From Children's Interests to Children's Thinking: Using a Cycle of Inquiry to Plan Curriculum

Learn how to connect your curriculum planning to children’s interests and thinking. 

With this book, educators will discover a systematic way for using documentation to design curriculum that emerges from children’s inquiries, what they wonder, and what they want to understand. Get strategies for designing a classroom environment at the start of the year to facilitate emergent inquiry curriculum. Each chapter guides teachers to document and reflect on their thinking through each of the five phases of a cycle of inquiry process, including observing, interpreting the meaning of the play they see, and developing questions to engage children.

Jane Tingle Broderick is professor of early childhood education at East Tennessee State University where she co-coordinates the early childhood PhD program and the early childhood education emergent inquiry certificate program. She has taught in early childhood for over twenty years. Her research focuses on emergent curriculum and Reggio-inspired practices. She has published articles and chapters on teacher development with emergent curricular practices, as well as documentation and the arts.

Jane is also a visual artist with a BFA from Pratt Institute. She exhibited widely in Massachusetts where she also won two state art fellowships. In her doctoral program at the University of Massachusetts she served as an atelierista and documentarian at the Reggio-inspired Early Childhood Laboratory School. She and her colleague Seong Bock Hong have been developing and working with the Cycle of Inquiry System (COI), a tool for teaching inservice and preservice teachers to plan and implement emergent curriculum, for several years in their teaching and research projects. They have previously presented their processes with teaching and researching using the COI at NAEYC conferences. Materials explorations are central to their COI research and practice.

Jane lives in Johnson City, Tennessee, with her husband who is a woodworker. They have two children who are both committed to working with the earth through sustainable landscaping and farming.

Seong Bock Hong is professor of early childhood education at the University of Michigan-Dearborn where she teaches graduate and undergraduate early childhood courses. She was the faculty director of the Early Childhood Education Center, which is a university lab school from 2012 to 2017, and has been the primary faculty curriculum and pedagogical leader in the early childhood teacher preparation program for 20 years. During her doctoral program at the university of Massachusetts, Amherst, she served as an interim director and documentarian at the Reggio-inspired and constructivist Early Childhood Laboratory School. Her research interests have focused on the exploration and development of Reggio Emilia–inspired educational systems and tools such as the Cycle of Inquiry System (COI) that guide pedagogical documentation practices in emergent curriculum planning approaches to early childhood education. She has published articles and chapters on teacher development, Reggio Emilia–inspired inclusion practice, as well as documentation pedagogy and the role of technology as a knowledge construction tool.

Her recent notable collaboration work was hosting “The Wonder of Learning—Hundred Languages of Children” exhibition in Ann Arbor, Michigan, from June through August 2017. She has received a number of awards for her record of distinguished professional achievement, including the inaugural Rosalyn Saltz collegial professorship award in 2012 and the University of Michigan Diversity Leadership award in 2010. She begins her tenure in October 2019 as the president of the Association for Constructivist Teaching organization.

Seong Bock lives in Novi, Michigan, with her husband, a retired chemistry professor. They have two children who are working professionals in medicine and engineering.

medicine and engineering.