Meeting+Summary+Feb+22

We started this meeting by exploring what learning means to us. Winnie notes, that some research suggests that when we are asked what it means to learn, many of us cannot explain it. We began this discussion by individually recalling and reflecting on an instance when we learned something well or learned something significant. We then looked at the characteristics of those experiences and noted the convergences and divergences among the experiences. We acknowledged that there were many different ways or styles of learning - some of us preferred to be left alone to do the learning, while others preferred close support, but we noted that none of our learning experiences occurred in total isolation - there was always at least one other person who acted in some way to move the learning forward. We also noted that there was an emotional element. Emotions often changed over the course of the learning experience. Discomfort or disequilibrium was an important part of the learning process. We also commented, that sometimes the learning we gained from an experience was not always what others might have intended for us.
 * Monday February 22, 2010** - Jean Piaget, Reggio Philosophy

This led into a discussion of how and whether we can meet the needs of all our learners - extroverts and introverts, physical and cerebral. We wondered are we sometimes focused on trying to produce the same learning in all our students.

Our look at cognitive theorist, Piaget, began with a quote from one of his speeches: "Our real problem is: What is the goal of education? Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds capable of discovery from preschool age on, throughout life."

We viewed some clips of some traditional Piagetian experiments and discussed how profound the cognitive changes children experience from birth to adolescence - how developing an understanding of object permanence for example fundamentally and dramatically changes the child's view of the world. We noted that this takes time. We noted that from Piaget, we begin to understand how learning does not occur through transmission but that learning alters existing mental structures and occurs as the learner faces new information and tries to align or accommodate it with what he or she already knows.The learner has to construct her knowledge herself. We will all do this at different rates and paces. If, as teachers, we can learn to reward the trying and failing, the reaching, the effort, then, perhaps, there would be more value to learning.

We looked next at Reggio Philosophy.

We heard about the notion of reciprocity and relationality in Reggio philosophy. Children have a relationship with materials and each other. There is a reciprocity among children, the environment, teachers, and parents. (Parents are key in Reggio - they got the schools to run.) Reggio understands teachers as advocates for children and sees children as full citizens and creators of culture. The school is a living organism.

Reggio is influenced by complexity theory and understands learning as a socially constructed process. The teacher is a facilitator or protagonist who encourages children to reach as high as they can. Aesthetics is hugely important and part of their learning - not separate from it. Reggio values difference - they want children to have different ideas - they don't want children to just learn what they are told (this is a response to fascism in WWII). Reggio has brought together the philosophies of many others such as Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky and created their own. It is a philosophy not a curriculum.

Reggio uses documentation. Documentation is for children, parents and teachers. Teacher look at what the children are learning. There are no grades. This is qualitative, anecdotal, narrative data. It has no less value than a test. This led us into a discussion about reporting and grading and whether qualitative and quantitative data can work together.