A Child's Place

The West Yard, campus at A Child’s Place

About a month ago, I was at my grandson, Jack’s, preschool, A Child’s Place, in Lincroft, New Jersey.  I had agreed to offer a professional development morning and planned it in collaboration with the director, Zach Klausz, and a small group of teachers.  A Child’s Place is a Reggio-inspired school founded by Alba Di Bello.  I met Alba some years ago at an education conference and was happy to discover that my grandson would attend the school that she led for thirty-four years.  Zach and the teachers at A Child’s Place and I decided that reading Bringing Reggio Emilia Home over the summer would be a good way to prepare for my day with them.   I organized the morning and my slide presentation around some of the themes from the book: the learning community; dialogue, conversations and listening to children; the hundred languages of children; and project work.

I structured the presentation so that after each theme, we could think together about what resonated with them, their practice, and where they saw that they might expand and grow their practice with children.

We met in a comfortable room with one wall of windows that look out on an expansive outdoor classroom and the fields and woods that surround the school.  Tables were arranged in a circle so that the 15 or so teachers and administrators could be learners together and engage in dialogue about what was most important to them.

Demonstrating “bug drawing,” pretending to follow the path of a tiny insect around the contours of an object with your eyes and your pen.

It was a joy to have a morning with Jack’s teachers and to listen to their thoughts.  What struck me, more than ever, is that all these practices, that are central to the Reggio Approach, are also central to best practice no matter where the inspiration comes from.  Reflecting on the morning I was reminded that all these practices are focused on developing a democratic community, where all voices matter, where all voices are heard and valued and nurtured.  All voices in a school include children, teachers, parents, the larger community.  Zach, the director, posed the idea of a learning community as one that grows wider and deeper and does not have an end.  The idea of project work culminating in some offering to the larger community was a new idea to the teachers. This has become a central tenet of our work as Cadwell Collaborative…that learning is not for us alone, that all of us can share and offer what we learn to others in beautiful ways that become a gift.

Teacher practicing bug drawing/contour drawing with a leaf from the campus of A Child’s Place.

When we say that all voices matter, what is the broad and wide understanding of voice? “Voices” means children’s and adults’ words, ideas, learning, theories, perspectives, expressed in many ways and in many “languages,” as they say in Reggio Emilia…words, drawings, songs, gesture and drama, dance, numbers, sculpture….

The teachers gained a new appreciation for these foundational ideas during our morning together and so did I.  I realized, once again, and in a new way, that these themes… the learning community; dialogue, conversations and listening to children; the hundred languages of children; and project work…are bound together through the idea of democracy, inclusion, equality, shared ownership, collaboration, and offering to the community.

The outdoor spaces at A Child’s Place offer endless possibilities for learning and engagement with the natural world as a part of our learning community. That morning, I shared the Tree Project from Reggio Emilia that I wrote about in chapter three of Bringing Reggio Emilia Home. This project will always be an inspiration to me. The Diana School, where I spent so many happy days, is surrounded by the trees of the Giardini Publici, the public gardens, in Reggio Emilia. A Child’s Place is surrounded by mature trees and an expanse of field and green space that is rare these days.  I am so happy that Jack is at this school.  I so look forward to visiting often.   

Selecting leaves to draw, A Child’s Place, November, 2022

• Thanks to A Child’s Place and to Linda Littenberg for the images in this post.

Engaging, Organized, Beautiful Learning: The College School

First grade documentation on a project: From Sap to Syrup

We just returned from a trip to St. Louis where we worked with two schools, Principia and South City Catholic Academy. In these schools we continue to collaborate with wonderful teachers and administrators who want to grow and evolve their practice as educators. We also returned to my “home school,” The College School.  We are always inspired by so much at The College School.  It continues to be a touchstone for us…where the faculty practice so much of what Ashley and I help schools work toward.  I always find engaged children and teachers, lively classroom atmospheres, a variety of beautiful, well organized and cared for materials available in classrooms, learning that is clear through the practice of “making learning visible” on the walls of the classrooms and hallways, and organization, clarity, and beauty in classrooms.

Second grade classrroom

I started out in the first grade where I met with Melissa Ridings, a friend and colleague of many years.  I discovered that in the first and second grades, they are using Secret Stories: Cracking the Reading Code with Brain and Mind.  This was new to me.  In the first and second grade there were many child-made and illustrated phonics guides.  Reading was everywhere and in context.  And so were child made guides for creating healthy, happy classroom communities. There were self-portraits of children, photos of families, and evidence of learning through evolving projects or themes, which have been a part of The College School during its nearly 60 year history.

First grade Book Nook

First grade child illustrated phonics guides

Another thing that I noticed about the classroom environments was the place for the teachers’ work and materials. They were often located on counters rather than separate desks, and they were consistently organized and uncluttered.  Each classroom has the feel of a lab or studio where materials, books, supplies, spaces are organized for function and beauty, ease and comfort, practical use and aesthetics.

Second grade reading corner featuring families and guides for healthy community and communication

Fourth grade teacher “desk” in a corner on a counter

I also visited the kindergarten and the third and fourth grade. I met some teachers new to me, and some former friends and colleagues.  I ended my day with Sarah Hassing, the atlierista in the preschool and kindergarten.  I spent some time with three-year-old children exploring clay for the first time with a small block of clay in front of each of them.  I wrote a blog post last year about Sarah’s atelier because last April, when I visited, I started there and didn’t get to the rest of the school. I was so enchanted that I couldn’t tear myself away.

Second grade child made birthday chart

Second grade child generated and written guides for partner work

Materials on all tables in the kindergarten

This time, I did not make it beyond fourth grade, but I will next time when I will visit the fifth grade and the middle school. If you have a chance and are near The College School, make a detour and arrange for a visit.  If you are looking for inspiration and assurance that beautiful, joyful, education that puts engaged, meaningful learning at the top of the list and features children’s beautiful, excellent work in writing, graphics, science and other disciplines and media, go here.  It is one of my favorite schools on the planet.

Fourth grade guides to important ways to be together

Wild Geese

Snow geese, Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area, Vermont

About this time of year, friends begin to send photos of the changing leaves, New England views of autumn, walks on trails through the woods, and sunsets. Something about the crisp air, the changing season, that we know is at once breathtaking and short-lived here in the northeast, makes it poignant, fleeting, and we want to try to capture it somehow. We want to savor it.

Image by Laura Brines. Kayaking at Green River Resevoir

We just returned from a trip to Maine where we helped our youngest son and his wife with their new baby while they attended a wedding of dear friends. Driving through all the brilliant color, through Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, seemed such a miracle. Like a continuous rainbow of reds and yellows, oranges and umbers, against the evergreens and the blue sky. As one of our friends says, “It takes your breath away.”

Watercolor by Susan Abbott. Find her work at here.

My sister-in-law sent photos today of the view outside her office in Shelburne, Vermont of Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains, and a flock of wild geese flying south. She accompanied the photos with Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese.” The poem is a call, an invitation, to find our place “in the family of things.” To find our place in cycles and alongside creatures, in blooming and in dying, in the seasons and in change, and as children, and parents, and grandparents.

Image by Deb Sherrer. Lake Champlain, Adirondack Mountains, wild geese.

We share these images and this poem as a fall interlude, a pause to breathe and smile, and be grateful for our families, our world, our work and the teachers and children with whom we share our lives.

Many blessings to each of you as we move from fall to winter and find our place in the family of things over and over.

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Grandson, Alden, and son, Chris, Camden, Maine

Teaching Preschool Partners

Children at Shaver Elementary School, Teaching Preschool Partners

I just finished reading a gem of a curriculum guide for those of us inspired by the work of the preschools in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Playful Inquiry in the Early Years: A field guide for Inclusive, Inquisitive, collaborative school communities that learn together was written by Judy Graves in collaboration with educators dedicated to bringing the inspiration from the preschools of Reggio Emilia to under-resourced public elementary schools. They have done a stellar job! Teaching Preschool Partners (TPP) is a non-profit organization that partners with public school districts to offer playful inquiry approaches to early learning teachers and support staff. Teaching Preschool Partners is an organization that works every day to bring Playful Inquiry to schools where it has been missing. Teaching Preschool Partners collaborates with Oregon school districts to develop demonstration preschool and kindergarten sites and offers K-3 professional development to support inquiry-based learning for teachers, children, and families who live in marginalized communities. 

The work that launched Teaching Preschool Partners began at Opal School where teachers worked for 20 years to adapt and evolve the inspiration from Reggio Emilia in their pre-grade 5 public charter school.  Judy Graves, who I have known since 1996, explained to me that she grew weary of hearing teachers say, “This works for you in your context here at Opal, but it won’t work for us in our under-resourced community.” When Judy stepped down, following ten years as the school’s founding director, she accepted an invitation from her colleague, Catherine Willmott, to co-found Teaching Preschool Partners.

As background, Opal School was a beacon for North American educators, as well as international visitors, who looked for a living example of how to begin to interpret the work from Reggio Emilia and to build schools in response to the inspiration.  Opal was especially helpful for elementary school educators to see how the early education principles and practices from the preschools of Reggio Emilia might evolve and take shape in the elementary grades. I was fortunate to visit and work alongside the Opal educators many times over 20 years.  In a blog posted in April, 2021, we wrote:

Judy worked day and night, along with collaborators, to open Opal as a publicly funded charter school with a tuition-based preschool attached, inspired by the work of the schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy, the pedagogy of play, the highest quality literacy practices, a foundation of teaching democracy and social justice, and a commitment to professional development of the local, national, and international community.  Because of pandemic financial woes, both the Portland Children’s Museum and Opal School closed their doors on June 30, 2021.

In that blog post we also introduced a wonderful book that highlights a practice developed at Opal School, by by Opal School teachers with the leadership of Susan MacKay, Story Workshop: New Possibilities for Young Writers. 

Visiting educators at Opal School conference

Playful Inquiry in the Early Years: A field guide for Inclusive, Inquisitive, collaborative school communities that learn together is a treasure trove of in-depth descriptions and stories of essential practices that have found resounding success in these communities. I have never read a book that so thoroughly and in detail describes practices that embrace playful inquiry as the foundation of curriculum work in all the disciplines as well as the social emotional growth of children. As we read, we can understand and imagine putting these ideas into practice in our own work. At the same time, it is not at all prescriptive. It is a generous, helpful guide book for the possible.

The contents include:

Playful Inquiry: Respecting the inquisitive and imaginative minds of the young

Community Building

Environments and Materials

Curriculum Workshops: Introducing materials as thinking and imagining tools

Curriculum Workshops: Introducing literacy awareness and mathematical thinking

Social, Emotional, and Cognitive Life of Children

Documenting Playful Inquiry

The educators at Teaching Preschool Partners write:

Inquiry practices differ significantly from traditional instructional methodologies that assume knowledge can be transmitted from teacher to child. In place of prescriptive, scripted curriculum, inquiry approaches invite children… to use their inquisitive minds to play with intriguing ideas, questions, proposals, and challenges. Rather than reproducing knowledge, children are empowered to construct and produce knowledge.  The role of an adult shifts from being a transmitter of knowledge to becoming an organizer of opportunity.

When Portand Children’s Museum, the parent company of Opal School, closed its doors in 2021, an Opal Archive covering 20 years of teacher research was given to TPP to organize. It is now available to the public at no cost here, opalschool.org.   You can inquire to purchase the Field Guide to Playful Inquiry here. (the Field Guide is just becoming available to the general public so email them at the addresses you find at this link and someone will answer you.) These are valuable resources which you will reference often.

I will keep this Field Guide close by.  Rather than a one-time read, it is an invaluable resource for teachers in any setting.  We come away knowing that this kind of teaching and learning, founded on a strong image of the child and the child’s right to an engaging, empowering, and joyful education is foundational, possible, and the most important calling we have as educators.  

Opal School documentation of ideas about community

My Second Curve

Working with Principia School through classroom and curriculum transformation

When I left The St. Michael School of Clayton in 2008, I gave up being a Head of School to become a full time consultant to other schools.  I remember my excitement as I launched with Louise our new venture, Cadwell Collaborative.  However, I also felt some regret.  For some time I second guessed myself.  I was 60 years old.  I had invested 16 years to create with several marvelous colleagues a unique and successful educational program, one that hundreds of other educators had come to observe over the years.  The school was humming along on a solid foundation of best practices and the faculty was ever ready to discover even better and more creative ways to organize and invent authentic learning experiences.  And, I had developed a keen understanding of how to share the leadership of this progressive enterprise.

Why would I leave?  My intuition told me to.  I knew I was doing the right thing…but why?  Now, 14 years later, I’ve just read From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks, and I know why.  The subtitle of the book points to how I grew after I left The St. Micheal School and how I have been happily evolving ever since: Finding Success, happiness and deep purpose in the second half of life…or as Brooks also calls it, the second curve.

For me, Brooks’ first stunning assertion was: in practically every high skill profession, decline sets in sometime between one’s late thirties and early fifties. (p.4)  Huh?!?!  Well, to be honest, I had to admit that I was tired — tired of the daily, seemingly relentless multi-tasking.  And here Brooks relieved my feeling inadequate as he based the decline in brain research: “…structural changes in the brain — specifically the changing performance of the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain behind your forehead)…primarily responsible for working memory, executive functioning….” (p.13). Yup, that was me…with my shrinking forehead I could no longer keep up.  Looking back, I know this was true, but I never realized it…or, I never admitted it.

Besides, there was part of being Head of School that I enjoyed, that I was good at…better than ever.  And here Brooks shined another light: “two types of intelligence that people possess, but at greater abundance at different points in life.” (p.25).  Brooks cites Raymond Cattell’s research.  Cattell writes: “Fluid intelligence is conceptualized as the decontextualized ability to solve abstract problems, while crystallized intelligence represents a person’s knowledge gained during life by acculturation and learning.”  Brooks has a helpful translation of this: ”When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old you have wisdom.  When you are young, you can generate lots of facts; when you are old, you know what they mean and how to use them.” (p.27)

At 60, after 16 years at the school I had reached the point where my fluid intelligence had ebbed and my crystallized intelligence was flowing.  I was able to maintain, without embarrassing myself too much, the daily moment to moment demands, but with more and more effort.  However, I thrived in the curriculum planning meetings and leading professional development sessions, and in personal consultations with students, parents and board members.  I was drained by the former and fulfilled by the latter.

And here, Brooks affirmed my decision to leave the Head of School job and begin a consulting career.  He references the 1st century Roman philosopher, Marcus Julius Cicero, who as Brooks summarized, “believed three things about older age.  First that it should be dedicated to service, not goofing off.  Second, our greatest gift later in life is wisdom, in which learning and thought create a worldview that can enrich others.  Third, our natural ability at this point is counsel; mentoring, advising, and teaching others, in a way that does not amass worldly rewards of money, power, or prestige. (P31)

I realize that those three things have been the core of the fulfillment I have felt over the past 14 years.  My work with Louise in schools is counsel…and wisdom (I hope).  My volunteer work as Chair of the Building Committee for our local Habitat for Humanity board, and as Treasurer of the John Graham Homeless Shelter is service (with dashes of wisdom and counsel).

That said, the transition from being Head of School to being an education consultant and not-for-profit board member (what Brooks calls jumping from my first curve to my second curve) was not seamless.  Brooks dedicates roughly a quarter of his book to explain the three things that hold one back from making the jump: ‘addiction to work and success, attachment to worldly rewards, and fear of decline.”  I definitely manifested bits of all of those and Brooks’ in depth exploration of each was illuminating.

In many was my second curve has been even more fulfilling than my first. And being a founding partner in The Green Mountain Valley School, living for a year in Reggio Emilia, Italy, transforming The St. Michael School, traveling with Louise and our boys, designing and building our homes and others, filled a first curve to be deeply thankful for. In the last half of his book, Brooks explores three things that make the second curve better than the first: develop relationships, start a spiritual practice, and embrace your weaknesses.  I am intrigued and inspired by each of these.  I find myself more conscious than ever of my deep connections with family and friends (old and new).  I am firmly grounded in my morning mediation practice (most delightfully in garden season when I sit in a raised bed garden that I built and cultivate, under a trellis of honey suckle vine visited regularly by the thrum of a band of humming birds).  I am humbled by my awareness of this physical body slowly falling apart despite miraculous insertions of titanium.  I know I can form strong opinions, so I work daily to be mindful of other points of view.  I know I can be quick in my responses, so I work to be careful and respectful with my words.  I know that I can be self-centered, so I work to be compassionate and to open my heart.

While there is no one path for everyone, and mine is my own, as is yours unique to you, Arthur Brooks has composed a deeply meaningful and useful reflection on how to live one’s life.  Not surprisingly, it’s a New York Times Best Seller.

My raised bed garden, affectionately known as My Chapel Garden