The Reggio Emilia theory and application puts the natural development of people and the close relationships that they share with their environment at the center of its philosophy. The Reggio Emilia approach and curriculum are just one of the many systems we have researched to create the Education for Life Program and this page is meant to function as an ever-expanding archive of open source, free-shared, and duplicable Reggio Emilia theory and application inspired ideas. As this page develops we also organize everything we add here into the primary components of the One Community Education Program: Curriculum for Life, Teaching Strategies for Life, Learning Tools and Toys for Life, and building The Ultimate Classroom. These components are designed to be combined to create endless “Lesson Plans for Life” purposed to grow and evolve what we feel will be the most comprehensive, effective, and diversely applicable free-education program and resource archive in the world. The One Community Foundations of Teaching, Leadership, and Communicating, combined with a collaborative Evaluation and Evolution Component (Portfolio Creation and Maintenance), help us to further grow and adapt both the program and as individuals.
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The Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education is based on over forty years of experience in the Reggio Emilia Municipal Infant/toddler and Preschool Centers in Italy. It places emphasis on children’s symbolic languages in the context of a project-oriented curriculum. Learning is viewed as a journey and education as building relationships with people (both children and adults) and creating connections between ideas and the environment. Through this approach, adults help children understand the meaning of their experience more completely through documentation of children’s work, observations, and continuous teacher-child dialogue. The Reggio approach guides children’s ideas with provocations”not predetermined curricula. There is collaboration on many levels: parent participation, teacher discussions, and community.
The Reggio Emilia approach is an educational philosophy focused on preschool and primary education. It is a pedagogy described as student-centered and constructivist that utilizes self-directed, experiential learning in relationship-driven environments. To create this page we have researched a diversity of the components of the Reggio Emilia program and philosophy including: Reggio Emilia approach curriculum, Reggio Emilia classroom design, Reggio Emilia lesson plans, Reggio Emilia teacher training, and more. Our goal is to list here what we feel are the best, simplest, and most usable tools with application and benefit for all ages? If you have ideas stemming from Reggio Emilia theory and application that you feel should be added to this developing resource guide, please use our Education for Life Collaborative Input Page.
NOTE: One Community does not believe there is any one system that is the best. It is our Highest Good of All philosophy to look at all systems and all methodologies. Our goal is to learn and integrate everything we can to better inspire and create the Education for Life program as an open source and free-shared globally collaborative and accessible program available to positively contribute to the education of anyone who chooses to use it.
Here is our continually evolving list of Reggio Emilia Theory and Application inspired ideas divided into the categories of the Education for Life program:
If you’d like to help us make this list better, please submit your Reggio inspired suggestions so that we can integrate them here and into the Foundations of Teaching, Leadership, and Communicating component.
The teacher’s role within the Reggio Emilia approach is complex. Working as co-teachers, the role of the teacher is first and foremost to be that of a learner alongside the children. The teacher is a teacher-researcher, a resource and guide as she/he lends expertise to children. Within such a teacher-researcher role, educators carefully listen, observe, and document children’s work and the growth of community in their classroom and are to provoke, co-construct, and stimulate thinking, and children’s collaboration with peers. Teachers are committed to reflection about their own teaching and learning.
┏ Children should have some control over the direction of their learning
┏ Children should be able to learn through experiences of touching, moving, listening, seeing, and hearing
┏ Children have a relationship with other children and with material items in the world that they should explore
┏ Children should have endless ways, opportunities, and encouragement to express themselves within any environment
┏ Teachers are co-learners/researchers and should be active and offer mutual participation in the activity to help ensure that the child is clearly understanding
┏ Teaching children is viewed as a collective responsibility of parents, teachers and community, therefore everyone is encouraged to learn the Reggio Approach
┏ Incorporate parents into the education process by offering principals to bridge learning between school and home and make it clear that they are expected to partake in discussions about school policy, curriculum, development, planning and evaluation
┏ Use the entire environment as a teacher and look for additional opportunities to integrate it. For example, plan new spaces and remodel old ones and include integration of each classroom with the rest of the school, and the school with the surrounding community. Embrace change – children can create meaning and make sense of their world through environments which support complex, varied, sustained, and changing relationships between people, the world of experience, ideas, and expressing ideas
┏ Create a flexible, relationship-driven learning environment
┏ Create environments that reflect your values
┏ Creating environments that foster creativity
┏ Foster creativity through investigations
┏ Ideas to add? Click here to make this page better!
If you’d like to help us make this list better, please submit your Reggio inspired suggestions so that we can integrate them here and into the Curriculum for Life component.
┏ Project-oriented curriculum
┏ Fosters interpersonal relationships with other children
┏ Curriculum evolves in relationship-driven environments
┏ Respect, responsibility, and community taught through exploration and discovery within social environment
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If you’d like to help us make this list better, please submit your Reggio inspired suggestions so that we can integrate them here and into the Teaching Strategies for Life component.
┏ Documentation. Children document (write, photograph, draw, story) their learnings to show or tell the experience/learning to each other, teachers, and their parents. This process of expressing what was learned enables teachers to reevaluate the process of teaching, parents to understand what their child is learning, and children to reinforce material use
┏ In the imaginary play spaces within the classrooms and the playground outside, children are actively writing and drawing.
┏ Give children the opportunity to understand their relationships with other children
┏ Rather than instructing the children, the teachers set up the provocation and then take a step back
┏ Teachers place great emphasis on using materials and activities that provoke investigation and group learning
┏ Ideas to add? Click here to make this page better!
If you’d like to help us make this list better, please submit your Reggio inspired suggestions so that we can integrate them here and into the Learning Tools and Toys for Life component.
┏ Steer away from purchasing ready-made materials, such as pre-cut foam pieces or rubber stamps, and instead spend resources on paper, clipboards, and multiple forms of writing and drawing tools.
┏ Keep cameras always available to document life and learnings
┏ Microscopes always available for use and encouraging children to look through them, bringing outside findings into the classroom
┏ Magnifying glasses, small clipboards with paper, and markers to support investigation and interpretation of experiences
┏ Ideas to add? Click here to make this page better!
Within the Reggio Emilia schools, great attention is given to the look and feel of the classroom. Environment is considered the “third teacher.” Teachers carefully organize space for small and large group projects and small intimate spaces for one, two, or three children. Documentation of children’s work, plants, and collections that children have made from former outings are displayed both at the children’s and adult’s eye level. Common space available to all children in the school includes dramatic play areas and worktables.
There is a center for gathering called the atelier where children and children from different classrooms can come together. The intent of the atelier in these schools is to provide children with the opportunity to explore and connect with a variety of media and materials. The studios are designed to give children time, information, inspiration, and materials so that they can effectively express their understanding through the “inborn inheritance of our universal language, the language that speaks with the sounds of the lips and of the heart, the children’s learning with their actions, their signs, and their eyes: those “hundred languages” that we know to be universal.
If you’d like to help us make this list better, please submit your Reggio inspired suggestions so that we can integrate them here and into the Ultimate Classroom component.
┏ There is a center for gathering
┏ It is a flexible, relationship-driven learning environment
┏ Indoor classrooms are filled with plants and natural light
┏ Specialty classrooms such as ‘inventors workshop’, art studio, science lab, open kitchen, computer lab, etc. all offer exposure starting at preschool
┏ Ideas to add? Click here to make this page better!
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Montessori | Waldorf | Orff | Reggio | Multi-Intelligence | Bloom's Taxonomy | Study Tech | I-WE
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"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model.
You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. That, in essence, is the higher service to which we are all being called."
~ Buckminster Fuller ~
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