A Guide to Documenting Learning

by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano

  Do not feel that everything related to student learning must be accomplished via documenting learning. If you begin by applying the documenting techniques, tools, and tips conveyed once a semester or quarter, you will have begun an amazing and worthwhile journey!

  At first, documenting FOR and AS learning can feel timeconsuming. Hale and Fisher (2013) mention that modernizing, or upgrading, student learning should happen, “one unit at a time.” In other words, after reading this book, do not feel that everything related to student learning must be accomplished via documenting. If you begin by applying the documenting techniques, tools, and tips conveyed in this book once a semester or quarter, you will have begun an amazing and worthwhile journey! Yes, it will be time consuming early on—not just for you, but for your students as well. It is a new way of thinking about one’s thinking. Two benefits to using FOR and AS learning opportunities is witnessing students’ authentic engagement and sense of empowerment.

  Collaboration plays an important role in documenting FOR and AS learning, which Hale and Fisher (2013) also convey is an important aspect when modernizing learning:

  We based Upgrade Your Curriculum on the premise that moving from me to we is an ongoing and essential process. Slow-and-steady upgrades or transformations, in which teachers (and students) work collaboratively to make strategic and specific modifications to current curricular elements, lead to modern, meaningful, and engaging experiences. We have found that once a collaborative culture is in place, participating in curriculum transformation continues to have positive effects on both teachers and students. (p. 3)

  Documenting strategically and purposefully supports all aspects of one’s learning process. The specific purposes for documenting learning are fourfold: to make one’s cognitive—and most importantly, metacognitive—thinking visible, meaningful, shareable, and amplified.

  Making Learning and Thinking Visible

  Clark (2017) states that, “Visible thinking doesn’t always mean visual.” While there are many images and videos on blogs and other social media platforms, it is important to not fall into a visual trap and focus solely on conveying ideas or thoughts through infographic or photographic images. The heart of documenting is capturing the learning and thinking while it is happening, not simply the act of capturing what is happening or happened. Capturing one’s or a group’s thinking can happen via textual responses, narratives, or illustrated note taking, as well as audio reflections, interviews, or presenting video-recorded oral arguments to name a few.

  The reality is that many young and adult learners are not aware of their own thinking when learning and do not proactively use thinking strategies and techniques to capture how learning is occurring. That is why it is imperative for learners to have ample opportunities in exploring how to make their thinking and learning visible, which awakens both cognitive and metacognitive processing.

  To make thinking and learning visible involves breaking down the learning into self-awareness process steps. Project Zero (2017) states that, “When thinking is visible in classrooms, students are in a position to be more metacognitive, to think about their thinking. When thinking is visible, it becomes clear that learning is not about memorizing content but exploring ideas.”

  Martinez and Stager (2013) add that,

  Teachers should be concerned with making thinking visible, or making private thinking public. Making is a way of documenting the thinking of a learner in a shareable artifact. Stages of a project ‘under construction’ offer important evidence of productive thinking or scaffolding opportunities. (p.157)

  Educators define and recognize learning acquisition differently. Some teachers will say that a student who gets all ten spelling words correctly on a test has learned how to spell the words, while other teachers will say it is simply an act of rote memory and will most likely be unable to spell the words correctly in a week without assistance. Some teachers may claim that reading a chapter in a book represents learning specific subject material, while others will say that is an assumption.

  To bridge the gap of what a group of educators recognize as learning, the learning-thinking needs to be made visible. It is important for teachers to explore what constitutes learning-thinking in general, as well as for a particular focus or goal. They need to come to an agreement on the answers to such questions as:

  How do we recognize and acknowledge that our students have truly learned something?

  How can we recognize and acknowledge that we as adult-learners have truly learned something? Is it the same for students and adults?

  How can we recognize a pattern or trend of learning-thinking in our students over time?

  How can we teach/model the awareness and processes involved in learning-thinking?

  Ritchhart et al. (2011) researched what it meant to capture learning-thinking discernibly. Ritchhart and some of his colleagues identified eight thinking moves that are, “Integral to developing understanding, and without which it would be difficult to say we had developed understanding of the learning”:

  Observing closely and describing what’s there

  Building explanations and interpretations

  Reasoning with evidence

  Making connections

  Considering different viewpoints and perspectives

  Capturing the heart and forming conclusions

  Wondering and asking questions

  Uncovering complexity and going below the surface of things (pp. 11, 13)

  Each of the eight thinking moves is supported in strategic documentation and moves documenting from a display to a documenting learning process. To expand on each of these thinking moves, consider:

  Observing closely and describing what’s there Observing is more than simply looking. It is homing in on what is taking place with a deliberate purpose. Being charged with articulating and describing what is being observed concerning oneself and/or others throughout a learning opportunity elevates cognition and metacognition processes when documenting.

  Building explanations and interpretations Embedding explaining and interpreting the meaning behind an action, behavior, belief, or phenomenon provides clearer evidence of one’s thinking and ownership of the learning. As learners document through creating explanations and interpretations of their artifacts, they experience how the act of documenting aids in the learning itself. One’s interpretation of a captured artifact can articulate background knowledge, viewpoints, and potentially, bias.

  Reasoning with evidence While it appears relatively easy to capture documentation artifacts and present them as evidence of learning, there is often no visible-thinking reasoning to support the evidence’s claims. It takes thoughtful actions, such as annotexting a series of images over time.

  For example: A kindergarten teacher, Mr. Flagg, shares insights into his classroom’s learning and discoveries through weekly class blog posts. Currently, his students are learning more about the interdependent relationships in ecosystems. Given his students live in Ventura, California, a study of the monarch butterfly is relevant and meaningful to them. He creates an initial post explaining the purpose and science-specific focuses for the unit of study. Mr. Flagg includes images (labeled drawings) of a few students’ original mental models of how the monarch butterflies interact with the ecosystem in Camino Real Park after they ate a picnic lunch there in mid-October.

  While gaining knowledge about the life cycle of monarch butterflies and the why behind their migration patterns to California locations, Mr. Flagg continues to include iterative evidence of his students’ models (ongoing photographs of their evolving labeled drawings) in his blog posts. His final post includes their representation and explanation of the relationship between the butterflies and their choice of wintering among the park’s Eucalyptus trees and nearby milkweed.

  Important note: While Mr. Flagg also includes photographs of his class caring for and observing monarch butterflies in the classroom (e.g., looking intensely at a caterpillar munching on a milkweed leaf in thei
r butterfly camp), these photographs do not provide actual evidence of learning. Only when comparing the initial, iterative, and final drawing models does the evidence of learning actually convey the learners’ sophistication of understanding and reasoning at a kindergarten level over time.

  Making connections Krechevsky, Mardell, Rivard, and Wilson (2013) express that, “Documentation is largely about building connections—temporal, relational, and conceptual” (p. 75). When capturing artifacts, learners have two choices:

  Amass hours of recordings, hundreds of photographs, and piles of text snippets that can fill up analog or digital folders. These may or may not ever be used thoughtfully to aid in making connections.

  Strategically capture and organize artifacts to purposefully create connections between and among the artifacts that aid in deepening understanding. The act of learning is alive and visible to oneself and to others.

  Considering different viewpoints and perspectives Taking advantage of artifacts captured by others allows learners to view their learning from multiple viewpoints. Documenting from varying perspectives allows learners to view and review moments in time, as well as study vantage points that could be outside their comfort zone (think of movie stars who do not like to view their own work) or beyond their isolated perspective, which deepens the acquisition process and allows the learners to articulate their thinking beyond themselves.

  Capturing the heart and forming conclusions While documenting learning could involve capturing everything seen, heard, or read, it is counterproductive. A learner must contemplate how to best capture evidence of the learning process, failures and successes alike, which is the heart of one’s learning-thinking. A learner needs to be able to answer these questions when planning what needs to be captured: how will I use the documentation artifact to form conclusions about my current/future learning? How will the documentation artifacts inform what I need to learn (or teach) next?

  Wondering and asking questions Documenting is seen as a constant quest of wondering (looking) and finding potential answers. Through intentional documentation, learners and teachers conduct research through the inquiry process by posing questions, interpreting captured information, reporting on the findings, and asking more questions. Sheskey (2010) proposes learning is not about, “The answer anymore—it’s the question.” He continues, “At this point in the history of formal education, a change is occurring. Whereas before we gathered knowledge to become intelligent, now intelligence is measured by how well we apply knowledge to ask the right questions about how to solve the world’s problems” (pp. 208–209).

  Uncovering complexity and going below the surface of things While it is easy to set up a camera and record an event or a moment in time, it does not capture thinking. Taking a photograph captures the surface—what is visible and desirable to the eye of the recorder. It cannot convey complex underlying assumptions, perspectives, interpretations, or explanations. How someone may interpret what is being seen or heard may be influenced by such factors as cultural beliefs, prior experience, what just happened moments before and after the image was taken or video recorded, or what was happening just off screen. When students and teachers observe their learning, and need to make their thinking and meaning visible, it aids in uncovering the complexities in their learning processes.

  Making Learning and Thinking Meaningful

  Making learning and thinking meaningful is not an easy task. For the documenting process to be meaningful, learners need to ask themselves questions such as:

  How do I know this documenting process has a worthwhile purpose?

  How will this process be useful to myself, as well as to others?

  How will this process support my ability for creating learning-thinking evidence?

  How will this process communicate information that cannot be expressed explicitly?

  Learners must see an intentional link between the act of documenting and a meaningful focus or goal. Documenting purposes can be thought of as usefulness. For example: Does the documenting action support growth? Does the documenting action move learning forward? Does the documenting action tell a story about the learning? Table 1.2 provides questions pertaining to potential purposes.

  Making Learning and Thinking Shareable

  In addition to content knowledge being learned in schools, there are critical skills and now literacies (which are addressed in Chapter 2) that learners of all ages need to build fluency in. Students and teachers are being asked to learn how to learn. The now literacies combined with the purposeful use of media platforms and tools require learners to apply strategies and techniques to aid them in acquiring and sharing their evidence of learning with others:

  Sharing thoughts, ideas, creations, and connections to help make sense of what is being learned. Global conversations are taking place on the immediacy to transform teaching and learning, including the necessity for authentic sharing. These conversations often lead to collaborations, fueled by educators who are passionate about impacting and empowering their students in meaningful ways. Learners gain leverage when they are given access and invitation to view other’s learning, as well as ask for insight and feedback for their own learning. It is imperative that teachers also share their professional learning and growth to learn from their documentation artifacts and engagement with others.

  Sharing allows thoughts, ideas, creations, and connections to be disseminated quickly beyond traditional avenues. Appreciation for instant responses via an email or text versus snail-mail especially resonates with an older generation. Younger generations do not know what waiting for information really means. People around the world depend on instant, up-to-date information due to the ease of sharing, editing, and publishing technologies. Likewise, the ways that news, books, entertainment, and other kinds of information are now delivered and shared is staggering, especially when one realizes the sharing is accomplished at no or a low cost for the recipients or end users.

  Sharing successes and failures/mistakes digitally extends and expands learning. Twenty-first century teachers and students are pioneering new trails of what learning is and what it looks like using social media and digital curation. To curate in this context means the act of determining a resource’s or artifact’s value for a current or future learning need or task. Traditional learning pathways are not as they once were due to the reality that the world is advancing digitally in leaps and bounds. Just as pioneers of the past shared their success and failure stories as they journeyed to new lands to inform those who would blaze new trails after them, documenting while learning and sharing those journeys locally and globally aids and supports the journeys of others.

  Sharing purposefully using social media can reach hundreds (and even thousands) of people instantly, and supports a learning-thinking model for others. Social media avenues continue to grow at an exponential rate because people want to share their thinking, reasoning, experiences, latest work, and resources. While this is beneficial, there is a difference between sharing for sharing’s sake versus sharing strategically to gain desired insights and feedback from expertise around the globe. The latter is what needs to be incorporated and modeled by teachers and students who are participating in documenting opportunities.

  November (2010) emphasizes that, “Collaboration and sharing knowledge are the highly prized skills. . . . Teachers will be valued for their ability to share their knowledge and solve problems about teaching and learning that an individual teacher could not solve alone” (p. 50). Educators need to shift from a traditionally isolated learning process to include sharing strategies and techniques that support more meaningful learning opportunities, which lead to better retention and connection capacities.

  Sharing can take on many forms, especially in today’s world. What was once difficult to share with people who did not live or work on the same floor, in the same building, or geographically in the same area can now be contacted and connected via an email, DropBox downloadable files, or an impromptu FaceTime convers
ation. Shirky (2011) makes the point that even the notion of sharing is evolving due to myriad social media and networking tools that allow anyone to produce, publish, and comment:

  Expanding our focus to include producing and sharing doesn’t even require making big shifts in individual behavior to create enormous changes in outcome. The world’s cognitive surplus is so large that small changes can have huge ramifications in aggregate. We are increasingly becoming one another’s infrastructure. This may be a cold-blooded way of looking at sharing – that we increasingly learn about the world through stranger’s random choices about what to share – but even that has some human benefits. Our ability to balance consumption with production and sharing, our ability to connect with one another, is transforming the sense of media from a sector of the economy to a cheap and globally available tool for organized sharing. (p. 327)

  Ritchhart et al. (2011) express that “Students need to see how others plan, monitor, and challenge their own thinking in ways that move them forward. Students need to see that all learners make mistakes and that learning often occurs from reflecting on those mistakes” (p. 29). Therefore, it is important to note that artifacts do not equate perfection. They are often works in progress designed to aid in gaining knowledge and understanding.