Week 2: HighScope, Reggio…influences on GalaMundi
Mae b -
Hi everyone! This week, I went to the Speech and Debate State tournament in Phoenix and spent some more time with the kids at GalaMundi. Elsa sent me documents outlining the curriculums GalaMundi uses, called HighScope and Reggio Emilia. I’ll be explaining them in this post.
I’ll get to Reggio Emilia later. HighScope emphasizes the importance of “active” learning, allowing students to choose experiences, requiring them to reflect on their choices, and giving them hands-on learning. Intuitively, I know that young students develop better when they aren’t simply told what to think but rather allowed to explore, but it is nice to see that HighScope agrees. HighScope is founded on a series of comprehensive studies finding that learning is most effective when students take responsibility for themselves.
One of the things I’ve noticed Elsa and Yadira doing is constantly asking the students questions –“¿Qué es eso?” (“What is this?”)–and giving the students tasks or toys that are just a wee bit challenging for them. The one-and-a-half-year-olds are often given a narrow-mouth container to put necklaces into, an activity that requires them to build hand-eye coordination. The four-year-olds make letters out of little tiles. I noticed this as part of the HighScope curriculum, called “Adult Scaffolding.” From the curriculum, “Adult Scaffolding” is when “[a]dults support children’s current level of thinking and challenge them to advance to the next developmental stage through thoughtful interactions and questioning.” This is just one of the many strategies GalaMundi implements as recommended by HighScope.
Now, GalaMundi also uses the Reggio Emilia approach to teaching, which also emphasizes the child actively engaging with their environment to learn, rather than being talked at by a teacher. Reggio refers to the environment as a “third teacher,” explaining that teachers should set up the environment so that by engaging with it, students learn. GalaMundi does this by having containers and scoops to play with the wood chips outside, having blocks that can only be stacked in a certain way, and so many other things! HighScope suggests that teachers create different “zones” of the classroom with different materials: GalaMundi has an area with toy babies, an area with toy cars and a track, an area for playing with blocks, an area for reading, a toy kitchen, and a table with a daily game.
I went to Montessori from age three to age eight, and I remember lots of hands-on learning. What Elsa told me and what the information she sent me that compares Reggio to Montessori says is that while Montessori and Reggio share the same basic philosophy, Montessori is more structured. Each item has a specific use (I do remember having blocks specifically for stacking, beads for counting, and a set order that lessons were introduced – first this, then this, then this). Meanwhile, Reggio is more focused on allowing the student to do open-ended tasks, and items have many uses, open to children’s creativity. My gut tells me that unstructured discovery is probably better for younger kids, and introducing structure to learning is perhaps important as students get older. But I’m not sure!
I enjoyed reading these documents – they showed me that while GalaMundi feels very “go with the flow” and calm, there is actually a clear method and plan for the students’ development!
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