The programme was implemented in the preschools of Istituto Comprensivo Gabelli, located in the Barriera di Milano district, an area marked by educational poverty, linguistic diversity, and spatial segregation. Twenty-three teachers and pedagogical staff voluntarily joined a collaborative process designed to help them reinterpret their everyday practices rather than replace them. The study, conducted by Andrea Lupi of the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, adopted a qualitative interpretive case study design with an internal formative evaluation orientation, meaning the goal was not to measure causal effects but to document how professional reinterpretation unfolded in real time.

The intellectual architecture of MoMAg rests on a deliberate tension between three traditions. Montessori contributes structured materials, autonomy, repetition, and the control of error; the Agazzi sisters bring everyday objects, sensory contrasts, and the didactic museum; Malaguzzi adds documentation, collaboration, and the celebrated hundred languages of children. Crucially, the framework does not attempt to dissolve the differences between these approaches. Instead, it uses them as prompts for professional reflection, asking teachers to consider when materials should support perceptual distinctions, when they should guide autonomous manipulation, and when they should open space for narrative and symbolic meaning-making.

What makes this synthesis scientifically credible is its grounding in contemporary research on embodied cognition. Developmental studies consistently show that early cognitive growth is rooted in sensorimotor experience, and that gestures, actions, and object manipulation help children connect concrete experience with emerging symbolic reasoning. Meta-analytic evidence indicates that physical manipulables enhance conceptual understanding when embedded in guided pedagogical contexts, and recent work has even interpreted Montessori materials through the lens of extended cognition, treating child and material as a unified cognitive system. MoMAg takes these findings seriously: learning is conceived as multimodal and embodied, and the educational environment is treated as an active pedagogical mediator rather than a neutral backdrop.

The framework also takes a firm stance on one of the most contested questions in early education: the balance between free play and adult guidance. Drawing on research showing that minimally guided instruction tends to produce weaker outcomes than purposefully scaffolded approaches, MoMAg positions the teacher as an intentional mediator of children’s exploration rather than a mere facilitator of spontaneous activity. Recent meta-analytic work on guided play supports this position, showing that scaffolding and assisted inquiry can promote deeper learning while preserving children’s agency. For the teachers in Turin, however, this message was not always easy to absorb, and the tension between guidance and autonomy became one of the programme’s central points of negotiation.

The programme’s activities were deliberately varied. Laboratory training sessions combined presentations of the Italian pedagogical tradition with discussion of neuroscientific and developmental evidence and reflection on teachers’ implicit beliefs about children and learning. Workshops invited teachers to design learning spaces, develop language materials from everyday objects, build collections of recycled loose parts inspired by the Agazzian didactic museum, and construct Montessori-inspired sensorial materials. Job shadowing allowed teachers to observe one another’s classrooms, an approach supported by research identifying peer observation as a powerful form of experiential professional learning. Guided visits to centres such as Remida, which specialises in creative reuse of materials, broadened teachers’ perspectives on exploratory environments.

A flagship activity was the Laboratory of Agazzian Loose Parts, a contemporary adaptation of the seven-step lesson Rosa Agazzi described in her 1962 work on the didactic museum. The sequence moves from a structured introduction to contrasting sensory qualities, through the preparation of a museum of recycled objects contributed by children and families, to narrative activation with storytelling and Kamishibai theatre, guided exploration, a dialogical collective lesson in which children compare and categorise objects, and finally documentation through drawing, construction, or digital recording. The design resonates with Simon Nicholson’s theory of loose parts, which holds that the richness of play environments depends on the diversity and manipulability of available materials, and with recent reviews linking open-ended materials to problem-solving, creativity, and early academic skills—provided that teachers scaffold the experience with skilful questioning.

The findings reveal four main areas of transformation. Teachers reported heightened awareness of didactic mediators and sensorial processes, describing how materials shifted from occasional attractions to recurrent mediators of exploration and categorisation. Classroom documentation and photographs documented a reorganisation of learning environments, with furniture repurposed, materials made accessible, and a manipulative materials corner becoming the most sought-after area of the classroom. Perhaps most strikingly, teachers reinterpreted what the researcher calls latent practices—routines such as colour lessons and classification games that had always been present but never conceptualised. As one teacher put it, these activities were previously disconnected, but now form a didactic pathway from material to language.

A fourth outcome was the emergence of a shared professional lexicon. Terms such as mediation, sensorial materials, loose parts, guidance, and categorisation began circulating in everyday professional discourse, and teachers joked that they had become Montessorians and Agazzians. This shared vocabulary functioned as a practical coordination tool: when one teacher proposed improving the provision of fine-motor materials, colleagues immediately began making suggestions. The finding aligns with systemic perspectives on teacher learning, which hold that durable change emerges from the recursive interaction between individual reflection, collaborative dialogue, and organisational context.

The study is candid about its limits. Teachers struggled to reconcile guided instruction with play-based pedagogy, sometimes perceiving them as incompatible, and one remarked that other trainers usually tell them the opposite. The absence of protected institutional time for documentation and reflection emerged as a significant constraint, with teachers noting that colleagues in Reggio Emilia are lucky to have paid hours for team reflection. As a single qualitative case study with the author serving as both programme designer and analyst, the findings are not statistically generalisable, and no formal inter-rater coding was applied. Future research, the author argues, should formalise MoMAg into operational guidelines, involve independent researchers, and test its effects longitudinally on teacher–child interaction quality and children’s language, executive-function, and early mathematical development. Even so, the Turin experience offers a compelling proof of concept: sustainable professional development in early childhood education may depend less on imported programmes than on embedding learning in real contexts, fostering collective reflection, and treating local pedagogical heritage as a living resource for innovation.

Subject of Research: Situated professional development for early childhood teachers integrating Italian pedagogical traditions with cognitive science

Article Title: Situated Professional Development for ECEC: The MoMAg Experience

Article References: Lupi, A. (2026). Situated Professional Development for ECEC: The MoMAg Experience. International Journal of Early Childhood. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-026-00545-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13158-026-00545-6

Keywords: early childhood education, professional development, Montessori, Agazzi, Malaguzzi, teacher empowerment, loose parts, sensorial learning, embodied cognition, guided play, Turin, qualitative case study