baby steps

I'm always surprised when I talk to people and they've never heard of the Reggio Emilia approach, even other teachers.  I've been immersed in trying to learn about the Reggio way for six years now, and the more I discover, the more I want to understand. 

I started with a vague sense of what Reggio was about: progressive, emergent, project-based... the words floated around in the ether and made me feel good about working in a preschool with these values.  I was coming out of nearly 5 years of teaching in a very tough and under-resourced public elementary school where I had to follow the mandated curriculum, measure each distinct subject area in minutes per week, and administer standardized tests to at least 25 underprivileged 7-year-olds, some with serious problems in their lives creating obstacles to their success.  Yikes!  Almost any other teaching situation would have been a reprieve, but finding a Reggio-inspired preschool to work in was a dream come true.

We started off with some inservice training; a teacher from a well-established school came and showed us images of their project work and talked about what the children had done.  It was wonderfully impressive, but I came away with a lost feeling of "Yes, but how did they do that?" 

Since those tentative beginnings, I have joined NAREA (The North American Reggio Emilia Alliance) and attended two of their conferences featuring professionals from Reggio Emilia, Italy.  We took our whole staff to Salinas to view the Wonder of Learning exhibit, an inspiring display of Reggio children's project work that tours the world. 

These days I feel like I have wondered a lot, learned a lot, and have a much better understanding of what it is that I want to understand better!  My learning comes in baby steps, some bigger than others, some backwards... something like this:

- Visit a school, conference or exhibit, or 
- Read a blog, book or article
- Get inspired
- Change something about how our school looks or how it functions
- Get bogged down in the day-to-day details of a busy classroom and fall short of intended perfection
- Look back and notice what we could have done better
- Repeat

It's a never-ending cycle but definitely a forward-moving one, and that's the kind that's preferable when you're on a journey.