Children as Individual and Group Learners is a collaboration between the municipality of Reggio Emilia, Italy and Harvard Project Zero.
Schools are by their nature social institutions.
In most American schools, the focus of virtually all assessment and most aspects of instruction is on promoting individual work and learning. Yet the desire to learn from and with others is so powerful that even in institutions that do their best to isolate children, students still learn from and with each other. The focus of the research is neither group learning nor documentation alone, but what happens at the intersection of the two. The research teams created a conceptual framework for research and practice around group learning and identified seven propositions about how learning groups form, function, and demonstrate understanding in early childhood. They also examined the role of teacher as learner in the learning group and documenter of the learning process, and how documentation can qualitatively influence the processes of teaching and learning.