"... A few simple ideas can act as entry points for teachers beginning pedagogical documentation: 1- Choose one tool for documenting, such as a digital camera, a video or audio recorder, or a pen and pad of paper. Get used to having the tool available when you want it. 2 - Watch for and document ordinary moments of learning, the sorts of events and child thinking you would expect to see occur day by day, year after year, yet in ways specific to particular, unique children. For instance, Lana O’Reilly, a kindergarten teacher, observed a boy examining a book on dinosaurs, turning one page back and forth many times. She watched closely and saw that he was looking at an image of the skeleton of a dinosaur on one page and a full image of a dinosaur on the other. She hypothesized that he was wondering if the pictures showed the same animal. Teachers who are learning to document often wonder how they will know what they might want to “follow” in the classroom before it has happened. Experienced teachers say they learn to sense when and where such potential moments of learning may occur; for example, Virginia Ogada, who works with toddlers, says she can tell from the children’s intense focus of concentration that a moment for documentation may be taking place. 3 - Choose from several such documentation moments one occasion that you will try to make intelligible to others via more polished documentation, selecting the strongest documentation to make your point. Try naming the learning yourself by giving it a title after documenting. Try doing documentation with a colleague. Lay out what you think is happening as simply as possible and remove extraneous material. Share the documentation with several colleagues and invite them into a dialogue engagement (Wong, 2006) during which they tell you what they perceive and how they interpret the documentation. See how the discussion opens up surprises and new possibilities. ecrp.uiuc.edu/v13n2/wien.html
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 05:00:02 +0000
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