'll end up with depth over coverage and students learning to use their minds well; what's more you'll have opportunities to see students demonstrating mastery. If you assume shared responsibility, then your teachers are going to have to be generalists. Try it yourself: say "If," and then read any italicized statement in the diagram; then say "then" and read any regular statement in the same color, and see where that thought experiment takes you. 

This is why the two methods complement each other so well. The Reggio philosophy conceptually articulates a set of values within which professionals, parents and children define their own work. These principles testify to a system that has continued to refine itself over more than half a century. It takes time. By contrast, CES is just celebrating its 25th anniversary - still quite a milestone in the consumer culture of US secondary education where reforms are often discarded long before they have a chance to take root. CES' principles walk the tightrope of defining the common work to jump-start the logistics of the reforms, but not prescribing a cookie-cutter product. 

And, after 25 years, perhaps the time has come for us all to articulate the values that underpin our observable structures. After all, our goals, technologies and structures can all be imposed from above; our beliefs can be questioned; but our values are our own. In reality, our values have always mattered deeply to us, but, as members of a culture that values all those overt things that top the iceberg, we have not taken the time to articulate the covert underpinnings. Fortunately, the educators of Reggio Emilia have.