Perhaps the word documentation carries with it a collective teacher groan, a stigma of hours logged in at home and teachers wondering how valuable it was for the intended audience. We are left reflecting, did the documentation achieve its purpose – did it illuminate our theories about our students’ understanding? There is nothing worse for a teacher than an enormously time consuming task which actually revealed very little about students. Our PLC set about to further dissect and eventually personalize the various ways in which we were collecting evidence of student learning.
This path of self reflection and change led us to a wider understanding of the term documentation; maybe for the time being the terms “Visible Learning” or “Illuminating Understanding” would better illustrate our growing purpose as a PLC. Through each piece of evidence we collect we are uncovering deeper layers of understanding about our learners in order to better develop our growing image of the child. Concurrently, our journey allowed us to find greater meaning in the driving force of good documentation. We have walked away with a clearer understanding of why we should put our effort into personalizing documentation as a team. We have found inspiration as our documentation proved to better reflect our learners and help transform the thinking of all parties involved as we learn alongside one another. It has allowed us to better observe, listen and question so that we can better connect with our learners.
We invite you to learn alongside us in our learning journey as a PLC. As our tools have become more personalized, our students have become much more self directed to take part in their own documentation and share their thinking with others. This transformation has been key to supporting our children in deeper inquiry cycles, personalized learning and meaningful work as a global citizen.
We asked, how do you make the process of collecting evidence of learning more efficient, effective and relevant? You start small and chew vigorously! We hope to illuminate your thinking about the purpose in personalizing documentation so that it can become a more natural part of your classroom daily routines.
Earl and Hannay (2011) suggest that through rigorous use of evidence of student learning for teaching, educators are becoming ‘knowledge leaders’ pushing our understanding of teaching and learning to the frontiers of innovation.
At Istanbul International Community School we promote Play Based Learning from EY 3 to Grade 1. Our students engage in a range of learning opportunities that are created to meet their needs, interests and motivation to learn about themselves and their world. In order for our educators to build up an image of the child as students engaged in both student and teacher negotiated learning experiences we also inquired into ways to make documentation more efficient, authentic and part of our daily routine.
Meeting with our administration team allowed us to make some significant changes to our timetables to make Play Based Learning part of our daily routine from EY3 – Grade 1. We also began reviewing paper forms of play observations and updating these to Google Forms to make documentation more efficient and organised as the starting point to upgrade and enhance current systems we use to document and share student learning.
We already had our class websites and had begun exploring a range of different blogging apps to allow children to acknowledge and document their own play experiences.
We were hearing all these messages about the importance of capturing student thinking and theory building as an additional component towards strengthening the image of the child. Was this something we as educators, had considered as part of our approach to documentation?
Rinaldi (2001) described documentation somewhat paradoxically as ‘visible listening’ – using notes, slides, videos and so on to reconstruct children’s learning paths and processes.
We found that through the PLC we were slowly beginning to get a feel for how the documentation worked best for us as a team and how we could be more efficient. We were personalizing documentation for ourselves and wanted an approach that put learning at the centre and provide an authentic record for dialogue, reflection and analysis. It also meant a review of what we currently had on the table, culling back and bringing forward additional forms and texts of documentation.
We reviewed our Google Forms for play observations and we realized that we wanted something that was more effective in making our curriculum standards more apparent and visible. We were certainly able to generate an image of the child, however how was this being tracked against our written curriculum?
It was about discovering a new way of observing – a shift in the role of the teacher from an emphasis on teaching to an emphasis on ‘the’ learning, teacher learning about themselves as teachers as well as teacher learning about children (Loris Malaguzzi)
Our team generated our goals:
What is Good Documentation?
Documentation should on the one hand, provide educators with the ‘evidence’ to provide timely, specific and descriptive feedback to move learning forward. On the other hand, it allows educators to go one step further, to help students self-assess, to “become directly involved in the learning process, acting as the ‘critical connector’ between assessment and improvement” (Earl, 2007)
As a team we have concluded that documentation should not only be connected to our initial goals but it should also move both student and teacher understanding of the learning process. We also noticed through our own journey, that documentation was allowing us to:
Inviting Feedback and allowing for Multiple Perspectives
Good documentation aims to incorporate the perspectives of all stakeholders in our community. Each comment, learning journey and blog post that is shared brings us closer to our goal of making learning more visible and inclusive in the Early Years.
Turner and Krechevsky, in their Reggio Emilia-inspired article Who are the Teachers? Who are the Learners?, speak of documentation as an integral component in creating awareness that we learn from and with one another. That is what these tools have done for us; they have broadened the scope of our classroom to include the wider community through which we learn together.
Feedback, comments and shared wonderings are welcomed from all parties and are acknowledged, responded to and discussed in group sharing sessions.
Documentation acts as a starting point for further enriched discussion. What is observed by the teacher and teaching assistant can be elaborated on, challenged and clarified by the student or group involved. The learning journeys and blog posts generated during the documentation process scaffold conversations that raise awareness of both group and individual learning. Reflection and next steps in learning naturally emerge when the time is taken to incorporate the voice and perspectives of all parties. When documentation is shared in this way it is transferred from the private to the public domain. The effect of this is far-reaching and has the potential for students to reach more complex understandings than that which is possible in isolation.
Making the Written Curriculum Visible
What do we do with all the evidence that is collected? Who and what are we gathering all of this evidence for?
Create a similar diagram to include here?
This question required much discussion in the beginning and by answering it together it helped to clarify our purpose and approach to documentation. As a group of educators we were motivated by the idea that these tools could assist in making our curriculum an integral and visible part of our daily practice. Evidence for Learning allowed us to input our curriculum frameworks and subsequently produce progress and coverage grids that give a clear overview of the curriculum areas that have been documented.
Documentation and Inquiry
Inquiry based learning and personalized learning allows us to put the learners interests at the heart of their learning, creating self directed students. As children become more self directed, documentation takes on a key role in tracking the diversification of roles students adopt during their inquiries. Our PLC asked, what if we could track better this complex process as learners shift roles during the inquiry cycle (i.e. team leader, hypothesizer, presenter, teacher, recorder, investigator)? With such documentation teachers would be able to scaffold the inquiry more strategically at integral moments to help students succeed in their roles, use technology to reflect on their roles and in turn, develop greater self directed learners during inquiry. Cheryl Walker and Bruce M. Shore note in their article titled Understanding Classroom Roles in Inquiry Education, ‘A better understanding of role diversification in the classroom can provide teachers with additional information about individual student progress.’
We began exploring the tools that we were using to see if there was a way to track the roles students were taking on during their personal inquiries. We found a fit in our tool Evidence for Learning. We added tags to the learners (i.e. #recorder, #investigator, #hypothesizer, #question poser, #presenter) so that we could track which member in the group took on which role. Through the tags and observations we could track how these roles had shifted over time. We could use the data to better reflect with students about the success of their role, or stop a group to question what they might need to feel more successful within the role. The tracking tool provided insight into the very active role/s students take in their inquiries, as well as tracking their deeper and significant growth as an inquiry learner.
Parent Involvement
Learning occurs best when we create a relationship-driven learning environment, when students, teachers and parents are able to learn alongside each other to understand the importance of what we are doing. Through our class websites, student blogs and ePortfolios teachers and parents feel that the link between home and school has been strengthened. These connections have not only allowed us to understand our learners better, it has allowed us to enrich our learning environments with learning experiences that are of greater meaning and relevance to our learners.
Table from How does Learning Happen? Ontario’s Pedagogy for the Early Years
Documentation highlights the process of learning for the parents and the student engagements during the task. It sets the scene for the child’s interests and motivations and allows room for further complex questions that can provide transformative thinking. Our websites, ePortfolios, Student Blogs and observations allow parents the opportunity to dig deeper and further on their child’s interests and engagements in order to learn alongside their child at home and at school. As suggested by Carlina Rinaldi, documentation is a way of listening to children, helping us to learn about children during the course of their experiences and to make this learning visible to others for interpretation. Rinaldi, 2004
‘I know it’s a lot of work to keep up the ePortfolios, but I really appreciate how accountable and invested it makes everyone- parent, teacher and child. When I have doubts or questions about my children’s personal or academic development, I go to the eportfolio first, and it gives me more depth and perspective. Thank you.’ -Anna Dillon, Parent in Early Years 5
Here is a website post from an Early Years 5 student’s Mother where she commented on how her child’s measurement learning in school linked to other areas of interest at home. This comment also helped teachers during Play Based Learning planning sessions to add further ideas to play spaces planned in their garden. With all parties involved, it greatly strengthened the students understanding about measurement as well as sustaining his interest in the topic.
Summary – Our shared understanding
We believe our key to success was the gradual release and introduction of the documentation tools required to make documentation an authentic part of the teaching and learning process. A regular opportunity to meet and reflect on the impact documentation and the teaching and learning allowed for further refinement, growth and improvement.
As educators we did become more adept in the use of documentation. It has become embedded and acknowledged as an attitude towards knowing and understanding teaching and learning. Knowing our students and how they think further contributed to an understanding of how they and others learn.
This transformational change moves the focus away from the product and ‘becomes an approach of knowing, making it possible for the adult to be and know together with the child’ so that the students interests, thinking and understanding drive instruction (Turner and Wilson, 2010)
We look forward to writing further about our progress in the very near future developing further how documentation serves as a ‘memory’ of what went on in the learning environment.
For further information please view the Early Years Videos:
http://www.svetlananekrasova.com/ – /categoriesofplay/ http://www.svetlananekrasova.com/ – /water/
