COLLABORATIVE COMMUNICATION: Using Their Senses, Students Moving Ideas Forward

The La Scuola educational program links the Reggio Emilia approach and the International Baccalaureate (IB) framework through language immersion. Students and their inquiry are at the center of the program. Teachers organize learning spaces and develop provocations to invite students to contribute observations, questions, and ideas — through voice, movement, and drawings — to the group. Making their own thinking visible — for example, playing a chord, crafting an opening paragraph — is foundational to the student-centered nature of Reggio and the IB learning experiences.

A classroom with all students communicating their diverse observations and ideas, how does that work? The Reggio environment, the third teacher, and the Learner Profile attributes (IB) shape and guide an inquiry that is both highly collaborative and problem-solving oriented. One hand holds the other — individual voices across 100 languages and highly collaborative problem-solving — they go hand in hand.

MULTI/PLURILINGUALISM

While Italian is part of the core of our program and identity, it is also a doorway into a plurilingual world. Once students have learned more than one language, their mind is primed to learn more — and they are curious and eager to learn!

Multilingual students draw on all their linguistic resources at all times; we can see this in the early grades, when our first graders added the word for hand in German and Albanian to the classroom posters they made. In Kindergarten Arancioni, the teachers noticed how the morning assemblea routine in Italian sparked an interest in greetings in other languages — so all year, they introduced and sang greetings in a new language.

In Grade 4 Spanish, teacher Daniela did not start with hola and walk the students through conjugations. Instead, she encouraged them to use what they already knew (Italian and English) to try to understand and notice things about what they didn’t know yet (Spanish). She encouraged them to look for what was the same and what was different, and found that the inquiry then went in the direction of language, history, power, and empire. This is the power of inquiry in language learning!

Math is also a language, and our students are learning how numbers, patterns, and deductive reasoning can help them make sense of the world. They don’t only learn how to calculate; they learn to look for relationships, to seek to understand the parts and the whole, to communicate and debate ideas. They consider the history of our mathematical language and how certain ideas, such as a base ten system, zero, or negative numbers, came to be.