Opal Summer Symposium, Day One

2010 Summer Symposium
Portland Children's Museum
home to Opal Museum School and Opal Charter School

"Nurturing Habits of Heart and Mind"

DAY ONE

Whenever I arrive somewhere, I always have to take a moment to walk around and take it all in. That's how I found the following exhibit put up by another Reggio-inspired school (a preschool) from California. It documents an on-going theme of the environment that has become a part of life in that school, in many ways. Documentation is one of the foundations of Reggio Emilia pedagogy, and can take many forms, as this exhibit exemplified.

Documentation: An integral element of the Reggio Emilia approach. Instead of prescribing a curriculum of lessons before school begins, teachers allow curricular themes to emerge from children's play, questions, and observations. As a result, more time can be put into documenting that process, and presenting it for students to see and remember, for parents to hear more of their children's learning, and for the general public to celebrate in the journey of learning.

An interactive felt board of poetry and photos. Part of the documentation shown above.

There were also poems written by the students, art work they had created to publicize their concerns about public littering, and other gems of children's lives that teachers had the privilege to observe and share.

Opal classrooms are similarly full of a variety of kinds of documentation of students' learning. As students get older, they can start to help make their own documentation, such as the family history story books below.

Children are authors, whose works are displayed in various classroom locations.

Sometimes, children's work just speaks for itself, like the following collaborative project:

Part of the culminating 5th grade project: a design for the new Opal playground.

There were several speakers today who spoke of the school as a place of research ... of children as collaborative researcher ... of learning as developing habits of the heart and the mind ... of dialogue as a conversation with a center, not sides (attributed to Meg Wheatley) ... and of teacher language as determinant of students' ability to grow their thoughts. It is humbling to be among these thinkers, these reflective practitioners. But it also feels familiar, comfortable. I feel like I've found my crowd.