Preparing a Roundtable
Authors: Beatrice Balfour & Susan Lyon
Preparing a roundtable for the Innovative Teacher Project: A Learning Process of Individual and Group Construction
I. Introduction
The Innovative Teacher Project (ITP) based in San Francisco, California, provides professional development inspired by Reggio Emilia Approach to educators in early childhood. Since its inception, 1994, the project’s goal is to create opportunities for dialogue and exchange between teachers, directors and schools based on the principles of the Reggio Emilia Approach. The project offers seminars, director meetings, events and roundtables in the Bay area. A network of schools participate in the project and a community has been established inspired by the Reggio Emilia Approach of schools interested in quality early childhood education. The Reggio Emilia Approach is an internationally renowned high quality educational approach that was born in Italy after the second world war. Schools that are part of the established ITP network have an opportunity to host a roundtable during the school year, which includes these elements: a tour of the school, an opportunity for the attendees to talk with teachers of that school, presentations of the school’s current work based on the Reggio Emilia principles and discussion time among participants with the school’s staff.
The focus for the ITP roundtables for the school year 2019-2020 came from Indications, Preschools and Infant -Toddler Centres of the Municipality of Reggio Children. These are principles of the educational project in Reggio Emilia. For the 2019-2020 school year, the ITP steering committee chose the following principle (principle 2.5) to focus on for the roundtable series: “learning as a process of individual and group construction.”
Each child, like each human being, is an active constructor of knowledge, competencies, and autonomies, by means of original learning processes that take shape with methods and times that are unique and subjective in the relationship with peers, adults, and the environment. The learning process is fostered by strategies of research, comparison of ideas and co-participation; it makes use of creativity, uncertainty, intuition, curiosity; it is generated in play and in the aesthetic, emotional, relational, and spiritual dimensions, which it interweaves and nurtures; it is based on the centrality of motivation and the pleasure of learning.
Roundtables offer an environment for participants to engage, listen and interact with the faculty of the school and make interpretations to their own work, together and individually, on the core principles of the Reggio Emilia Approach. The Roundtable is a professional development opportunity for both the attendees and the staff that hosts the Roundtable. It is aimed at building understanding and awareness of the meaning and methods of high quality early childhood education, the particular educational project at the school as it relates to the Reggio Emilia principles, and the specific competencies of the professional roles of the teachers and the directors in Reggio Emilia inspired schools. For the 2019-2020 school year, a Roundtable was scheduled at Gan Shalom Preschool for April 26, 2020. In the Fall 2019 a director from the Aquatic Park School, Anne Bauer, and the founder, director of the ITP, Susan Lyon, met with the director of Gan Shalom, Beatrice Balfour, to begin the discussion and professional development (within Gan Shalom) for the roundtable scheduled in April. The director of Gan Shalom preschool met and worked side-by-side with the teachers of Gan Shalom in preparing the Roundtable presentation. In this way, the professional development began, and took place, with the director and teachers, and the ITP leadership, in advance of the roundtable. In this article, we show the process of professional development for the Gan Shalom director and staff in anticipation of the roundtable at Gan Shalom Preschool. Presentations of the work in the school give educators in the school an opportunity to articulate their work among themselves, with children and pose provocations and questions for the participants. Specifically, in what follows, we discuss how the preparation for the Roundtable for Gan Shalom became a catalyst for the Gan Shalom staff to think together about, create, and bring to life, the role and place that a newly created art studio had for the school.
II. A description of the professional development process and co-construction of learning leading up to presenting the project.
Beatrice works with Maya (4 y.) and Judah (4 y.) in the art studio on the ITP project. The project, which emerged from the children, involved building a forest and connecting the trees in the forest with roots. Picture courtesy of Hagit Caspi.
I, Beatrice Balfour, had been working and directing Gan Shalom for over a year when Gan Shalom was invited to participate in the ITP Roundtable. Gan Shalom is a small preschool located in downtown Berkeley, California. The school has about 32 families per year, and 10 teachers. It’s organized in two classrooms: a 3-5 year old classroom and a 2 year old class. I joined ITP with Gan Shalom soon after I started directing Gan Shalom. Also, soon after I started at Gan Shalom, I created an art studio for the school. The art studio became the focus of the ITP Roundtable. The Roundtable became an opportunity for us as a team at Gan Shalom to collaborate and to better understand, and reflect together how to integrate, the art studio in our school culture and in the pedagogical practices of the school. Through the opportunities for collaboration and professional dialogue that it afforded, preparing for the ITP presentation became an opportunity for professional growth for me as a director, and for the teachers involved in the project.
When I started at Gan Shalom, I noticed right away that in the school, there was a spacious and beautiful, yet unused room. I decided, in collaboration with the leadership team of Gan Shalom and with the teachers, to transform it into an art studio - a core environment for the Reggio Emilia Approach. We worked with an architect in Reggio Emilia that collaborated in the design of many Reggio Emilia inspired preschools around the world, Sebastiano Longaretti, to design the space. We met with the teachers and Sebastiano on video calls to discuss how we envisioned the use of the space. We were able to get the art room licenced and ready to go for the start of the new school year. My dream was to hire an art studio teacher, or an atelierista. However, we just did not have the budget for it the first year I was there and so I invited artists and members of our community to volunteer to run activities and workshops in it. I also invited and encouraged teachers to use it for their own art activities with the children. When ITP invited Gan Shalom to host the Roundtable, we had been using the art studio for over a year.
One of our early drawings from the process of restructuring the room at Gan Shalom and turning it into an art studio, or atelier.
My vision for the art studio, or atelier, was that of being the heart of the school, where the principles of Reggio Emilia teaching and learning come alive and that of a space that inspires teaching and learning according to those principles across the schools. However, I felt that a lot of the value of the art studio for the school was in my own head. We had not yet developed a collective vision for this space in the school. Though we did create the space together, I was still the main person that was encouraging and advocating for the use of that space. I was looking for ways to integrate it more and more into the life of the school, in the pedagogical culture of the school and to get the buy-in of the teachers and of our community at large. The ITP Roundtable became a great opportunity for professional development around this project. This is because the ITP was a catalyst for me to work side-by-side with the teachers in the art studio, to show them through their own experience the value of working with the children in the art studio in a Reggio Emilia inspired way and to reflect together as a community about the role of the art studio for the school.
The Art Studio, or Atelier, at Gan Shalom Preschool.
When I met with Anne Bauer for the first time to discuss my plan for the ITP Roundtable, I shared with her my excitement about the studio and our work with clay in it. By then, I was able to include in our school budget some funding to hire an artist to do more extended work with the children in the studio. I had just hired a clay artist, Ofra Fisher, to come and work every week in the studio with the children. Ofra spent a semester in the classroom mainly working with clay with the children, teaching the children the qualities of clay, exploring and experimenting with clay in the art studio, taking the children to a potter studio to fire the clay, and using clay for student-lead projects. We got into the routine of using the art studio on a weekly basis with the children, and a teacher joined Ofra in the studio as she was doing projects with the children. The art studio was starting to become more popular. among the children and some of the teachers.
While we were talking about this work with clay in the studio with Anne, I was also reflecting on the challenges that I was facing - one of which was that I still felt that, even though I involved the teachers in the creation of the studio and encouraged them to use the space, the art studio was a top down project (a project that came from me) rather than something integrated in the school culture and that the teachers were excited about. The projects in the art studio were still mainly run by Ofra (or other artists that occasionally came in the school), and I wanted teachers to take more ownership of the art studio. Anne suggested that the ITP Roundtable could be an opportunity to reflect and discuss with the teachers about how to use and integrate more the art studio in the life of the school, and how to create and construct that idea with them. I decided to commit to that plan and move forward with it. In this way, ITP became an opportunity for starting to really think together with the teachers about the role of the art studio for our school.
I decided to proceed by choosing one teacher to start to work on the ITP Roundtable with me, as a pedagogical pair, in the art studio. I felt comfortable in starting small - having conversations, collaborating and co-constructing knowledge together as a pair. The teacher I chose to work with, Molly Greenberg, was in her third year as an early childhood educator. As Molly and I developed a project, we got more teachers involved. When Molly and I started working on this project, I decided that we had to work together ‘on the floor’, first, to experience the art studio together, it’s value for the children, and to see how this work could speak to the ITP roundtable that we were going to host. Stepping in the art studio with Molly was the first of a number of steps in the professional development process sparked by ITP. In the rest of this session I describe each of these steps, starting by (a) describing my collaboration with Molly in the art studio and (b) describing our collaboration in the preparation of the actual presentation.
a. Co-teaching & the Pedagogical Pair - Value of collaboration and constructivist teaching
Teacher Molly works with Judah (4 y.) and Asher (4 y.) helping them to cut a ‘root for the tree.’ Picture courtesy of Hagit Caspi.
I wanted to use these principles within our own practice as educators, and as presenters, especially as we were preparing for the ITP Roundtable. I also recognized the opportunity the art studio provided for co-construction and knowledge among both the children and staff members. Working as a pedagogical pair with Molly meant that I was working side by side with her in the art studio, reflecting together outside of the studio, as well as preparing and learning together. Molly and I started spending two hours a week in the art studio together for the next couple of months. Together we also came up with a research question inspired by the theme of the ITP Roundtable for our work in the art studio, ‘how do children learn individually and as a group in the art studio?’
In the art studio, we worked in small groups with the children and both of us, Molly and I, were always present. At times other teachers joined us. At least one of us would be taking notes in the form of a video recording, written notes or pictures. We spoke with the children as a group or we worked side by side facilitating children’s learning and interactions. We debriefed before and after each art studio session in my office, discussing emergent issues and how we wanted to ‘provoke’ the children next. In the process, it became clear that taking notes during the workshops with the children and revisiting them in our meetings was a good way for us to move forward in the process. Often we noticed something new by looking back at children’s words, and we were able to highlight new connections or places of growth for the both of us or the children. These notes also came to be useful when later we started creating the ITP presentation.
During the meetings with Molly I was able to highlight the connections between the principles of Reggio Emilia and or work in the art studio. We quickly found the combination of our knowledge was beneficial, as Molly was not experienced in the Reggio Emilia approach. Molly's questions and inquiries encouraged me to think deeper, and I was able to guide Molly to various readings, articles, or publications. Molly would ask me questions about the Reggio Emilia principles and I would guide her toward some reading, an article or a school publication about the Reggio Emilia Approach. As part of this process, I also encouraged the teachers at Gan Shalom to attend ITP events and Reggio Emilia inspired workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area. I would go with them, and then debrief with them after the meetings answering and going in depth about any questions. Our exchanges were strengthened by the teacher’s own interests. Molly and I were exploring the principles of Reggio Emilia as they became relevant to our work in the studio with the children. In turn, when we would go back into the classroom with the children, we would bring our expanded knowledge and interests as a teaching pair to the children, and then move on from there. We continued with this way of working, this ‘cycle of inquiry and teaching’, for over a month.
The excitement about the project in the art studio that Molly and I were leading grew fast among the children, the staff and even for myself. The children were getting more and more excited by the project (a child mentioned to her own parent that she did not want to miss Thursdays because that was the day we were working in the studio).
Andrea shows us the tree that she made during the art studio project that Molly and I led.
On Day 1, she said that her ‘tree is for animals that like to eat, it’s got apples for the cows.
On Day 2, she decorated the tree and put glitters that are like ‘snow on top of it.’ Picture courtesy of Hagit Caspi.
A newfound enthusiasm emerged for me in the preparation of the classes with Molly, in getting back into the classroom with the children, and getting to know the children better. ,It was also powerful to be able to work side-by-side with Molly, as I was able to get to know her as my partner in the education process, and being able to see her grow professionally as a teacher. More and more, I noticed that she would come asking for in-depth conversations about the Reggio Emilia approach and with ideas about the next art studio session. Molly was growing her interest, joy, enthusiasm and knowledge as a Reggio Emilia inspired teacher through this process. I slowly created spaces for her to take more of a lead in the project as she expressed more interest. I was also strengthening my own knowledge and understanding of our school, of the children and the staff, as well as building on my own knowledge and experience of mentoring staff and my understanding of the role of a director
As Molly and I were working on this project, we invited other teachers to participate in some of our sessions. The other teachers in the school were developing a curiosity about the art studio and what was happening in it as the children were talking about it. I started to work and collaborate with other teachers who expressed interest in extending the project I was doing with Molly in their own classroom, starting to also meet, discuss and include them in the process and project that Molly and I were leading in the studio. Molly also brought the project slowly in her own classroom brainstorming with the other teachers ideas of how to create more of a connection between the art studio and the work in the classroom. The enthusiasm around this project was starting to become contagious and the art studio was starting to have a more central role in our discussions and work as a staff as a result of this work. I participated and facilitated meetings with the staff where teachers discussed how to integrate the project of the art studio in their own classroom work, and how vice versa their own classroom work could contribute to the project of the art studio. I observed by then that the art studio had become more of a focus among the staff!
In the following section of this article, we describe the process of the articulation of the presentation and what we learned from it.
b. Theory and practice: the articulation of a project
After a month, Molly and I had a lot of material that we collected from our sessions with the children in the art studio, and we were getting closer to the ITP Roundtable. Over that month, I had been in regular contact with the ITP leadership, and had shared with them some of the materials that Molly and I had been collecting. Doing so was helpful to ensure that the work was regularly categorized and organized. Once Molly and I needed to access the data, it was all ready for our use!
At that point, I met with Anne Bauer again, and spoke with her about a conference that was taking place in the area before ITP and to which Gan Shalom always participated as an audience member. I also shared with Anne that the previous year I presented at the conference. There with Anne, the idea emerged that Molly and I could present together the work we had done in the art studio as a test for the ITP Roundtable at this other conference. I got excited by that, Molly agreed, and I shared my idea with some colleagues that participated in the planning of the conference. They encouraged me to put in an abstract, we got accepted and started to get ready for the presentation.
I organized a mock presentation for Molly and I to practice and present together in front of a smaller audience before the large conference. I invited members of the Gan Shalom community to attend the presentation; this included parents, teachers, and other community members. A large part of professional development was involved in the phase of preparation for the test presentation and for the presentation of the conference. Molly and I spent three weeks meeting twice a week, reviewing our notes and pictures that we had carefully catalogued in a shared folder. We reviewed together the material and discussed how the different principles of Reggio Emilia came alive in the art studio during our project. We discussed what we had learned in that process about the children and the numerous contributions that art brought to the children. We talked about how the children worked individually and together in the studio, and how inclusion and participation took place in that space and what our role had been as facilitators in that space. That’s where I really started seeing that we were constructing knowledge together, that we were in that process creating and shaping together our interpretation of what had happened in the art studio for Gan Shalom during that time, and its value for the children and teachers in our school and for our community for the present and for the future.
Our relationship as a pedagogical pair was strengthened in this process. We were collaborating, rather than me simply explaining to Molly what to do in the art studio and how to use it. It was not a top-down approach to the art studio anymore. We were generating together the idea of what the art studio meant to us and how the work in the art studio was contributing to the children’s growth and development, and to our community en large. The value of the art studio started becoming clear and visible to us, and that value was brought about and made clear to us by the real words, theories and experiences of the children that we had carefully documented throughout the process and that we were reviewing and interpreting together.
By the time our presentation was ready and we were going to present it, I came to realize that what we had already accomplished was of value and the take-away. The presentation itself was only the icing on the cake for us, as so much learning and professional development had already taken place. Presenting was important, but the process of preparing for the presentation was equally important. The preparation time allowed for a lot of learning and growth for both Molly and I, and for the school. As Vea Vecchi, founding atelierista (or art teacher) in Reggio Emilia says, “the importance and care given to the entire procedure, the whole process, leading to the final product is one of the elements which” distinguishes the Reggio Emilia pedagogy from others (Vecchi, p. 58.) Much in line with Vecchi and with the Reggio Emilia pedagogy, by the time we were ready for the presentation, it had become clear to me that ITP was about the entire procedure, ‘the whole process’ of preparing and delivering the presentation, and not just about the presentation day itself. For Molly and I, the ‘process’ of preparing for the roundtable together had been equally, if not even more, important than the ‘product’ - the presentation itself because of all the professional growth that came from that process. Molly had learned about project-based learning and the core principles of Reggio Emilia by working hands-on with me in the studio. I had learned about mentorship and saw first hand the power of art in our school. We had also learned about our community, children and we had started to come up with a shared vision of the role of the studio for Gan Shalom.
The conference presentation was very well received. As Malaguzzi says, “In our system we know it is essential to focus on children and be child centered, but we do not feel this is enough. We also consider teachers and families as central to the education of children. We therefore choose to place all three components at the center of our interest” (Edwards, Gandini and Foreman, pg. 64). Through the process of preparing for the ITP Roundtable, we at Gan Shalom brought teachers at the center too, making them co-participants in the project of the creation and development of the educational vision and success of the school, particularly as it pertained to the art studio.
Due to the outbreak of COVID 19 and the shelter in place order instituted in California in March 2020 for the month of April, and unfortunately the ITP Roundtable scheduled for Gan Shalom did not take place. Though of course I was sorry for the missed opportunity of hosting the Roundtable, in light of what I described above, I knew that a large part of the richness of the learning that the ITP Roundtable could ignite for me as a director, for the teachers at Gan Shalom and for our school more broadly had already happened. The learning originated from all the professional development opportunities - working as a pedagogical pair, the meetings with the other teachers, the art studio activities for the children, and dialogues with the staff and the ITP leadership that I had organized in preparation for the Roundtable. In this sense, preparing for the ITP Roundtable had been a catalyst for growth and development for us, especially as it pertained to developing our vision and role of the art studio for our school. In that process, the art studio had become a core space in our school where those principles of the Reggio Emilia approach, for example collaboration, and constructive dialogue, were modelled and taught to the children.
c. Closing Remarks
According to the Reggio Emilia philosophy, the school should be a place where we “keep alive the wonder and excitement in learning procedures” (Vecchi, Art and Creativity in Reggio Emilia, p. 30). The school has a responsibility to cultivate joy and enthusiasm in learning; this does not just apply to children, but also to teachers and directors (Edwards et al., pg. 64). By getting involved in the ITP project and leading the process of preparation of the ITP Roundtable, I developed a renewed joy and enthusiasm for my work. As I described in this session, I gained a more in depth understanding about the children, the staff, and about the educational vision of the school. I also started to really understand my role as a director was not just as that of an administrator but also as that of a ‘pedagogista’ or pedagogy director . In taking on this new ‘role’ I realized that it’s necessary to step in the classroom with the staff,developing projects with teachers and co-constructing with them knowledge and understanding about children’s growth processes, our role as professional educators, and the school environment through dialogue and continued connection between theory and practice. In turn, by engaging our school in the ITP project, I brought renewed joy and enthusiasm both to the staff - by offering them opportunities for growth and development - and to the children - by ‘provoking’ them with new learning opportunities in the art studio.
III. Conclusions
Professional development in education does not only exist in conferences, seminars and workshops outside of the school. Professional development can occur daily in the life of the school with teachers and children. Knowledge and understanding of the children’s learning is shared among teachers on a daily/weekly basis. Professional development created inside the school through weekly meetings with teachers can deepen the level of learning between teachers and children as described by the director at Gan Shalom.
In Reggio Emilia, Italy, the city views the infant toddler and preschools as an educational project. Within each school, teachers and children do research and investigations of particular projects as they arise from the interests of the children and the curriculum requirements. The school itself is seen as an educational project. Within the schools there are pairs of teachers and a pedagogista for each school. “The role of the pedagogista in Reggio Emilia works to promote within each self and among teachers an attitude of “learning to learn” (as John Dewey called it) an openness to change, and a willingness to discuss opposing points of view. We work
to favor discussion. People offer their ideas, and likewise should also take advantage of the ideas of others. The value of such a strategy comes gradually to be appreciated, even if it takes time. The pedagogista becomes part of the overall educational project of each institution and facilitates dialogue and reflection about general and specific educational issues.” (Edwards et al., pg. 130)
At Gan Shalom the creation of a pedagogical pair between the teacher and director began an important strategy for the focus on the art studio and their project of following the children and teachers in their experiences within the art studio. Their work together and the sharing of the ongoing work in the art studio created an environment at the school of excitement and growth and an attitude of “learning to learn.” The opportunity of presenting at the ITP roundtable was the catalyst to analyze and articulate their collected data in their ongoing experience in the art studio which we could say contributed also to the professional development of the pedagogical pair and the school as a whole. In essence the educational project of the art studio organized in preparation of the ITP and the preparation of the presentation created a diverse opportunity for the ongoing professional development to occur at Gan Shalom.
Through the ITP project, at Gan Shalom, the director and the teacher created a pedagogical pair to activate the art studio project in the school. In developing this pedagogical relationship theory and practice began to enhance the relationship between teaching and learning. Both the director and the teacher became learners in the process and both director and teacher became teachers in the process. Molly makes this clear in her testimony of working on this project.
“It was a powerful and profound experience to work alongside Beatrice For this project. Our relationship before had been that of school director and classroom teacher, but throughout the project it shifted to that as a pedagogical pair and co-creators. I had very little exposure to the Reggio Emilia pedagogy before meeting Beatrice. Beatrice exposed the teaching staff to Reggio Emilia concepts during staff development, but there was little time for in depth learning. I was eager to work with Beatrice when she invited me to join her for this project for a few reasons, but the two most overwhelming reasons were that I wanted to learn more about Reggio Emilia and wanted to work closer with Beatrice. As I was still newly exposed to Reggio Emilia, I had many questions. I also experienced some frustration at times, as I had to actively work to shift my brain from focussing on the end product, to focusing on the process. Beatrice was always patient in explaining new concepts to me, and was always open to hearing and taking on my ideas. I realized that I was getting to know Beatrice in a new light and by learning more about her background and passion for Reggio Emilia, I got to know her better. It was also inspiring to watch the children doing the length of the project. I saw how they got to know the clay material better, use new language, and work together as peers in a way that I hadn’t seen before. It also showed me that there is time and space within project based learning for providing children with learning opportunities typically found in more explicit instruction classrooms. I had been skeptical of the process, and I still do believe in explicit instruction, but it definitely opened my eyes to the value of this sort of learning. Beatrice and I worked well together, and were easily able to find a balance for our individual ideas and goals. Working together we were able to provide the children a new learning experience, teach them numerous learning goals and opportunities (math, physics, language), and physical development (fine and gross motor skills). When we first started the project we asked ourselves ‘‘how do children learn individually and as a group in the art studio?’, and how would the art studio affect the children’s learning? By the end, I realized that the end result answered a different question - how do we (Beatrice and I) build a partnership not based on that of director to teacher, but that of partner-to-partner, and how does that partnership work to engage children? I found this to be one of the most interesting and rewarding professional-development experiences as a teacher thus far in my teaching career, and I feel so happy and lucky that I was able to partake in it with Beatrice.”
In closing, as a ‘provocation’, we share some generative questions that emerged in our writing process as reflections about the role of the director and professional development in schools. We hope that such questions can generate dialogue and collaboration within your school context.
Looking at the role of the director in preschool in relationship to pedagogy of a school:
How does pedagogy relate to leadership? What’s the difference between a manager and a leader?
Who creates the ‘pedagogical map’ or the pedagogical/curricular plan in your school?
Is it possible for a preschool director to be also a pedagogy director, or pedagogista, in your school? If yes, what would this look like? Or, is this a role that needs to be honored by another person in your school?
Looking at the role of the ITP roundtable as professional development:
What has been an emerging project in your school community?
How can engaging in a roundtable be a catalyst for dialogue and exchange in your school about this project?
In what ways can you use the roundtable as a way of looking at the process of teaching and learning in ongoing professional development within your school context?
References
Vecchi, V. (2010). Art and Creativity in Reggio Emilia: Exploring the Role and Potential of Ateliers in Early Childhood Education (1 edition). Routledge.
Edwards, C., Gandini, L., & Forman, G. (1993). The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education. Praeger.
Reggio Children. (2010). Indications: Preschools and Infant-toddler Centres of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia.