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.

Teaching as Designing

Today I took part along with FAIR Downtown teacher Paul Hannan in a small Cultural Collaborative class with Dr. Jabari Mahiri. Essentially he tested a prototype of his new seminar, Designing Learning: Integrating Digital & Traditional Texts & Tools in Schools, in advance of his new book. Fellow Arts Integrators - this guy is right up our alley, if you don't know him, you should!

His premise is that the design process is a viable model for technology integration and curriculum development in general. What he's getting to is the same idea Eric Booth espouses - that when we integrate through the nouns (concepts) we'll have limited success, but when we utilize the verbs (processes) we get to deeper learning and more authentic connections. He also pointed out that the prototyping process - in which participants are forced to move away from the page and into a physical model - is a great place to make learning more active and more collaborative. It is true that the prototyping phase caused us more head-scratching about how to get started, surely an indicator of our brains having to stretch. This phase was also the most animated, with participants standing, moving, gesturing and experimenting - all indicators of physical engagement. And, for me, some pieces of our design literally firmed up as we created our physical model.

The other foundational assumption that Mahiri makes is that learning can be "multimodal" - a text is a text is a text, regardless of the mode of communication. So when a student makes connections between a phrase of music and a series of images, that's what reading guru Ellin Keene would call a text-to-text connection - an important part of developing comprehension. (In fact, the subtitle of her book was my first clue that reading teachers think of themselves as teaching not just reading but comprehension. What if we all did this?) Mahiri illustrated this by presenting a handful of images from the lengthy picture book, The Arrival by Shaun Tan and allowing us each to create and share our own meaning from them. (Check out the NPR story for a sense of this beautiful book In Wordless Imagery, An Immigrant's Timeless Tale). Then, modeling a text-to-text connection for us, he compared a series of images from the Let it Be and Come Together portions of the Julie Taymor film, Across The Universe - a different interpretation of the same archetypal story.

For the phases of the design process, Mahiri uses the vocabulary from Stanford University's design school, or D-School. Here are my notes on them:

• Empathy: uncovering meaningful needs, identifying with user needs. Clients (students) are the experts in their own needs. Interviewing, observation & immersion are techniques to gain empathy.

• Define: distilling the specific need and behind that need, insight into what the design will address, leading to an actionable problem statement. In Education this means defining who are the users, what grade, etc.

• Ideate: generation of ideas – use post-its so you can regroup as needed. Go broad to provide fuel for prototype. Later, you'll focus and select ideas.

• Prototype: creation of artifacts – physical, digital or experiential – that provide visible models of solutions being designed to address user needs and that can be tested for viability. Prototype gives us a physical springboard to which people can respond.

• Test: trying out the design solution with actual or potential users. Prototype like you know you’re right; Test like you know you might be wrong in order to refine the solution and make it better.

The best thing about this class was that we got to do the process. I know that I learned in an entirely different way from this active process, and I connected with my partners as well as the members of the other groups better. What we designed, in groups of 3 or 4, was a unit that incorporated digital tools. Though it was not a requirement, all of the groups ended up with designs that had students participating in a design process as well - even the 5th grade Vocabulary unit!

I got assigned to work on a Social Issues unit, with the requirement to include the iveBeenThere site. Specifically, we were assigned to use the Race portion of the site. The site started out as the project of a graduate student - along the lines of the Coming Out project, but featuring young adult "mentors" speaking about a range of social issues that younger kids might face: race, sexuality, bullying, drugs, making friends - you name it. The idea is that teens can access advice from a mentor on their own - one that looks like them, just a little bit older. They can search by topic, or if there is a particular mentor they like, they can follow that person.

From this site we found several others that would be great for a social issues/race unit. The Race Awareness Project  has a "Guess My Race" app similar to the section of the Science Museum's Race exhibit. There's also a "Who Am I Race Awareness Game," designed to open dialog about human physical diversity, colorblindness and race. It's  recommended for children ages 3 and up, care-givers, teachers, etc. Teachers with iPod access, this could be something to check out! Also, there's a way for people to upload their own head shots to be a part of the games. 

The site that ended up organizing our unit design was the Understanding Race site originally developed by the Science Museum of MN for their Race exhibit. The introduction to the site is one of the few in the world that is really worth watching completely, as it cycles through a mosaic of facial features making up a multi-racial face, all the while listing  off multiple ways that humans can differ from one another. This of course is also a list of things that we might use to construct our identities. From this and the other sites, we decided that a race unit should be embedded in a large, interdisciplinary unit based in identity. Hmm, this is sounding familiar. FAIR teachers, I did give you some credit when one person asked if we would actually teach something like this in the classroom and if so, how would we structure courageous conversations with students? I was proud to say that we would, could and do at the FAIR schools, and that Paul or I would be glad to discuss this with them.

We heard about two more juicy, equity related sites at the end. First, check out the Question Bridge, a project that asks black males a set of question and then edits down to the meatiest parts of their answers. There are over 2,000 men represented so far and the designers are trying to reach 200,000 participants. They have put out an app with which black males can upload their answers to the questions. There is also an identity map which is a tag cloud of words the men use to describe their identities, and a high school curriculum framework. The site was not fully functional today, but the parts I have been able to see are promising, so it would be worthwhile to check in periodically to see how it is developing.

Second, Virtual Oakland Blues and Jazz: Remembering 7th St.
This is a second-life tour of historic Oakland, California during the post-World War II period when there was a prosperous black business community based on the port of Oakland. Students can make an avatar, take it to the actual clothing store to pick out a vintage outfit, then check out the shops and of course, the blues and jazz clubs. They can interact with some residents to find things out. This seems like such a great way to use the 3-d virtual environment - not as a substitute for reality, but a way to see something that's just not currently available.

I expected to learn about a lot of cool sites today. What I didn't expect was to begin to see ways that students could use these sites not just for traditional research, but to really participate in their own design processes. I'm excited to see so many interactive sites and sites to which students can upload their own work, share with each other and their teachers, and even invent entire worlds of their own. I'm encouraged that time students spend in design-based games is adding to their persistence, taking them to new places and allowing them to experience things that no longer exist - or don't exist yet!