The Italians have had a profound influence on early childhood education. From Montessori to the more recent Reggio Emilia approach, the Italians are Brining Life to Learning. Watch children in any culture, who speak any language, and you’ll likely find a common thread: a love of learning. Margaret Blood, president of Strategies for Children, saw this universal when she visited the preschool programs in Reggio Emilia, a small city located in northern Italy.

“Preschool, Italian Style” describes her impressions and the vision she has for translating the principles to Massachusetts schools.

The schools in Reggio, where the emphasis is on the children’s competence, have infant, toddler, and preschool programs. They operate on a schedule flexible enough to follow the children’s leads and the environments are designed to inspire learning.

In 1991, Newsweek named the Reggio schools among the best preschools in the world, and the approach has been studied at colleges and universities in the United States. Blood, along with educators from 5 other states, called the schools “amazing,” and hopes to translate some of their features to Massachusetts schools.

A theme of the Reggio schools is letting children lead. The children decide what to study, and then teachers shape the topic to meet curricular goals. For instance, children may draw, then paint a flower, then look at and discuss real flowers, then return to the original representations. The children are then asked to describe what they’ve learned since they the project. The children’s pictures then adorn the walls of the schoolrooms.

Physically, the schools are, says Blood, “more like a cheerful greenhouse than a public kindergarten,” with high ceilings, a lot of light, and abundant materials such as markers, pencils, clay, and natural items. At the Diana School, one of the schools visited, children designed and created a new curtain for the local theater. American Educator Louise Boyd Cadwell quoted the founder of the Reggio approach, Loris Malaguzzi, stating that these projects should be like “long stories.”

Teachers at the Reggio schools document children’s projects via photograph or videotape and then share the material with each other to evaluate instructional methods and to plan future teaching. The goal is to make the learning process visible to teachers and children, but also to parents. Teachers train the parents of Reggio students to learn to answer in age-appropriate terms some of the hard questions preschoolers ask, like “where do babies come from?”

Because of cultural differences, no preschool program can be transported wholesale from Reggio, but there are several Reggio-inspired programs in Massachusetts such as the Advent School in Boston and the Children’s Garden, a 33-student program at the private high school Cambridge School of Weston. The Reggio schools inspire a universal love of learning that educators hope to transplant to Massachusetts’ day-care and in-home child care centers.

Susan MacDonald, the director of the Children's Garden and the coordinator of the state chapter of the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance, holds training programs for teachers and providers in the Reggio methods.

For Massachusetts to experiment with the Reggio approach requires a solid infrastructure – including better professional development opportunities and higher salaries. While not all aspects of the Reggio approach can be transplanted, the goal of helping preschoolers to love learning is achievable.