A Week Rich with Content

Home Sweet Home is grateful to our families for honoring our staff's time to engage in rigorous training and professional development. We wish to share our exploration of pedagogical content with our learning community of families and peers.

On Monday, the entire Alternatives in Action team (all three sites) met to follow-up on the Yearly Flow - each program sharing calendar through multi-media presentations. The goal was to identify opportunities for integration and support of services and programs, and to celebrate the youth achievements and performances. The Home Sweet Home team then met to discuss Big Friends, the Child Development class objectives/outcomes, creation of syllabus, potential for parent-youth mentoring and support, and expectations for student performance.

On Tuesday, the AIA team met again, but this time broke into our cohorts and worked with the youth leadership from all three sites on our individual Learning Plans. The youth provided outstanding criticism and feedback to our personal and professional goals and helped us to craft action plans. There is a strong initiative to include the same students as matched to their cohort at the September Learning Plan check-in. The HSH team then met for lunch and further discussion on program organizational pieces, schedule, policies and procedures.

On Wednesday, Artensia, Cierra, Jose, Kathleen and Sky met at 9:00AM and boarded the ferry in pursuit of our intellectual adventure. Climbing the stairs to the benches, we sat in the sun with our faces to the wind and began a discussion on our individual understandings of Reggio principles and practice.

Arriving at the Ferry Building we were elated to find a large wooden table and we spread out our books. Grabbing refreshments, we shooed away the inquisitive pigeons and set down to work. Holding to the culture of Alternatives in Action, our group facilitated OARR establishing Objectives/Outcomes, Agenda, Roles, Rules. Artensia volunteered to timekeep, Cierra to scribe, and Jose to facilitate. We were off!

Jose and Artensia presented an analaysis of the articles based on HSH Philosophy in Theory, HSH Philosophy in Action, HSH Communication (teacher-teacher; teacher-child; teacher-parent). This resulted in a rich discussion, creating more questions than answers.

We moved on to the Slanted Door for a delicious meal. In a Reggio environment, everything is beautiful and of the highest quality. The team engaged in a strong conversation.

What Can We Learn from Reggio Emilia? by Lilian Katz

Project work is child initiated and teacher framed, resulting in a "negotiated curriculum". The value is that project work gives young children an early experience of knowing and understanding a topic in depth. Children use graphic languages and other media to record and represent their memories, ideas, predictions, hypotheses, observations, and feelings in their projects. Educators use visual media with children to explore understandings, reconstruct previous ones, and construct and co-construct revisited understandings of the phenomena investigated.

We broke into pairs to further our deeper discussion and grow our personal relationships.
Jose and Cierra discussed that teachers all have our own individual backgrounds, style and skill, and how can we collaborate to strengthen our program through our diversity. They also marveled at the construction of the children's chairs in a shop on the way out of the building.
Artensia and Sky admired the display in the mushroom shop, identifying the chanterelle that had been used in our snow peas at lunch. They tried on sun hats, despairing at the prices. They discussed a system for documentation to support consistency of presentation and exchange.
Kathleen bought chocolate and butterscotch for the team to nibble on.

We boarded the ferry for the journey home, but the learning continued with lively discussions. Arriving back at the site, we were greeted with the glorious sight of a Big Friend having completely emptied out the playground shed in anticipation of our organizational work. As we cleaned classrooms and made plans for the next days, our excitement rose instead of waned. Jose volunteered to research and present on Discipline. We were making headway.


On Thursday, the team met to discuss the article Negotiated Learning by George Forman and Brenda Fyfe. As teachers engage in analysis there is an appearance in our work room of a bright tow head, one of our Home Sweet Home children, delivering a package of love from the PAC Appreciation Committee. It is healthy food to nourish our bodies, but the expression of affection nourishes our souls. We all remark on our renewed energy to work together.

As a team we identified the possibility for documentation:

Drawings as designs.
Descriptions transform into documentation.
Talking elevates to discourse.
Remembering supports revisiting.
Symbols combine into languages.
Listening includes hearing.
Understanding leads to provocations.
Encounters expand to projects.
Assessment is replaced by study.
Parent involvement develops into intellectual partnership.

Documentation supports parents understanding and cooperation with the rigorous manner in which children learn to enable the learning model, allowing deep investigations and moving the parent-child-teacher relationship forward to a generative case of co-construction.

Teachers hopes for the future:
Parent cooperation with program schedules becomes collaboration with program goals for learning.

Adults share an understanding of Home Sweet Home program design knowing that every decision reflects intentionality toward support of the shared vision of the child as a capable being.

Teachers and families will honor routines and meetings as essential tools to construct our knowledge and understanding of the individual child. This will include taking the time for meaningful conversations; to engage fully with the child in her/his learning environment to support transition pieces and revisit their work through documentation; and meet together during established conference times fully present and willing to share with open honesty.

Adults treat talk as discourse; this is not trivial or jargon, but a deeper opportunity for adults to perceive theories, assumptions, false premises, misapplications, clever analogies, ambiguities, and differences in communicative intent. This conscious effort may result in fundamental shifts in levels of perception, analysis and understanding.

The day continues with classroom work, constructing our learning environment in the physical space while envisioning the relationship building with children and parents that will promote a Reggio-inspired Early Education. This is the teacher prep. It's also dirty, gritty, prone to accident and hilarity and frustration. We are taking cues from our observations, but making predictions on what will work to serve the children entering the program. It is high stakes and we want to get it right. Relax, breathe, eat another strawberry dipped in granola. We're in it together and when the children and parents join us it will be wonderful!