Author: Sam

I write books and talk about stuff.

Diverse by Design: Episode 2 (Project Based Learning)

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How active should learning be? How relevant? And what is required of adults if they are serious about expecting that kids will have a different experience — and a different feeling — in that thing we call ‘school’? 

In a new four-part series from 180 Studio, we witness one community’s efforts to answer those questions.

In the city of Memphis, in a formerly abandoned Sears warehouse, a new school, Crosstown High, is aspiring to model something that hasn’t been seen before — a version of school that looks nothing like the schools most of us attended or experienced, and an explicit commitment to weave together a community of young people who embody the full range of Memphis’s social, economic, and ethnic diversity.

This is Diverse by Design.

Diverse by Design: Episode 1 (The First Day of School)

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How do you reimagine something that has looked the same for generations? And what does a diverse society require — and need — in order to support a shared commitment to the common good?

In a new four-part series from 180 Studio, we witness one community’s efforts to answer both questions.

In the city of Memphis, in a formerly abandoned Sears warehouse, a new school, Crosstown High, is aspiring to model something that hasn’t been seen before — a version of school that looks nothing like the schools most of us attended or experienced, and an explicit commitment to weave together a community of young people who embody the full range of Memphis’s social, economic, and ethnic diversity.

This is Diverse by Design. I hope you’ll watch, share, & comment . . .

Seeds for a Better World

Posted on | by Sam | 8 Comments on Seeds for a Better World

I’m writing a new book with some cool folks — a field guide for a better world. The goal is to translate the core design principles of the natural world, and show readers how to apply those principles in the service of creating better human systems (including, and not limited to, our schools).

To do it right, however, we need your help. So here’s the idea, and the challenge:

Imagine a small metal tin filled with colorful index cards — sort of like your Grandma’s old recipe box, but in this case, instead of each card showing you how to make peach cobbler or yummy meatloaf, they’re showing you how to build a better world.

Now, imagine that each seed/card outlines something tangible to do — the sort of thing that anyone, anywhere, can apply and “plant” in their own life and work immediately (since our own behavior is the only thing we can actually control).

Next, imagine that these seeds are scattered across the following six categories of individual action: TEACHING, LEARNING, PARENTING, LEADING, CREATING, and BEING. And imagine that every seed/card has a front and a back that outlines the what (do I do), the how (do I do it), the who (gave me this seed), and the why (should i make time to do this?

By way of example, here are three, properly titled and categorized, along with their authors and a way to go deeper.

But the real question is, what would be your seed(s) of contribution to the tin?

Maybe it’s an idea/recipe original to you, or maybe it’s an excerpt from some super useful thing you read by someone else. But if you could only provide a single seed/idea/recipe to be planted in the service of building a better world, what would it be?

Standing by for all clarifying questions and ideas, and thanks in advance for your thought and creativity!

EXAMPLE 1
FOCUS ON BETTER, NOT MORE (TEACHING)

One of the most important questions any school or teacher can ask is simple: “How can we be more thoughtful about what we do?”

Unfortunately, it’s not the question we ask most frequently. The question schools and teachers have fallen in love with — “What more should we be doing? — is much more dangerous. It also leads to the creation of unsustainable systems.

The better question, the sustainable question, the question that frees up resources for schools to do more is the question of reflection and refinement.

Schools are better when they create spaces and expectations for reflection.

Formalized protocols for the adoption of reflective practices abound — though a good place to start is schoolreforminitiative.org/protocols. What’s most important, however, is simply creating the space and support for reflecting on the work that is already being done. And while it would be ideal if this reflective practice started with the principal, it could start anywhere.

In fact, it should start everywhere. Department chairs, classroom teachers, sports coaches — we can all be models of reflection to those with whom we work. That’s why reflective practice means asking not, “What more can we be doing?” but “How can we do what we’re already doing. better?”

AUTHOR(S): CHRIS LEHMANN & ZAC CHASE

GO DEEPER — READ BUILDING SCHOOL 2.0: HOW TO CREATE THE SCHOOLS WE NEED

EXAMPLE 2
CONNECT AND REDIRECT (PARENTING)

All parents experience times when their children say things and get upset about issues that don’t seem to make sense. At moments like this, however, one of the least effective things we can do is jump in and argue with our child’s faulty logic. Instead, we need to recognize that our children are experiencing a right-brain, nonrational, emotional flood, which guarantees that any sort of logical, literal left-brain response will only make the situation worse.

Instead, try this: Connect with the right. Redirect with the left.

When a child is upset, logic often won’t work until we have responded to the right brain’s emotional needs.By letting our children know that we hear what is upsetting them, we show that we are tuned into how they are feeling. Instead of fighting against the huge waves of emotion, we surf them.

After responding with the right, we can redirect with the left through logical explanation and planning. It won’t always do the trick, but Connecting and Redirecting will almost always work better than Commanding and Demanding. It’s as if you’re a lifeguard who swims out, puts your arms around your child, and helps him to shore before telling him not to swim out so far next time.

AUTHOR(S): DAN SIEGEL, M.D. & TINA PAYNE BRYSON, Ph.D

GO DEEPER: READ THE WHOLE-BRAIN CHILD: 12 REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES TO NURTURE YOUR CHILD’S DEVELOPING MIND

EXAMPLE 3

TAKE FIVE (BEING)

  1. Sit in a comfortable position.
  2. Take 3 slow, deep breaths.
  3. Set a timer for 5 minutes.
  4. Relax into your body.
  5. Clear your mind.
  6. Keep going.

Meditation is all about the practice. Don’t get too focused on whether or not you’re ‘doing it right’. The process of redirecting your focus to the present moment is where the benefit comes.

One of the most valuable aspects of it is that it builds resilience over time, not only during a meditative sit, but during stressful moments in your daily life as well. With regular practice, you’ll begin to notice more space between events and your reactions. You’ll find that you are more able to make choices in how you respond rather than acting on impulse.  

Breathing out slowly through your mouth stimulates the Vagus Nerve which connects with almost every organ in your body and immediately sends signals to your brain to relax. Your heart rate slows, as does the release of cortisol (the stress hormone) into your brain.

Though it can be intimidating to begin, even this short five-minute meditation, practiced frequently, can bring noticeable stress relief and peace into your life over time. For best results, try longer meditation sessions (20 minutes or more) a few times per week. Then, these five-minute sessions will have more of an immediate impact when you need them!

GARDENER: STEPHANIE BUNTON

EXAMPLE 4

(YOUR SEED HERE)

Green Book Is Not Our Story

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It has been more than fifty years since James Baldwin first named the knotted pathology that has ensnared White and Black America in an intimate dance of mutual self-destruction for, well, ever. “The failure to look reality in the face diminishes a nation as it diminishes a person,” he wrote. America has failed, he said, because it has come to believe its own myths: The Dream. Equal Justice. The Melting Pot. And America’s greatest crime is its ongoing disinterest in any meaningful introspection. “If we are not capable of this examination,” Baldwin warned, “we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.”

Which brings us to Green Book — which is, at its root, yet another story that invites us to whitewash our collective imagination in a soothing balm of Bizarro-harmony, one in which the white guy is now the driver, and the black guy is now in charge.

Stories like this encourage us to assume that the deep roots of our history can be lopped off like a summer haircut. They offer lazy redemption, and hey — isn’t life hard enough? It’s OK, they say to all of us, but especially to White America. All is forgiven. The worst is behind us. This is really who we are

To which Baldwin, then and now, says — screams! — NO. America’s only hope of survival lays in a liberation from the hypocrisy that has allowed generational inequality to persist, to flourish, with nary a speed bump in its way. But because these myths and distortions are embedded so deeply in our collective psyche, they require hard, uncomfortable, sustained, deeply introspective work that we remain, as a nation, completely unwilling to do. 

And so, we choose Driving Ms. Daisy over Do the Right Thing.

Emmett Till becomes Tamir Rice.

Fred Hampton becomes Sandra Bland.

And Barack Obama becomes Donald Trump.

To recognize one’s true identity as an American (and a human being), we must first be willing to confront, in its full weight, the history of the Black/White experience, with all its fantasies and attendant myths. Until that happens, nothing will happen. “What is history?” Baldwin asked us to consider. “What has it made of us? And where is a witness to this journey?”

We are all witnesses. Green Book is not our story. It’s time to wake up from the Dream.

What (& Where) Are the World’s Most Transformational Schools?

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OK, people, let’s get specific: Out of all the schools in the world, which ones are the most transformational when it comes to imagining a new way to think about teaching and learning in the 21st century?

There are a lot of inspiring schools out there, so I want to repeat: which are the most transformational?—?by which I mean schools that are demonstrating, by policy and practice, 10 or more of the 22 core categories from QED Foundation’s Transformational Change Model?

 

What I find so useful about the QED model is the way it identifies the central pillars of a high-quality education, and then demarcates what each pillar looks like in a traditional, transitional, and transformational setting.

In a traditional school, for example, we tend to assume the student bears the primary responsibility for learning; in a transitional environment, that responsibility shifts to the teacher (see, e.g., just about every recently proposed accountability policy in the U.S.); but in a transformational context, the responsibility is shared via a learning team that includes, and extends beyond, teacher and student.

Of course, learning teams are just one part of a holistic system of environmental conditions. That’s why, taken together, the QED change model helps clarify what we need, and which stages our own evolution will need to pass through, in order to pull K-12 schooling out of the Industrial-era model and into a new Information-era paradigm.

Because that sort of clarity is in short supply, too often we hold up models of school reform that are, at best, examples of transitional progress, not transformational change.

With that caveat in place, please help me find the best set of transformational schools the world has to offer. Where are the schools that are demonstrating a transformational approach to teaching and learning? And in which specific ways are they doing so?

I look forward to your recommendations and ideas.

(This article also appeared on Medium.)

The Art of Jazz

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“When they study our civilization two thousand years from now, there will only be three things that Americans will be known for: the Constitution, baseball, and jazz.”

— Gerald Early

Imagine a country: imperfect, divided, diverse, contradictory, inchoate, in search of a more perfect union.

Now give that country a sound, a feeling, and a form.

Jazz is the soundtrack of American life. It is a prism through which we can see and make sense of our own history.

Jazz peels back the layers of American identity. It takes our national character and gives it shape.

It was born in the Crescent City of New Orleans — established by the French in 1718, briefly ruled by Spain, a waystation for the ships and crews of the world, a part of America since 1803, and home to an unprecedented mixture of the world’s people, languages, cultures, and styles of music.

Its roots can be traced to the early 19th century and to the public, legal gathering of slaves in Congo Square, who brought a uniquely African form of music  — polyrhythmic, antiphonal, and unabashedly expressive — into public view.

It is a music of movement — marching bands and swing dances and waltzes and mazurkas. It contains within its DNA the genes of ragtime, the blues, and the sacred music of the baptist church — but also klezmer, calypso, and zydeco.

Jazz is a dialectic. It rewards individual expression and demands selfless collaboration. It is organized chaos. It emerges through feeling. It is the recipe of a thousand chefs.

To its detractors, jazz is an abomination — a “bolshevistic smashing of the rules and tenets of decorous music. A “willful ugliness.” A “deliberate vulgarity.”

But to its devotees, jazz is a barometer of freedom itself — a music Duke Ellington said “is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.”

Jazz is more style than composition. One moment it was unknown — “a low noise in a low dive.” A moment later it was the center of everything, “the diversion of princes and millionaires,” an art form that could match a new tempo to the world and to American public life, “a restorative for the national nerve complaint, the great American noise.”

Its feeling, Wynton Marsalis says, is like the feeling you get going into your favorite grandmother’s house. You know there’s all kinds of things in there that you might not recognize, but it’s accumulated wisdom. Jazz is freedom of expression with a groove.

Jazz objectifies us. It’s an art form that helps us understand ourselves. It’s the art of negotiation. It’s the argument we keep having.

Jazz is a chance to decide how to let one’s personality emerge against the tapestry of a whole stage full of musicians doing the same thing, at the same time.

Jazz is like democracy itself. It’s a process that will not always go your way. It will force you to adjust.

Jazz is a way of wrestling with what to means to be human. “What comes out of your horn is what you understand about life, the texture of it, the absurdity of it, and the beauty of it.”

Jazz is all of it — the interweaving, the dueling, the calling and responding, the alternating, the texturing, the dominating and submitting, the euphoria and the sadness, moving, challenging, celebrating and reshaping.

Jazz is not the notes you play; it’s the notes you leave out.

Listen.

 

The Science of the Human Brain

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It is the most complex living system in the known universe, built of hundreds of billions of cells, each as complicated as a city.

It is the primary author of the deeply personal story we tell ourselves about who we are and why we are here.

And it never, ever, shows us the world as it truly is — only as we need it to be.

This is the conundrum of the human brain, which is why understanding its peculiar science is a prerequisite towards our ability to imagine, and then build, a better world.

Consider this: Human beings — or, for that matter, any other life form on earth — see only what has helped them survive in the past. The way we make sense of the present is still being shaped by the innovations, fears and assumptions our ancestors made hundreds, thousands, even millions of years ago. And yet our success as a species has occurred not in spite of our inability to see reality, but because of it.

As neuroscientist Beau Lotto puts it, human beings didn’t evolve to see the world objectively; they evolved to “not die.”  And all living things have managed to “not die” thus far by developing different perceptual overlays on the same planetary backdrop.

Bats developed echolocation.

Cephalopods learned to change colors.

Birds got GPS.

And we developed a wet computer with a parallel processor — otherwise known as a bi-hemispheric brain.

Why did our brains evolve that way, with a singular blueprint stamped out twice? No one knows for sure, although psychiatrist Iain McGlichrist believes it happened to help us “attend to the world in two completely different ways, and in so doing to bring two different worlds into being,” and two different ways of surviving life’s slings and arrows.  

“In the one,” he explains, “we experience — the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world in which we are deeply connected. In the other we ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: a ‘re-presented’ version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based.

“These are not different ways of thinking about the world,” McGilchrist claims. “They are different ways of being in the world. If the left hemisphere is the hemisphere of ‘what’, the right hemisphere, with its preoccupation with context, the relational aspects of experience, emotion and the nuances of expression, could be said to be the hemisphere of ‘how.’”

Who we perceive ourselves to be is a mashup of these different perceptual overlays — ostensibly equal parts logic and emotion. And yet the reality of the modern world, says McGilchrist, is that our way of seeing has gotten out of balance.

For a number of reasons, we have become left-hemisphere heavy.

“My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of existence; that each is of ultimate importance in bringing about the recognizably human world; and that their difference is rooted in the bihemispheric structure of the brain. It follows,” he asserts, “that the hemispheres need to cooperate, but I believe they are in fact involved in a sort of power struggle, and that this explains many aspects of contemporary Western culture.”

Is it possible to bring ourselves back in balance? Harvard neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor would say yes — and she would know. In 1996, a blood vessel burst in the left half of her brain. “In the course of four hours,” she explains, “I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information.”

Because Taylor had spent her adult life studying the brain’s intricate architecture, she was uniquely suited to observe how the stroke was affecting her. What she discovered has huge implications for how all of us think about who (& why) we are in the world.

But first, a refresher course:

On one side of our brain, there is the right hemisphere, which is designed to help us remember things as they relate to one another. “To the right mind,” Taylor says, “no time exists other than the present moment, and each moment is vibrant with sensation. By design, our right mind is spontaneous, carefree, and imaginative. It allows our artistic juices to flow free without inhibition or judgment.” And it gives us the sense that we are indistinguishable, infinite, and interconnected.

By contrast, our left hemisphere organizes the world for us in a linear and methodical way. “Here,” says Taylor, “the concept of time is understood as either past, present or future, and our left brain thrives on details. Here, we use words to describe, categorize, define, and communicate about everything we see.” And here, we find the part of ourselves that feels most distinct — the part that proclaims, ‘I am,’ apart from the world.

Because Taylor’s stroke occurred in the left side of her brain, her right hemisphere was left unchecked by its usual counterbalance. As a result, she experienced a drastically different way of seeing the world (and her role in it). “I no longer perceived myself as a single, a solid, an entity with boundaries that separated me from the entities around me. Everything around us, about us, among us, within us, and between us is made up of atoms and molecules vibrating in space. Although the ego center of our language center prefers defining our self as individual and solid, most of us are aware that we are made up of trillions of cells, gallons of water, and ultimately everything about us exists in a constant and dynamic state of activity.

“My left hemisphere had been trained to perceive myself as a solid,” she explained, “separate from others. Now, released from that restrictive circuitry, my right hemisphere relished in its attachment to the eternal flow. I was no longer isolated and alone. My soul was as big as the universe and frolicked with glee in a boundless sea.”

For Taylor, the lesson is not that one hemisphere is better than the other; indeed, there is a reason our brain evolved this way — which is, simply, to integrate two contradictory yet complementary ways of seeing the world: one holistic and boundless, the other segmented and bound.

Rather, the lesson comes when we accept, as Beau Lotto puts it, that “the world out there is really just our three-dimensional screen. Our receptors take the meaningless information they receive; then our brain, through interacting with the world, encodes the historical meaning of that information, and projects our subjective versions of color, shape and distance onto things.

“Meaning is a plastic entity,” he reminds us, “much like the physical nature of the brain, which we shape and reshape through perceptual experiences. It is critical to understand that the meaning of the thing is not the same as the thing itself.”

Believing is seeing, more than seeing is believing. And so we will never change the story of how we learn and live unless we become aware of the way our brains are always trying to ensure that we “not die” — by providing us with a coherent story about our lives, a story that our brain works around the clock to create.

A story that is never, ever, accurate.

To see differently, we must learn to see seeing differently. “The more aware I remain about what my brain is saying and how those thoughts feel inside my body,” Taylor tells us, “the more I own my power in choosing what I want to spend my time thinking about and how I want to feel. If I want to retain my inner peace, I must be willing to consistently and persistently tend the garden of my mind moment by moment, and be willing to make the decision a thousand times a day.”

The clearer we are about the science of the human brain, in other words, the greater the chance we can appreciate the art of individual identity.

It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.

2019: The Year of Living Emergently?

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We’re doing it again.

2019 is barely a week old, yet everyone seems to be searching for the singular person, policy or program that can restore order and usher in the better world we seek. From the excitement over the looming presidential race (and the promise of a return to normalcy) to the anticipation of the pending Mueller report (and the vision of a president in handcuffs), we are hardwired to hope for the sweeping solution, the quick fix, the reset button.

In reality, life works differently. What if we started to work in closer accordance with life?

What if we made 2019 the year of living “emergently?”

Emergence is not a word we hear or use often, yet it is the dynamic origin of development, learning and evolution, and we see evidence of its existence in everything from our cells to our cities. Indeed, the conditions for emergence flow from the reciprocal relationship that exists between any living form and its environment. A single ant, following the chemical trail of its neighbors to carve out a vital, completely decentralized role in a teeming colony. An adaptive software system, seeking patterns in individual behavior that shape which banner ad you see. A human stem cell, self-organizing into increasingly more complicated structures based on the behavior of its neighbors. Or even a solitary Tunisian fruit vendor, whose decision to set himself ablaze eventually sets the entire Arab world on fire.

As Steven Johnson writes in his book on the subject, the capacity for emergent systems to learn and grow “derives from their adherence to low-level rules. . . Emergent behaviors are all about living within the boundaries defined by rules, but also using that space to create something greater than the sum of its parts.”

In that sense, the central features of emergent systems outline a set of rules from the natural world that are both timeless and timely:

Give and receive feedback.

Pay attention to your closest neighbors.

Seek order, not control.

Start anywhere, and follow it everywhere.

It’s the songline of life itself — the deeply resonant story that flows through all living systems, including our own. And in a world that is becoming increasingly interwoven, and at a moment in history when the promise and peril of artificial intelligence are becoming more than just a sci-fi script, our ability to shift to a more emergent way of thinking may just be the difference between survival and extinction. As Johnson puts it, “our ability to capture the power of emergence will be closer to the revolution unleashed when we figured out how to distribute electricity a century ago. Almost every region of our cultural life was transformed by the power grid; the power of self-organization — coupled with the connective technology of the Internet — will usher in a revolution every bit as significant.”

Like the natural systems that surround us, the human systems we inhabit — from our schools to our cities to our political parties — are in a state of continuous dynamic balance. These systems are not done to us — we are the ones who create and perpetuate them, despite our protestations of innocence. (As the theoretical physicist David Bohm once put it, “Thinking makes the world and then says, ‘I didn’t do it.’”)

And so we cannot underestimate our individual and collective power to consciously create the conditions that make our system’s transformation in the direction we desire more likely.

It is literally that simple — and that complicated.

What, then, would it mean to make 2019 the year of living emergently?

For starters, it would mean resisting the urge to pin all of our hopes on any “singular solution.” Stop pretending that removing Donald Trump from office will restore a set of moral principles to American culture. Stop viewing ourselves as blameless pawns in someone else’s end game. Stop waiting for someone else’s policies to empower us to do our best work. And start working where you can, how you can, and with whom you can.

Although a better world depends on all of us, the work towards its creation begins with each of us. Transformation is first and foremost an inside job. And how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale.

We see evidence of these principles in practice throughout the natural world — although perhaps in no more stirring form than a murmuration of starlings. What words can do justice to the magic of as many as a million birds, flying and weaving as one?

Improvisatory choreography? Elegant chaos? Symphonic cacophony?

There is no familiar way to make sense of this natural phenomenon — both what they do and how it makes us feel when we see one.  Yet this flocking behavior of the birds the ancient Romans believed foretold the will of the Gods — indeed, the word auspicious comes from the Latin auspicium, or “divination by observing the flight of birds” — is a natural manifestation of a set of principles for organizing complex behavior,  and an observable phenomenon that runs counter to the way we human beings have made sense of the world for as long as anyone can remember. And thanks to the work of researchers, we now know that individual starlings all obey the same few flight rules:

Watch your seven nearest neighbors.

Fly toward each other, but don’t crowd.

And if your neighbor turns, turn with them.

Why do they do this? According to one of the studies, “when uncertainty in sensing is present, interacting with six or seven neighbors optimizes the balance between group cohesiveness and individual effort.” By following this rule of seven, the birds become part of a dynamic system in which each individual part combines to make a whole with emergent properties. This collective behavior allows the birds to gather information on their surroundings and self-organize toward an ideal density, one in which optimal patterns of light and dark are produced that can deliver information to the entire flock (and protect them from predators). The closer each bird pays attention, the safer — and more cohesive — the entire flock becomes.

Of course, this sort of swarming behavior is not unique to starlings. Many different animals, from birds and insects to fish and mammals, have been observed in their own form of a swarm. So what can this behavior teach us about ourselves, our organizations, and our ability to change the story of the way we work and learn?

According to Andreas Weber, author of The Biology of Wonder, “the spirit of poetic ecology is the spirit of swarms. To understand the individual, we need to understand its environment, and each through the other. We have to think of beings always as interbeings.

“We are a swarm ourselves,” Weber writes, “and we form swarms. A swarm does not have intelligence; it is intelligence. In this respect, a swarm (or a murmuration) is an intensified counterpart of ourselves. It is what we are and what we try to imagine with our conscious thinking. Swarms are solidified feeling. The swarm is — and in its being living dynamics and their expression are welded together in one single gesture.”

A murmuration, then, is more than just a metaphor for thinking differently about organizational behavior; it’s a reminder, in physical form, that our own bodies, cultures and classrooms are governed by the same rules.

As Weber puts it, “we see gestalts of the living that behave according to simple organic laws mirroring the great constellation that every living being has to cope with: to persist, to be close to the other, but not so close as to collide with him. These are the principles of poetic forms that are so thorough we can even teach them to a computer. They are the primary shapes of a poetics of living things.”

So let’s stop waiting for Godot. Let’s make 2019 the year in which we plant a thousand Trojan horses — future seeds of creative destruction that can, when the time is right, assume a different form, attack our most intractable rituals and assumptions about the systems we inhabit, and usher in a different way of being that is more in line with both the modern world and the modern brain.

Applying these principles to the way we organize ourselves will change the way we feel and act. It may even change the way we dream. “My dream is a movement with such deep trust that we move as a murmuration,” says author and activist Adrienne Maree Brown. “The way groups of starlings billow, dive, spin, and dance collectively through the air. Each creature tuned in to its neighbors. There is a right relationship, a right distance between them — too close and they crash, too far away and they can’t feel the micro-adaptations of the other bodies. Each creature is shifting direction, speed and proximity based on the information of the other creatures’ bodies. Imagine our movements cultivating this type of trust and depth with each other, having strategic flocking in our playbooks.”

We can imagine. And we can flock more strategically — but only when we recognize that the work begins with each of us, at the scale of the individual, now.

The Most Famous Nursery Schools in the World — And What They Can Teach Us

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Reggio Emilia, a mid-sized city that sits roughly halfway between Milan and Bologna, is not your grandmother’s Italy.

For starters, it’s more hardscrabble than picturesque — heavily graffitied, with streets and buildings that feel weathered and worn from everyday use. And although you’ll still find the charming clock tower, the cobblestone streets and the Renaissance-era churches in the city center, you’ll also find a city in which one out of five residents is not from Italy itself, but places as far-flung as Ghana and Nigeria, Morocco and Albania, Yemen and Syria.

It is, in short, a microcosm of the changing face of Italy, and of the wider world: nascent, uprooted, and precariously perched between worlds and worldviews.

Why, then, is it also the home to the finest nursery schools in the world?

Recently, I traveled there to find out — along with more than 300 other educators from around the world. We were part of an international study group, scores of which regularly visit Reggio’s integrated public system of more than eighty infant/toddler and early childhood centers to bear witness to what has been created here — and wonder how it can be replicated elsewher

Because Reggio schools don’t exist anywhere else in the world — the closest you’ll find are schools that say they’re “Reggio-inspired” — they’re not well known outside of progressive education circles. But for those that do know, a visit to Reggio is akin to a pilgrimage to Mecca. And after spending five days there, walking the city’s streets, listening to lectures, and visiting several of its schools, I can see why.

Reggio Emilia is a city of altars — to childhood, to imagination, and to the spirit of shared governance and democratic participation. It is magical, but not in a precious way; it is revolutionary, but only because it has had the time and space to evolve; and it is illustrative, but not because it is prescriptive or straight-forward. In Reggio, the whole is always more that the sum of its parts. There are no shortcuts. And yet the path is as clear as can be.

To understand why, you must first travel back to 1945, when, after four years of worldwide war and two decades of domestic terrorism, a group of local residents made an unexpected (and unintended) discovery: one tank, six horses, and three trucks that were left behind by fleeing Nazi troops.

After some discussion, it became clear that by selling what they had found, the townspeople could underwrite an initial investment in their post-war future, and begin to write a new history in the wake of all that had been lost.

The men wanted to build a cinema. The women, a school.

Fortunately, the women won, and within weeks, the construction was underway. A young man named Loris Malaguzzi heard what was happening, and hopped on his bicycle to see for himself. “There were piles of sand and bricks,” he recalled, “a wheelbarrow full of hammers, shovels and hoes. Behind a curtain made of rugs to shield them from the sun, two women were hammering the old mortar off the bricks.

“We’re not crazy!” they exclaimed, unprompted. “If you really want to see, come on Saturday or Sunday, when we’re all here. We’re really going to make this school!”

For Malaguzzi, an elementary school teacher in a nearby town who would in time become the ceremonial leader of the the Reggio network, it was a life-changing moment. “It forced everything back to the beginning. It opened up completely new horizons of thought. I sensed that it was a formidable lesson of humanity and culture, which would generate other extraordinary events. All we needed to do was to follow the same path.”

The bedrock of that path was illuminated by a disturbing wartime lesson about humanity. “Mussolini and the fascists made us understand that obedient human beings are dangerous human beings,” he explained. “When we decided to build a new society after the war we understood that we needed to have schools in which children dared to think for themselves, and where children got the conditions for becoming active and critical citizens.”

Consequently, after seven decades of tinkering and revision, what a visitor will see in Reggio’s schools today are a series of design choices and principles that run counter to the way most of the world does ‘school.’

The goal is not knowledge; it’s communication

In Reggio schools, all adults believe that all children have at their disposal a hundred different languages — and that typically, “the school steals ninety-nine.” By languages, these adults do not mean merely the use of words, but also clay, paper, color, joy, imagination — anything that can help a child communicate his or her inner thoughts with the people around them. “We have not correctly legitimized a culture of childhood,” says Lella Gandini, a longtime Reggio teacher, “and the consequences are seen in all our social, economic, and political choices and investments.”

To counter this, Reggio’s schools are relentlessly child-centered — not to achieve notable results in literacy and numeracy, but to achieve notable qualities of identity formation and to ensure that all children know how to belong to a community. “Our approach offers children the opportunity to realize their ideas are different and that they hold a unique point of view,” said Gandini. “At the same time, children realize that the world is multiple and that other children can be discovered through a negotiation of ideas. Instead of interacting only through feelings and a sense of friendship, they discover how satisfying it is to exchange ideas and thereby transform their environment.”

I know, I know. It sounds amazing, but how do you actually teach that? What’s the curriculum in a Reggio school?

The curriculum is not fixed; it’s emergent

By design, Reggio schools were created to protect children from what Malaguzzi called the ‘prophetic pedagogy,’ or an education built on predetermined knowledge that got delivered bit by bit — a format Malaguzzi felt was humiliating for both teachers and children because of the ways it denied their ingenuity and emergent potential.

Consequently, Reggio teachers have no predetermined curricula (as the behaviorists would like), but neither do they work as constant improvisers. Instead, every year each school delineates a series of related projects, some short-range and some long. These themes serve as the main structural supports, but then, as Malaguzzi says, “it is up to the children, the course of events, and the teachers to determine whether the building turns out to be a hut on stilts or an apartment house or whatever. The teachers follow the children, not plans.”

To see this in action is part of what makes Reggio so magical, and the central feature it requires is a very different notion on the part of adults as to what their central role is, and is not. In this sense, teachers (and there are two in every classroom) are not there to deliver content, but to activate the meaning-making competencies of all children. As Malaguzzi put it, “they must try to capture the right moments, and then find the right approaches, for bringing together, into a fruitful dialogue, their meanings and interpretations with those of the children.”

Context, in other words, matters more than content. And the physical environment, after adults and peers, is the third teacher.

The space is not ancillary; it’s exalted

This is why every Reggio schools feels like a collection of altars. Great care is given to the construction of space, and to the conditions into which children will explore their hundred languages. Intricate patterns of stones snake through an outdoor courtyard, inviting children to continue the pattern, or to begin a new one. A bright orange slide cuts through thick stalks of bamboo, just because. The art materials are ubiquitous, and organized, and easily accessible. And the boundary between inside and outside is always as permeable as possible.

Here, the light is always able to come in.

It’s why Malaguzzi called the physical environment the Third Teacher. And it’s what led the celebrated psychologist Jerome Bruner to take particular note of a group of four-year-old children who were projecting shadows onto a wall on the day of his visit. “The concentration was absolute, but even more surprising was the freedom of exchange in expressing their imaginative ideas about what was making the shadows so odd, why they got smaller and swelled up or, as one child asked: “How does a shadow get to be upside down?” The teacher behaved as respectfully as if she had been dealing with Nobel Prize winners. Everyone was thinking out loud: “What do you mean by upside down?” asked another child.

“Here we were not dealing with individual imaginations working separately,” Bruner concluded. “We were collectively involved in what is probably the most human thing about human beings, what psychologists and primate experts now like to call ‘intersubjectivity,’ which means arriving at a mutual understanding of what others have in mind. It is probably the extreme flowering of our evolution as humanoids, without which our human culture could not have developed, and without which all our intentional attempts at teaching something would fail.”

 

The community is not apart; it’s integral

That sense of intersubjectivity is everywhere in Reggio Emilia; it is, in fact, the clearest measure of the school’s longitudinal success. As former mayor Graziano Delrio put it, “We in Reggio Emilia believe that we should manage our cities with the objective of building an equal community, acting for the common good of citizens to guarantee equal dignity and equal rights. We assert the right of children to education from birth. The child is therefore a competent citizen. He or she is competent in assuming responsibility for the city. I often quote this statement by John Adams, the second president of the United States: “Public happiness exists where citizens can take part responsibly for public good and public life. Everywhere, there are men, women, children, whether old or young, rich or poor, tall or short, wise or foolish . . . everyone is highly motivated by a desire of being seen, heard, considered, approved and respected by the people around him and known by him.”

Indeed, the success of Reggio schools would not have been sustained without meaningful partnership and support from its elected leaders. Today, almost 20% of the city’s budget goes towards its early childhood education programs. There is no neighborhood more desirable than another because of the schools; the system has equity throughout. Parents are integral to the success of each school, and play an active role in shared governance. And the spirit of civic participation here, in a city founded by the Romans in the second century B.C., and in a community that can trace its collectivist tendencies back to the craft guilds and communal republics of the medieval 14th century, is what led a mayor of an Industrial city in Northern Italy to proclaim that the infant-toddler centers are “public common spaces where the multitudes aim to become a community of people growing together with a strong sense of the future, a strong idea of participation, of living together, of taking care, one for others. The school expresses the society through which it is generated, but school is also able to generate a new society.”

The bedrock is not love; it’s respect

Finally, this.

It is easy to imagine that all we need to do is love children more, or give them more space, and the rest will take care of itself. But what I witnessed in Reggio was less a case of adults loving children — though surely, they did. Instead, what I witnessed was a level of listening, attention, and care that came from an unwavering belief that all children, even the newest among us, are social beings, predisposed, and possessing from birth a readiness to make significant ties with others, to communicate, and to find one’s place in the world of others.

“We think of school for young children as an integral living organism,” said Malaguzzi, “as a place of shared lives and relationships among many adults and many children. We think of school as a sort of construction in motion, continuously adjusting itself. Either a school is capable of continually transforming itself in response to children, or the school becomes something that goes around and around, remaining in the same spot.”

This is the path. These are the ingredients. But none of it is possible until, as the great theorist David Hawkins once said, we realize that “the more magic gift is not love, but respect for others as ends in themselves, as actual and potential artisans of their own learnings and doings, of their own lives, and thus uniquely contributing, in turn, to their learnings and doings.

“Respect for the young is not a passive, hands-off attitude. It invites our own offering of resources. It moves us toward the furtherance of their lives and thus, even, at times, toward remonstrance or intervention. Respect resembles love in its implicit aim of furtherance, but love without respect can blind and bind. Love is private and unbidden, whereas respect is implicit in all moral relations with others. Adults involved in the world of man and nature must bring that world with them to children, bounded and made safe to be sure, but not thereby losing its richness and promise of novelty.”

Amen.

To learn more about the Reggio Children Foundation, and/or to register for an International Study Group, visit https://www.reggiochildren.it/?lang=en

This is what culturally-responsive education looks like (& requires)

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on This is what culturally-responsive education looks like (& requires)
I’m so excited to share these powerful short films of teachers and of culturally-responsive education (along with a whole se6t of resources you can access at https://crestories.org/watch).
They’re about race, and identity, and about the challenges of doing our best work. So I hope you’ll watch and share.

This is the future of learning.

This is how we change the story.