Our Approach
The Garden Gate Approach is carried out with a projected curriculum.
The Garden Gate curriculum is relationship-based, stemming from the children’s relationships with their family members, their caregivers, their peers and their community and carried out through the children’s relationships with materials, activities, ideas, questions and theories. Our children, teachers, families and community members are all critical components in the children's learning and development and work together to provide experiences for learning and growing. The curriculum and its projects emerge and evolve from the interests and ideas of the children.
Our progressive curriculum framework takes children from the foundational learning at home through a series of project based learning experiences that focus on the children’s emotional and social development. Children arrive at school with a wealth of knowledge and understanding. And together with the other children and their teachers they deepen that understanding and create new knowledge through inquiry and exploration.
The children are always at the center of our curriculum. Learning is meaningful and authentic because it is always tied to the interests and abilities of the specific children in our group. Based on their close observations of the children, teachers push curriculum forward with carefully prepared invitations designed to draw children into deeper thinking and theory making. The educators in Reggio Emilia, Italy refer to this as progettazione, which means to project to the next steps. Through inquiry and project work, and with the arts as a means of creative communication and problem solving, curriculum moves forward in a thoughtful progression toward the construction of new learning and knowledge.
The Garden Gate Approach is based on a pedagogy of listening.
The role of the teacher at Garden Gate is to form supportive relationships with the children, to support the children’s relationships with their families and classmates and to strengthen the children’s relationships with materials and ideas. Our curriculum framework provides teachers with specific strategies for supporting these relationships. Throughout the progression from home to classroom to community, teachers are asked to listen for meaning in the children’s play, invite the children’s involvement in focused exploration and project work, and establish a reflective practice that allows teachers to refine and redirect their teaching in response to the children’s ongoing learning.
Listening to families and children is at the heart of what we do. By listening deeply we learn about the individuals we work with and develop meaningful relationships that are based on respect and trust. “I’m listening, I hear you,” is an affirming statement that supports the emotional well being of each child and sets the stage for our way of interacting with each other in our classrooms and throughout our school. When developing a curriculum which emerges and evolves from the interests and ideas of the children, teachers must begin by tuning in, by observing and listening carefully to the children. Listening is done with the ears of course and children’s words may be documented through recordings and teachers’ narrative notes. But children communicate and “speak” to us in many ways, through their body language, their behavior, their art and their play. Teachers “listen” to these messages too and document their observations with photos or videos.
Establishing a reflective practice allows teachers to assess their work and the effectiveness of projects to achieve desired objectives. The projected curriculum may take many twists and turns along the way as new interests are sparked or new questions emerge. The collection of children’s work and the use of pedagogical documentation to record the children’s thinking provides teachers and children with materials to reflect on and informs teachers as to what direction to head in with new invitations. The process of reflection is part of the continuous cycle of observation-invitation-reflection that repeats over and over, taking teaching and learning to deeper levels.