To Develop Components of Pedagogical Documentation.
Making Learning Visible
Documentation is a natural way to make learning visible. Helm, Beneke, and Steinheimer (1998) call this idea “windows on learning,” meaning that documenting offers an insight into children’s development and learning. Moreover, when teachers document children’s learning in a variety of ways, they can be more confident about the value of their teaching.
A progressive, Research-Based Approach for Making Learning Visible
Based on the Reggio Emilia approach to learning, the book Visible Learners, highlights learning through interpreting objects and artifacts, group learning, and documentation to make students' learning evident to teachers. Visible classrooms are committed to five key principles: that learning is purposeful, social, emotional, empowering, and representational. The book includes visual essays, key practices, classroom and examples. This book outlines:
-
How to make learning happen in relation to others, spark emotional connections, give students power over their learning, and express ideas in multiple ways
-
Illustrate Reggio-inspired principles and approaches via quotes, photos, student and teacher reflections, and examples of student work
-
Offer a new way to enhance learning using progressive, research-based practices for increasing collaboration and critical thinking in and outside the classroom
Visible Learners asks that teachers look beyond surface-level to understand who students are, what they come to know, and how they come to know it.
Almost all of the tools emphasize greater intentionality combined with careful looking and listening. Making learning visible is not a recipe; it will take time to discover and adapt the tools and resources for your own setting. The site based on the book includes five kinds of tools and resources:
Supporting Learning in Groups in the Classroom:
Includes practical tools with suggestions for creating learning groups at the beginning of the school year, forming study groups in classrooms, and promoting a culture of dialogue. It provides tools for forming adult study groups, hands-on activities for adults to explore learning groups and documentation for themselves, and conversation structures for discussing and reflecting on student learning.
Supporting Learning in Groups in the Staffroom:
Provides tools for forming adult study groups, hands-on activities for adults to explore learning groups and documentation for themselves, and conversation structures for discussing and reflecting on student learning.
Documenting Individual and Group Learning:
Includes resources for understanding, creating, and sharing documentation with students and colleagues. Some tools will help you think through the purpose of your documentation; others provide guidelines for gathering or sharing documentation via video, computer, photographs, or powerpoint.
Engaging Families in Supporting Student Learning:
Offers resources to inform families about visible learning, involve families in supporting their children’s learning, and communicate with families about learning. Tools range from a refrigerator reminder to guidelines for parents interested in forming their own study group.
Making Learning Visible beyond the Classroom:
Provides tools and templates for creating bulletin boards, documentation panels, visual essays, and school-wide exhibitions that make learning and learners visible, with examples from preschool-high school.
The Progress of Higher Learning at Wheelock College
Making Learning Visible Through Pedagogical Documentation
We have always documented as a society. But pedagogical documentation offers more than a record. It offers a process for listening to children, for creating artifacts from that listening, and for studying with others what children reveal about their competent and thoughtful views of the world. To listen to children, we document living moments with images, video, artifacts, written or audio recordings of what children have said, or other digital traces. These documents embrace live experience, when shared with others, which becomes a tool for thinking together. To hear others’ thoughts makes us realize there are many viewpoints. Pedagogical documentation goes beyond the foundation of the developmental continuum to welcome both children’s perspectives and our study of their views.
How Pedagogical Documentation Supports Early Childhood Settings
Pedagogical documentation invites us to be curious and to wonder with others about the meaning of events to children. We become co-learners together, focusing on children’s expanding understanding of the world as we interpret that understanding with others. We document not only to record activities, but to hold events so that we might study and interpret their meaning together. We have the potential to discover thoughtful, caring, innovative responses that expand our horizons. Pedagogical documentation inserts a new phase of thinking and wondering together between the act of observation and the act of planning a response. Rather than looking for what is known through assessment, pedagogical documentation invites the creativity, surprise and delight of educators who discover the worlds of children. To see children as researchers working with others to make sense of the world, and educators as researchers bringing their curiosity to generate theories about children’s social, intellectual, physical, and emotional strategies of communication is to view both children and educators as participating citizens, engaging their cultural surroundings.
Learning to Create Pedagogical Documentation
The first step is to make documenting a daily habit, in an ongoing process of inquiry. Learning to have the tools we need close at hand can take months of practice. Learning to choose what to document, because we see potential meaning arising for children, requires practice, judgment and reflection.
The second step in creating documentation is the willingness to share what we have noted and our curiosities with others. Educators are willing to show others their documentation and to be interested in others’ responses to it. As we widen our frame of reference for reflecting on experiences, and share our practice with children, families, and colleagues, we strengthen partnerships, and open ourselves to new understandings. Alongside these developing interests, educators develop visual literacy skills, gaining understanding of how the eye reads information. Removing clutter, selecting just the images that show what we are noticing, and offering documentation in amounts that can be absorbed by children, or parents/caregivers, visitors, and colleagues takes signifiant practice. Educators grasp that documentation for children is highly focused with child-friendly text. For parents and visitors, documentation may be at adult height, with expanded text and commentary.
A leap in understanding occurs when educators grasp that documentation is more than a record or retelling of an experience that shows what children said and did. Documentation offers insight into children’s thinking, feeling, and worldview. When we make their ideas and working theories about the world visible to others, we may then study those views with others to broaden our perspectives and our responsiveness. This process of group study of educators’ attempts to make children’s thinking and feeling visible is what makes documentation pedagogical. Documentation becomes pedagogical because the group study of documentation teaches educators about ways that children learn, and ways that adults read children’s learning. Our intent is to deepen empathy, to construct ethical relationships.
Essential Elements of Documentation
Documentation as a Design Process
Carla Rinaldi, president of Reggio Children, an organization for international outreach, describes documentation as “traces” of learning and as “visible listening”. We interpret these ideas of the adults to what children do and to ways that they as teachers might use visual methods to communicate with others about the thoughts, feelings, values, and culture of the children with whom they work. If documentation is a design process, its purpose is first to make learning visible, which allows for collaborative discussion and interpretation with others to generate new aspects for further learning and experience. The design of what to do next in one’s practice arises from the discussion and interpretation of the documentation. In this way, pedagogical documentation contributes to an emergent curriculum.
To design documentation is to create a representation that theorizes or imagines how learning might be. Reggio classroom pedagogy is closely linked with graphic design processes, from the children’s observational drawings of real things in the city, such as fountains, piazzas, loggias, and pillars, to sketches and models that they make based on their ideas for similar structures. The children work out their ideas through their engagement with a variety of materials, such as, clay, wire, light, shadow, that enable expression in different languages of learning. Graphic design principles and processes are important to pedagogical documentation, along with an understanding of visual literacy, which refers to how the human eye reads images and how people interpret those images. Also helpful is awareness of the ways that combining text and image, or text and audio, or video and still image can convey information effectively. A grasp of how digital technologies can be used in visual design may also be applied to documentation.
The documentation creates a representation of children’s learning, and the development of their imagined theories and their movement between fantasy and what they understand to be reality. A parallel process goes on for the teachers who create the documentation in an way to understand and represent the children’s theories and the ways these theories may shift back and forth between playful fantasy and reality. In making this movement visible, adults may also see into their own theories.
Click on image to view the blog Technology Rich Inquiry Based Reaserch to viewThe Three Elements of the Documentation Process– Moving beyond Display to Interpretation, or click on the link below.
Documentation as Communication
Documentation serves many functions and is an important tool in Reggio Emilia-inspired programmes. Teachers routinely take notes and photographs and make tape recordings of group discussions and children's play. Documentation of the children's projects is carefully arranged, using transcriptions of children's conversations and remarks, photographs of ongoing work and activities, and the products that have been produced by the children to represent their thinking and learning. Teachers' commentaries on the purposes of a project, along with transcriptions of children's verbal language, photographs, and representations of their thinking are provided in panels or books designed to present the children's learning processes. The documentation shows children that their work is valued, makes parents aware of class learning experiences, and allows teachers to assess both their teaching and the children's learning. In addition, dialogue is fostered with other educators. Eventually, an historical archive is created that traces pleasure in the process of children's and teachers' learning experiences.
“Through documentation we can preserve the most interesting and advanced moments of teachers' professional growth. It is a process in which teachers generate hypotheses and interpretations of theories that can modify the initial, more general theories. Documentation makes it possible to create knowledge not only for teachers but also for researchers and scholars.”
Five Features of Documentation
-
Documentation involves a specific question that guides the process, often with an epistemological focus (focus on questions of learning).
-
Documentation involves collectively analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating individual and group observations, and is strengthened by multiple perspectives.
-
Documentation makes use of multiple languages, which refers to different ways of representing and expressing thinking in various media and symbol systems.
-
Documentation makes learning visible; it is not private. Documentation becomes public when it is shared with learners, whether it be children, parents, or teachers.
-
Documentation is not only retrospective, it is also prospective. It shapes the design of future contexts for learning.
http://earlychildhood.educ.ubc.ca/community/research-practice-reggio-emilia
Documentation: Transforming Our Perspective
This short documentary, created as an introduction to the Documentation Studio at Wheelock College, is a conversation with several leaders of Reggio Children and the municipal infant-toddler and preschools in Reggio Emilia, Italy about the practice of documentation and its role in teaching and learning.
Click on the title to open a new document with instructions of assessment.
