• Create engaging and inspiring learning environments
• Focus on creating relationships, making connections and establishing dialogue
• Make time for play, reflection, listening, engagement, learning
• Slow down! Children need time to consolidate their learning; reorganise and make sense of their world
• Listen, document and work alongside the children as co-researchers
• Focus on the learning rather than the teaching, to understand better the process rather than the product
• Respect and embrace the many points of view, ideas, theories and suggestions of individual children as well as the ‘the group’
• Encourage and support the children to work together during play and inquiry. Entrust the children to solve problems
• Empower the children to move through the day with confidence and self direction
• Provide the foundations for active citizenship
• Offer creative experiences that are collaborative
• Create time and space for the children to experiment with open-ended, creative, flexible materials
• Inspire a sense of joy, wonder and curiosity

An important aim … is to help students ‘learn how to learn’… the construction of knowledge is a subjective process that proceeds in a spiraling rather than linear or stagelike way.

Children sometimes work with teachers, and sometimes without them, projects are sometimes short, and sometimes long. The curriculum is … based on more flexible strategies than rigid plans.

I like to use the metaphor of taking a journey, where one finds the way using a compass rather than taking a train with it’s fixed routes and schedules.

C. Rinaldi, The Hundred Languages 2nd ed, 1998, p 119