in their own firsthand experience.

Research on this 'over-justification effect' indicates that frequent praise lacking in content does not increase the desired behavior as well as does occasional, but informative, feedback.

Feelings of belonging and feeling welcomed■ Feelings of being taken seriously and respected■ Feeling what it is like to understand some thingsbetter (or more deeply)■ Experience of applying their developing skills inpurposeful and meaningful ways■ Being intellectually engaged and challenged■ Experience of overcoming setbacks and obstacles■ Experience of offering suggestions to peers andhelping them understand something better■ Experience of taking initiative, appropriate respon-sibilities, making some choices, and so forth.

62 THE ART OF LEADERSHIP , Cultivating Curriculum in Early Childhood Organizations I suggest that a more appropriate way to assess pro-visions for our young children is to answer ques-tions like "What does it feel like to be a child in this environment day after day after day?" This question provokes another one: "What experiences should all children have much of the time?" (not every minute). In other words, what standards of experience should we provide for our young childre

ome even refer to child care and early childhood programs as an industry, rather than as a service

It is a constructive feeling that must be reinforced so that the connected pleasure lasts even when reality may prove that learning, knowing and understanding can be difficult and require effort.

The eye is shaped like a puddle ... Then the things that you look at are reflected in the eye. Blue and black eyes see a little bit differently: blue eyes see lighter, black eyes see darker. Sometimes the eye is happy." (Baldini, Cavallini, & Vecchi, 2012, p. 170)

They offer interpretations and intelligence about the events that take place around us.

This new child had the right to a school that was more aware and more focused, a school made up of professional teachers. In this way we also rescued our teachers, who had been humiliated by the narrowness of their preparatory schools, by working with them on their professional development.

An atelierista from Anna Frank School wrote that with Malaguzzi, the teacher brought paper and painting materials into the center of the city and set up them up under the colonnade of the theater. The children set to painting out in the public for all to see, and people crowded around, expressed surprise, and asked many questions (see Figure 2.1). All this was done in conjunction with an exhibit of children's drawings from preschools of the whole province (

He needed to make a statement to the citizens of Reggio Emilia about the importance of preschools, and offer proof of his beliefs.

This means producing traces -such as notes, slides and videos -to make visible the ways the individuals and the group are learning.

his is the reason why any theory, in order to exist, needs to be expressed, communicat-ed and listened to by others. Herein lies the basis for the "pedagogy of relationships and listening," which distinguishes the work in Reggio Emilia.

Listening takes place within a "listening context,•where one learns to listen and narrate, and each individual feels legitimized to represent and offerinterpretations of her or his theories throughaction, emotion, expression and representation, using symbols and images (the "hundredlanguages"). Understanding and awareness are generated through sharing and dialogue.

listen with oil our senses,

But we cannot live without meaning;

They see the work and devel-opment of teachers as a public activity taking place within the shared life of the school, community, and culture; they place a strong value on themselves com-municating and interacting within and outside the school.

our research team was impressed by the depth of discussion and lack 2of 2defensiveness 2by 2teachers. 2

The point of a discussion is not just to air diverse points of view, but instead to go on until it is clear that everyone has learned something and moved somewhere in his or her thinking.

What they are describing here is a genuine commitment to emergent curricu-lum, not a subtle manipulation of the project theme so that it will end up in a certain place

notice those knots and help bring them to center stage for further attention

Their goal is not so much to “facilitate” learning in the sense of “making smooth or easy” but rather to “stimulate” it by making problems more complex, involving, and arous-ing. They ask the children what they need to conduct experiments—even when they realize that a particular approach or hypothesis is not “correct.”

Throughout the project (as well as in other daily work), the teachers act as the group’s “memory” and discuss with children the results of the documenta-tion.

another version of responsive teaching involves providing a next occasion

They considered whether the sun has friends, and who are these friends. They compared the sun and the mooon, and they considered where the sun goes at night and when it rains, and whether children can touch it, or live on it. In talking about what happens to the sun when it’s dark outside, children said:

We must be able to be amazed and to enjoy, like the children often do. We must be able to catch the ball that the children throw us, and toss it back to them in a way that makes the children want to continue the game with us, developing, perhaps, other games as we go along

By creating shared meaning of the schoolchild’s nature, rights, and capacities, members of a community also can come to agree on what kind of teacher is needed to educate and provide for this child.

learn from and be changed by what the other says.

Children continually asserted, counter-asserted, built on one another's ideas, and revised their thinking. In small-group gatherings, children showed their caring for one another and their ability to listen to and support one another's conceptualizations (see also Mayall, 2000a). As the authors of the Boulder Journey School Charter on Children's Rights observed, "Children have a right to make ideas with other people."

skills as crawling or walking down hallways, climbing into car seats, puttin

in this classroom offered children the opportunity to travel on their own, either by crawling or walking along the

When the children arrived at the mailbox, they were dismayed to find that it loomed far out of their reach. The chil-dren did not want the teacher to lift them up to reach it, resulting in a long-term in-vestigation exploring how children could mail a letter independently.

autonomy in performing the daily task

"listening not just with our ears but with all our senses (sight, touch, smell, taste, orientation). Listening to the hundred, the thousand languages" (

So it does not depend on the age of the teller, but on the sensitivity of the listener. A newborn baby is l oking in your eyes, making silent questions, asking for cooperation for building a common world. That is the beginning of stories. (reported in Alderson, 2000b, pp. 26-27)

Finnish educator Monika Riihela held that infants as young as 8 months have ideas to share. She

Children have a right to know what time it is, and how many minutes they have to wait for something (their turn), and the time it will be when it's finally their turn

The teacher must forget all the lines he knewbefore and invent the ones he doesn’t remember.

We need to know how to recognize a new presence,how to wait for the child.

We can never think of the child in the abstract. Whenwe think about a child, when we pull out a child tolook at, that child is already tightly connected andlinked to a certain reality of the world — she hasrelationships and experiences. We cannot separatethis child from a particular reality.

Your Image of the Child:Where Teaching Begins

An environment that grows out ofyour relationship with the child is unique and fluid.

heycontinuetoformulatenewinterpretationsandnewhypothesesandideasaboutlearningandteachingthroughtheirdailyobservationsandpracticeoflearningalongwiththechildren