Rediscovering School & Community Project

Michigan Nightlight: In your view, what makes this project innovative, effective or remarkable?
Rediscovering School & Community Project Director Kristen Moore: The Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center serves as a neighborhood school in an underprivileged neighborhood. Its minority enrollment is at 49 percent, and 68 percent of the students qualify for free and reduced lunches.
 
However, the Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center is effectively weathering the storm that is hitting so many urban schools because the learning environment is remarkably different. The Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center is a school rooted in

This program is studying the notion that children should not be taught what to think, but rather be encouraged and nurtured to learn how to think -- through creation, innovation, generation, and construction...

the philosophy and practices of Reggio Emilia. The method was developed in Reggio Emilia, Italy, over 50 years ago and has been adopted in classrooms all over the world. The Rediscovering School & Community Project is currently uncovering why this method is one of the keys to the success at Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center.
 
What was the best lesson learned in the past year?
The best lesson I learned this past year is that there are more effective measures of academic success than report cards.
 
For example, the Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center has a day called "Portfolio Day." Hands down, it is the most anticipated day of school -- a day when every student displays examples of their yearlong work showing their interests, strengths, and deficiencies. The teachers, students, and parents at the Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center agree that a student's portfolio is a better reflection of the whole student. So, every year in the spring, each student, their parents and teachers come together and examine breadth of work in their portfolios.
 
The Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center, like traditional schools, also uses report cards to track students’ abilities and conduct conferences with parents to discuss each student. Unlike report cards or conferences, every child, regardless of academic abilities, eagerly looks forward to “Portfolio Day.”

What was the hardest lesson learned in the past year?
That the most difficult part of the Rediscovering School & Community Project will be to adequately tell the story of how the roles of three equal protagonists (students, parents, teachers) interact and how learning is accomplished in the Reggio

The faculty, students and parents are most definitely marching to the beat of a different drummer, and it is the aim of the Rediscovering School & Community Project to observe, understand and disseminate the music to others.

environment. Standardized test scores, matriculation rates, and other sources of data can be measured, but life at the Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center is more than those numbers. 
 
What really differentiates this program?
This program is studying the notion that children should not be taught what to think, but rather be encouraged and nurtured to learn how to think -- through creation, innovation, generation, and construction central to the guiding principles of the Reggio Emilia approach to education. This program is helping to illustrate that the Reggio Emilia approach works -- as students (along with teachers and parents) construct their learning within an environment and structure in natural, fluid ways that build upon individual strengths and inquiry.
 
One example of what the program is uncovering is the success of the [Reggio Emilia teaching tool] "Cycle of Inquiry” where teachers pose questions about a specific topic, such as “how do taxes work?” or “what was a medieval city like?” They organize the work of the children and look for common theories, questions and other emerging ideas. It is not linear. It is a cycle that can move forward and backward. Using the “Cycle of Inquiry,” teachers act as facilitators, allowing for failure and teaching children how to problem-solve.

What are the keys to success for your program?
Life at Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center is not scripted, expected or average. The faculty, students and parents are most definitely marching to the beat of a different drummer, and it is the aim of the Rediscovering School & Community Project to observe, understand and disseminate the music to others.

The Reggio Emilia approach is one of the keys to the school’s success, and I suspect that the Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center is a beacon of light in urban Grand Rapids because of that. It meets children where they are. It is a fertile and dynamic environment that allows children to discover and express how they learn through symbolic languages, color, sculpture, sound, construction, writing, drawing, collage, paint and dramatic play.
 
What do you think that the Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center will gain from the work you are doing after the Rediscovering School & Community Project is finished? How will others benefit from its results?

Once the project is completed, the Grand Rapids Child Discovery Center will have a website full of stories, data, photos, essays, video, and other forms of documentation that will be utilized by faculty to share their story and success with an array of audiences like schools, family advocates, community agencies and academic organizations. They will have the resources and data easily available to show marked academic success and be able to identify the best practices of the school.  
 
Furthermore, those best practices will be dissected for thorough comprehension so that others may adopt them as they see fit.