Teachable Moments
Last weekend, while discussing how precocious Signe is and what, if anything, we should do to help encourage that, my mother-in-law asked if we had looked into any Montessori preschools. We haven’t, for a few reasons.
They tend to be expensive.
They tend to be hard to get in to.
I’m not convinced they do any more for kids than what our current day care provides.
Thus began a conversation about what I know about Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and other teaching approaches. Which isn’t much.
But it made me curious, so today I went to Wikipedia to learn more. Montessori is pretty much what I thought it was. Reggio Emilia is pretty much what I thought it was, though I did learn this:
Reggio Emilia’s approach does challenge some conceptions of teacher competence and developmentally appropriate practice. For example, teachers in Reggio Emilia assert the importance of being confused as a contributor to learning; thus a major teaching strategy is purposely to allow mistakes to happen, or to begin a project with no clear sense of where it might end. Another characteristic that is counter to the beliefs of many Western educators is the importance of the child’s ability to negotiate in the peer group.
[Emphasis mine.]
I still don’t have a very good idea of what approach Signe’s current day care is using. But I’m convinced that Reggio Emilia is the approach used by Mrs. Sparklenose, the teacher at Abby’s Flying Fairy School on Sesame Street.
March 19th, 2010 at 3:55 pm
I think Signe will thrive wherever she is because she has good parents, is healthy and has six grandparents and several doting aunts and uncles who think she’s the bees’ knees. Alternate educational strategies were necessary when kids were being hacked at school by the principal. I hope we’ve all learned a little in the last forty years.
And, Signe, this is Gaga. Call me sometime.
March 22nd, 2010 at 5:09 pm
So, basically, any daycare/early learning facility is a Reggio Emilia approach, because anyone who has worked in one can tell you that even with a clear goal of how the project should go, there is no telling where it’s gonna end up. And sometimes even the teachers are confused!