The Reggio Emilia approach is a way of educating children from birth to six that grew out of the municipal infant-toddler centres and preschools of Reggio Emilia, a city in northern Italy, after the Second World War. It sees the child as capable and full of ideas, treats teachers as researchers who listen and record, uses the environment and the studio (the atelier) as active parts of teaching, and builds long investigations from children’s own questions. It is not a packaged curriculum with a manual. There is no official Reggio certificate for a school outside the city, which is why schools elsewhere describe themselves as Reggio-inspired.
This article is written for teachers, pedagogical leads and school founders who want to understand the approach beyond its photogenic surface. We look at where it came from, the handful of ideas that hold it together, what a teacher’s week looks like when the work is done seriously, and what tends to go missing when a school borrows the furniture but not the thinking.
Where the approach came from
The story usually begins in the spring of 1945 in Villa Cella, a village on the edge of Reggio Emilia. Families there decided to build a school for their young children, and they paid for it partly by selling what retreating soldiers had left behind, including a tank, a few trucks and some horses. A young teacher named Loris Malaguzzi cycled out to see what was happening and stayed involved for the rest of his life. That origin matters: the approach was born as a community project in a city rebuilding itself, not as a theory written in a university.
Through the 1960s the city took responsibility for early childhood services. The first municipal preschool opened in 1963, and infant-toddler centres for children under three followed in the early 1970s. Malaguzzi led the system for decades and drew on a wide range of thinkers, among them Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, John Dewey and Jerome Bruner, without tying the schools to any single one.
International attention came later. A travelling exhibition, The Hundred Languages of Children, began touring in the early 1980s, and in 1991 the American magazine Newsweek featured the city’s Diana preschool in a list of the best schools in the world. Reggio Children, the organisation that handles study tours, publications and international relations, was founded in 1994, the year Malaguzzi died. The Loris Malaguzzi International Centre opened in the city in 2006. For readers who want a single book in English, The Hundred Languages of Children, edited by Carolyn Edwards, Lella Gandini and George Forman, remains the standard introduction.
Five ideas that hold the approach together
The image of the child. Malaguzzi argued that every educational system rests on an image of the child, stated or not. Reggio chooses a child who is strong, curious and eager to make sense of the world with others. Teachers are therefore not filling an empty vessel; they are joining a thinker who already has theories, even if those theories are wrong in interesting ways.
The hundred languages. Children express and build understanding through many forms: drawing, clay, wire, movement, shadow, music, building, conversation. The phrase comes from a poem by Malaguzzi and is a reminder that school often recognises only two languages, speaking and writing, and quietly takes away the other ninety-eight.
The environment as a teacher. Rooms are designed so that materials invite investigation, light and transparency matter, and children can find what they need without asking. The often quoted line that the environment is the third teacher, after the adults and the other children, captures the spirit even though it is a summary rather than a rule.
Documentation. Teachers record what children say and do through notes, photographs, transcripts and samples of work, then study those records with colleagues to decide what to offer next. Documentation is a tool for thinking, not a scrapbook for parents.
Collegiality and participation. Teachers work in pairs, meet regularly with a pedagogical coordinator (the pedagogista), and treat families and the wider city as partners. Decisions about the next step in a project are made together, which is slower and, done well, much richer.
What a teacher actually does during a week
From the outside, a Reggio-inspired classroom can look as though the adults are doing very little. The opposite is true; the work has simply moved. A great deal of the teacher’s time goes into listening, writing down exactly what children say, photographing a sequence rather than a finished product, and then sitting with a colleague to ask what the children seem to be trying to understand.
Take a simple example. A small group notices that the puddles in the courtyard disappear after the rain. One teacher records their explanations: the sun drank it, the ground is thirsty, it went back to the sky. Instead of giving the scientific answer, the teachers meet and decide on a provocation for the next day: two identical trays of water, one in the shade and one in the sun, with a pen for the children to mark the water level. Over the following weeks the investigation might turn into drawings of clouds, a clay model of the courtyard, or a conversation about where rain comes from. The teachers do not know in advance where it will go, but they plan carefully for each next step.
The Italian word for this kind of planning is progettazione, which is often translated loosely as emergent curriculum. It is not the absence of a plan. Teachers set intentions, anticipate several possible directions, prepare materials for each, and revise as they observe. The difference from a conventional theme is that children’s thinking is allowed to change the route.
The atelier, the atelierista and the role of materials
Most Reggio schools have an atelier, a studio stocked with paint, clay, wire, natural objects, light tables and tools, and many have an atelierista, a staff member with a background in the arts who works alongside the classroom teachers. The atelier is not an art room where children make pretty things for display. It is a place where ideas are tested in material form. A child who draws a theory of how a seed grows, then models it in clay, then acts it out with her body, is revisiting the same idea through three languages, and each version reveals something the others did not.
Smaller classrooms often have a mini-atelier, a corner with a limited, carefully chosen set of materials. The choice is deliberate: fewer, better materials, kept beautifully and replenished, rather than a cupboard of craft supplies. Loose parts such as stones, shells, bottle caps, fabric and wooden offcuts appear everywhere because they can become anything.
For schools without a trained atelierista, the honest question is who will hold this role. A classroom teacher with an interest in materials can grow into it, given time to explore the materials themselves before offering them to children. What does not work is a studio that is opened twice a week for a scheduled art lesson; the atelier belongs inside the investigation, not next to it.
Documentation without turning it into paperwork
Documentation is the part of Reggio practice that schools most often adopt in name and most often get wrong. In the original sense it has three stages: observing and recording, interpreting the records with colleagues, and making learning visible to children, families and teachers so it can shape what happens next. The display panels that visitors photograph are the last stage, not the whole thing.
A practical routine many teams use is short and repeatable. During the session, one adult takes brief notes and photographs of a small group rather than trying to capture the whole class. After the session, two teachers spend fifteen or twenty minutes looking at the material and asking three questions: what were the children trying to do, what did they already understand, and what could we offer tomorrow that would push the thinking a little further? A few of those records are shared with families each week, with the children’s own words at the centre.
Two traps are worth naming. The first is volume: a school that asks teachers to post dozens of photos daily turns documentation into marketing and leaves no time to interpret anything. The second is judgement: documentation describes thinking, it does not grade it. Children are never compared or ranked through their documentation. This principle sits comfortably with observation-based assessment in early years everywhere, and it is the line the Global Nexus framework follows as well.
Reggio-inspired practice: what tends to be borrowed and what tends to be lost
Schools around the world adapt the approach in different ways. The table below summarises patterns that pedagogical leads often describe when they review a Reggio-inspired programme.
| Element | When it is borrowed well | When only the surface is borrowed |
|---|---|---|
| Environment | Materials are chosen for investigation and change as projects develop | Neutral colours and baskets, but materials stay the same all year |
| Projects | Follow children’s questions over weeks, with teacher planning between sessions | Teacher-chosen themes renamed as projects, finished in a few days |
| Documentation | Interpreted by teachers together and used to plan | Photo streams for parents with little analysis |
| Atelier | Part of the investigation, open when ideas need testing | A timetabled art lesson |
| Teacher role | Listener, co-researcher, provocateur | Activity organiser who follows a fixed plan |
| Families | Invited into the thinking, asked for ideas and materials | Receive finished products and newsletters |
None of these lists are a checklist for accreditation; no such accreditation exists outside Reggio Emilia. They are a mirror. A team that recognises itself in the right-hand column is not failing, it is at the beginning, and the most useful next step is usually to protect time for teachers to talk about their observations together.
Limits and honest questions
The approach has critics and its admirers would be the first to say it cannot simply be exported. It grew within a particular city with strong public funding, a culture of civic participation and a long investment in teacher development. Large classes, tight timetables and high turnover of staff all make it harder. Research on Reggio-inspired programmes outside Italy is mostly qualitative, with fewer large comparative studies than exist for some other approaches, so claims that it produces measurable gains should be treated with care.
There are also questions about literacy and numeracy. Reggio schools in Italy work within a system where formal reading instruction begins later than in some countries. A Reggio-inspired school in a place where families expect children to enter primary school ready to read and count must think clearly about how those skills develop through projects, rather than either ignoring the expectation or bolting worksheets onto the side.
For bilingual schools there is a further question: in which language does the listening happen? A teacher who records children’s theories only in English may miss the richest thinking, which often comes out first in the home language. Recording in both languages, and valuing both, is one of the quiet adaptations that makes the approach work in a Vietnamese setting.
How a blended curriculum uses Reggio ideas
Few schools outside Italy are purely Reggio. More often the approach provides the stance, the way of seeing children and the habit of documentation, while other elements come from elsewhere. In the Global Nexus framework used at Global Star School in Ho Chi Minh City, for example, Reggio ideas inform the role of the environment, the use of open-ended materials and the practice of observing and documenting learning, alongside Montessori-style practical life, STEAM investigations and project-based units, all within the Vietnamese national preschool programme.
Blending only works if the pieces do not contradict each other. A school cannot claim to follow children’s questions while running a fixed weekly schedule of teacher-led crafts. The practical test is simple: look at last month’s documentation and ask whether anything the children said changed what the teachers did next. If the answer is yes, the Reggio part of the curriculum is alive.
A second test concerns the children themselves. In a classroom where the stance has taken root, children start to expect that their ideas will be taken seriously. They bring objects from home to continue an investigation, they remind teachers of a question from last week, and they explain their drawings in detail because someone is going to write the explanation down. Those small signs are better evidence than any display wall.
Câu hỏi thường gặp
Can a school be officially certified as a Reggio Emilia school?
No. There is no accreditation or licence that allows a school outside Reggio Emilia to call itself a Reggio school. Schools elsewhere describe themselves as Reggio-inspired, and organisations such as Reggio Children offer study groups and professional development rather than certification.
Do teachers need an art background to work in a Reggio-inspired classroom?
Not necessarily. What matters more is curiosity about materials and the willingness to explore them before offering them to children. Many schools have a teacher who grows into the studio role over time, supported by colleagues and by regular time to experiment with clay, paint, light and wire.
How do Reggio-inspired schools handle reading and writing?
Literacy grows inside projects: children dictate their theories, label their own drawings when they are ready, make books about their investigations and see adults writing down their words. Schools in systems that expect early reading usually add deliberate attention to sounds and letters, woven into meaningful work rather than drills.
Is the Reggio approach suitable for children under three?
Yes. The original municipal system includes infant-toddler centres for babies and toddlers, with a strong focus on relationships, sensory exploration and careful observation. Investigations with toddlers are shorter and more physical, and documentation often focuses on small moments rather than long projects.
What is the difference between a Reggio project and a theme?
A theme is usually chosen by teachers in advance and covered over a set period. A Reggio project grows from children’s questions or a shared experience, can last days or months, and changes direction as teachers interpret what children are thinking. Teachers still plan, but they plan the next step rather than the whole route.
How can a busy team start documenting without extra paperwork?
Start small: one adult observes one group for part of a session, takes brief notes and a few photos, and two teachers spend fifteen minutes discussing them afterwards. Sharing a handful of well-chosen records with families each week is more useful than posting many photos with no interpretation.