Look, Listen, Interpret, Teach: A Reggio Emilia-Inspired Approach to Supporting Individual and Group Learning (LLIT)

COURSE INSTRUCTOR

Megina Baker has over twenty years of experience as an early childhood teacher, teacher educator, and education researcher, both in the United States and in Sweden. Megina holds a Ph.D. from Boston College in Curriculum and Instruction, and degrees from Tufts University and Cornell University in Early Childhood Education and Human Development, respectively. She is currently a Program Developer for the Boston Public Schools (BPS) Department of Early Childhood, where she designs curriculum and professional learning for early childhood educators in Boston's Universal Pre-K programs—building on prior work with former PZ colleague Ben Mardell in writing the integrated, play-based Focus on K2 curriculum. 

Prior to joining BPS, Megina was director of Teaching and Learning at Neighborhood Villages, a systems-change nonprofit dedicated to supporting childcare programs in Boston, where she helped to co-design a teaching and learning support system and a playful curriculum for toddlers. A former faculty member at Boston University, Megina:

• Mentored student teachers in the Early Childhood program
• Taught courses on playful learning, early childhood curriculum, and pedagogical documentation
• Helped found the BU Institute for Early Childhood Well-Being
• Collaborated with former PZer Stephanie Cox Suarez to run the Documentation Studio

She is a board member of the Boston-Area Reggio-Inspired Network and sits on the editorial board of Voices of Practitioners, a National Association for the Education of Young Children journal focused on teacher research. 

Megina is co-author of several books: Children at the Center: Transforming Early Childhood Education in the Boston Public Schools; Reclaiming Accountability in Teacher Education; and A Pedagogy of Play: Supporting Playful Learning in Classrooms and Schools.

COURSE DESIGNERS

• Daniel Wilson is a principal investigator at Project Zero and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His teaching and writing explore the inherent socio-psychological tensions—dilemmas of knowing, trusting, leading, and belonging—in adult collaborative learning across a variety of contexts. Specifically, he focuses on how groups navigate these tensions through language, routines, roles, and artifacts. He is the author and co-author of a number of books and articles, including Visible Learners: Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools.
   
• Mara Krechevsky is a senior researcher at Project Zero. She has been conducting educational research for over 30 years, including directing Making Learning Visible (MLV), an investigation into documenting and assessing individual and group learning in U.S. classrooms from preschool to high school. MLV is based on collaborative research with educators from Reggio Emilia. Mara has worked with hundreds of teachers and administrators in the U.S. and abroad to create powerful learning environments for children and adults. She has authored or co-authored over 30 articles and book chapters as well as seven books, including Visible Learners (above).
   
• A former PZer, Terri Turner joined Project Zero in 1999. Over the course of more than twenty years, she served as a project specialist on a number of projects, including Learning to Think, Thinking to Learn, Cultures of Thinking, Visible Thinking, and Making Learning Visible. All of these projects share an interest in better understanding how to create environments that encourage critical thinking and how to make these critical thinking moments shareable with learners inside and outside of the school context. Since its inception in 2008, Terri has also been the facilitator of the Democracy Inquiry Group, a Reggio-inspired inquiry group of teacher educators from more than 11 colleges, universities, and early learning centers.
   
• A principal investigator at Project Zero, Steve Seidel focuses on projects that study the use of reflective practices in schools, the close examination of student work, and documentation of learning. Over the course of nearly 40 years, he has led a number of projects, including Making Learning Visible, a study of group learning and assessment in partnership with the Reggio Emilia early childhood schools in Italy. For nearly 30 years, he served as director of the Arts in Education Program and senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also convenes a monthly discussion group at PZ on collaborative assessment for educators, ROUNDS. Before coming to the school, he taught high-school theater and language arts in the Boston area for 17 years.