Shift to the Future

When my kids were in school the proverbial answer to “What did you learn today?” was, wait for it…  “nothing”.  Do any of you get that response from your kids?  I suspect so as it seems to be some kind of natural law.  As parents, we were never quite sure what our kids were learning.  The periodic report card or the marked work didn’t tell the real story.  With today’s access to technology, there are ways to mitigate this and keep parents ‘in the loop’.  There are various tools that provide a range of connections for parents.  Some enable simple consumption of lesson outlines, homework lists, pictures, stories, spelling lists, and with portals or other secure spaces, the viewing of marks.  Other tools such as wikis, blogs, etc., depending on how they’re configured, enable parents to interact with their kids and their teachers.  “ Technology makes connecting, collaborating, and learning easier than ever before in human history ” (Kindle 4...

Sharing with others what we’ve learned is rewarding.  Others are able to benefit from what we’ve discovered and we feel good about helping others with their learning.  The saying “it is better to give than to receive” really is true isn’t it.  I think the “movement” to document student learning provides a powerful way to share and reflect on learning.  In my work in my District I have the privilege of visiting classrooms and documenting and sharing the learning teachers and their students are experiencing.  Visiting classrooms regularly is one of my personal goals .  One such recent visit was to a Kindergarten class to talk with the teacher and one of her students.  The teacher had documented a young learner who became a “Mathematician at Work” one morning.  Jennifer Lawson Come along with me and enjoy Keira’s learning journey… Our District created a focus group this past school year.  About 20 K-3 and literacy support tea...

I have the pleasure of regularly going out to visit with teachers and students in classrooms.  This past Thursday I visited two classrooms: a Kindergarten and a Grade 1 class.  In the Kindergarten class I was video recording a learning documentation process the teacher uses to support her students story writing.  The students came up one by one to share their pictures and in some cases, also written stories.  They were very motivated and proud to be able to do this.  The teacher used her iPod Touch to record each student explaining and/or reading their story.  The teacher then plays back the students reflections in the quiet of her home and provides written feedback in each students journal.  The kids loved that I was recording them telling their stories! While this was going on, one of her students had a bit of a melt down.  This particular student is designated as having certain special needs and a special education assistant (SEA) was present...

I’m impressed with how quickly the K-2 teachers involved in our District’s Making Learning Visible project are becoming both skilled documenters of early learners AND skilled users of digital tools for documenting.  Their purpose with this work is to collect and record learning events and experiences, to build a narrative from documentation to reflection.  Some of the purposes for digital documentation they are working with include: stimulating and supporting narrative illustrating a point providing evidence of learning opening up a conversation sharing an experience understanding a situation more deeply asking questions such as “What is going on here?”, “What have I missed?”, “What do I need to explore?”, “What’s the next step?” Digital documentation is “more than decoration”, “more than posed photographs”, and “useful in formative assessment”.  These teachers have had rich conversations about supplementing and / or replacing formal repo...

Our District has formed a Documentation Focus Group to “ Make Learning Visible ”.  I wrote last year about the early exploration of this approach to documenting learning in Capturing the Journey of Early Learners .  This year we have about 18 committed kindergarten teachers working with an external facilitator Pat Holborn, who specializes in Learning Through Play and Making Early Learning Visible in Early Primary .  They are embarking on an ambitious journey, going where most teachers have not gone before…  The stated purposes for this project include: build and share strategies and skills for documenting, assessing and sharing student learning over time. involve children and families in the documentation process. begin to develop a framework for documenting student learning, supported by examples in different subject areas that can be shared with others. explore ways to use technologies, including photographs, video and the Internet ( my43 ) to sha...

Our District has formed a small focus group of early learning teachers to experiment with documenting the learning of K-3 students (starting with a few Kindergarten classes) in an unconventional way.  Teachers will use video cameras, digital cameras, and audio recorders to capture students learning.  The intent is to make the learning transparent, to capture artifacts that can be used for various forms of reporting.  Parents could access their child’s “portfolio” of learning and see how they’re progressing relative to the curriculum.  Teachers will see how they could use this type of documentation to replace the traditional “report card” for formal reporting as well. At this age group, play based learning is often the norm.  Video will be used to capture kids in action creating things, acting in a play, working in groups, drawing, and just playing together.  Student work will be photographed at stages and the pictures assembled to show a progression over t...