A Guide to Documenting Learning

by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano

  What can I do to create a 21st century skills and now literacies documenting opportunity for my students (or teachers) that will cause them to meaningfully and purposefully capture evidence of learning related to specific learning focuses and goals?

  What will the discipline’s or cross-disciplines’ content and specific focuses and goals be for my challenge that will cultivate an engaging and authentic opportunity to apply the 21st century skills and now literacies?

  What will be the evidence of learning for my challenge’s focus and goals that enable the learningflow routine to be visible, meaningful, shared, and amplified (see Image 11.12)?

  How will I articulate how my challenge involves the documenting OF or AS learning characteristics? Explain why you believe it reflects the characteristics. (Be certain to share your thoughts beyond yourself to ensure you are increasing your sharing amplification degree.)

  What do I think I will need to do to plan for the three documentation phases: pre-documentation, during-documentation, and post-documentation?

  Image 11.12

  Now What?

  Remember that the key purpose for this challenge is to allow your learners (and yourself) to authentically apply specific characteristics, behaviors, and actions involved in the 21st century skills and now literacies combined with content learning in a purposeful documenting opportunity, whether an activity, task, or project.

  Here are several questions to spark your personal and collaborative thinking during your Pre-Documentation Phase’s planning time:

  QR Code 11.4 Scan this QR code to view a #21stcenturyskills Twitter feed.

  http://langwitches.me/21stcenturyskills

  21st Century Skills and the Now Literacies

  Who do I think I may need to contact in my Orbits of Ability for my challenge that has expertise in one or more of the 21st century skills and the now literacies? Note: Think out of the box. If you do not have anyone in your learning environment that meets the question criteria, try connecting with experts on Twitter using an appropriate hashtag, such as #21centuryskills, #nowliteracies, #contemporarylearning, and #documenting4learning. Scan QR Code 11.4 to view the current #21stcenturyskills feed.

  Who can help me make each of the learningflow routine steps happen successfully in relationship to the 21st century skills and now literacies coupled with my learners’ content learning focuses and goals?

  How will I extend my personal professional learning as a primary learner and/or secondary learner related to the 21st century skills and now literacies as I plan for and carry out my challenge?

  Content-Specific Learning Focuses and Goals

  Ask colleagues in person or virtually to listen to your learners’ focuses and goals (e.g., standards-based learning, applying school mission/vision behaviors, improving a specific skill or habit). Explain how they will be authentically applied in the upcoming documenting opportunity. Ask them to provide you with feedback based on the question: Is this challenge truly an authentic way to improve my learners’ capabilities based on their need to ___________?

  Next, brainstorm your colleagues to answer this question:

  How can I and my learners find and engage experts, eyewitnesses, or people of interest related to the challenge’s learning focuses and goals locally, as well as using social media to reach a global audience?

  QR Code 11.5 Scan this QR code to access the Documenting Planner PDF.

  http://langwitches.me/documenting-planner

  Now it is time to plan your challenge’s three documentation phases and five learningflow routine steps. How about creating a sketchnote? You can reproduce the template on page 242 in the Appendix to help you get started.

  If you prefer to use a text-based planner, you can either reproduce the template on page 243 or scan QR Code 11.5 to access a Documenting Planner PDF. After you download the PDF to your selected device, choose your preferred tool to annotate the saved file.

  If you prefer to use a spreadsheet planner, scan QR Code 11.6 to access a Google Sheets document. Once you make a copy of the file, you will be able to edit the template to customize your plans by filling in the various cells.

  QR Code 11.6 Scan this QR code to access the Google Sheets Documenting Planner.

  http://langwitches.me/documenting-planner-sheets

  12 Documenting Learning and Branding Administrative Actions

  We should want our community to see all the amazing things happening in school, and we should want our children to have a strong connection with the community around them.

  —Tony Sinanis and Dr. Joseph Sanfelippo

  In Chapter 4, it was mentioned that schools and districts can use documenting learning as institutional memory:

  Institutional memory for a school or district is a collective set of facts, events, best practices, learning experiences, values, and knowledge that represents who they are and what they believe in as an educational institution at a specific moment in, as well as over time. From an administrator’s school or district perspective, documenting learning can begin to replace traditional ways of communicating the teaching and learning taking place. When a school or district is willing to be transparent about its institutional processes and results of teaching and learning over time, all stakeholders benefit and grow.

  When viewed through the documenting learning layers, teachers and administrators are the primary learners, while the local community and global network are the secondary learners.

  School and District Brand Identity

  Sinanis and Sanfelippo (2014) note that branding provides a visibility, or identity, that a brick-and-mortar or online school cannot convey in traditional forms:

  We want to ensure that OUR voices are the ones telling OUR story—we cannot let anyone else tell our story for us! The idea of branding schools isn’t about selling kids or making false promises: it’s about promoting the amazing things happening in our schools for those who don’t have the opportunity to experience them on a daily basis. (p. 9)

  When the voice of a school is shared and amplified, it reveals who they are and what they believe in, similar to what a product brand evokes in consumers’ minds. For example, when someone hears Apple, he or she associates the name with innovation and outstanding design (Benson, 2014). This association did not happen overnight. It took years to brand this product, which included, and still includes, innovative ad campaigns that collectively convey and share what Apple stands for in the marketplace.

  While brand-identity building needs to be intentional, there are times when a school’s or district’s branding will be organic. For example, Silvia was working together with Andrea Hernandez in a Jewish day school in Jacksonville, Florida, as the school’s 21st Century Learning Specialists. They implemented schoolwide classroom blogs as a communication platform for teachers to document day-to-day and special-event happenings taking place in the K–8 classrooms to replace the weekly newsletters and reach out and inform the school community.

  Dr. Jon Mitzmacher joined the school the following year as the new head of school. Under his leadership, the school’s ability to document learning grew from classroom blogs to include individual blogfolios for every student, as well as a private faculty blog for teachers to reflect on their own learning and teaching practices.

  The public classroom blogs and student blogfolios aided in the school’s commitment and promise to stakeholders to embrace and practice a 21st century approach to teaching and learning. The local and global Jewish day school field (community) throughout North America responded to the school’s transparency of sharing and amplifying their learning. More and more schools came to visit and observe the teachers to see their 21st century learning in action.

  The sharing of the school’s innovation birthed the idea for a new professional learning conference: edJEWcon, a 21st century teaching and learning institute. Twenty-five schools from around the United States and Canada made their way to Florida to participate in two edJEWcon conferences. They were hosted and held at t
heir school with teachers and students showcasing their work and forging new collaborative connections to advance the collective work of the Jewish day schools across North America. The conference themes were building awareness, fostering and sharing understanding, and documenting best practices in Jewish education around 21st century skills and the now literacies. To document the learning taking place, students and teachers captured the learning during the conference through multiple school blogs that were created.

  Following the conferences, the 21st century leadership team continued to coach teachers in documenting on the school’s private blog where they transparently reflected on their classroom successes and failures and professional learning. It was also a place where the faculty could share resources, book recommendations, and reflect on feedback left as comments by their colleagues. When appropriate, documentation artifacts were cross-posted from the private faculty blog to the public edJEWcon blog.

  After an initial period of getting comfortable with the logistics of the private blogging platform from a reading, writing, and commenting-contributing perspective, Dr. Mitzmacher took a bold move to the edge and announced to the teachers that they no longer had to turn in weekly lesson plans. His upgrade required them to publish a weekly quality blog post that highlighted reflections on that week’s classroom content and skills learning, best practices, and new ideas related to 21st century and the now literacies.

  The collective artifacts and evidence of learning visible in the classroom, student, faculty, and edJEWcon blogs contributed to an archived institutional-memory history of the school.

  When teachers share their students’ and their own professional growth over time openly and transparently, it provides authentic opportunities for administrators to strategically embed artifacts in the branding of a school and/or district. McLane and Lowe (2015) remind educators that, “One dilemma education faces today is invisibility. So many great things are happening in schools around the world that, for the most part, no one knows about” (p. 2). Branding removes the invisibility and illuminates its identity by sharing and amplifying evidence of learning via online platforms that include websites, blogs, wikis, and social media.

  Rubin (2017) describes one reason for branding a school in a fast-paced changing world:

  Schools must be resolved in building a brand and sharing the range of messages and stories of the good work they produce daily. Amplifying messages has never been more important. We live in a new decade, an era of acceleration, where communication around real stories and fake news touches a school community. Schools can be known for their authenticity through building a brand and being a digital leader in education.

  Documenting on a school or district level requires going beyond traditional forms of sharing documenting OF learning artifacts, including

  Posting photographs of important events

  Tweeting out scores of sporting events

  Live streaming award ceremonies

  Artifacts that represent documenting FOR or AS learning opportunities enable a school or district to communicate who it is and what it stands for in visible ways that include annotations that convey the implicit messages that the explicit text, visual images, videos, and audio recordings cannot do on their own. It also invites local and global communities to be engaged participants and contributors by posting comments on the school’s or district’s blog posts, liking its videos or tweets, or contributing artifacts that support the school’s or district’s story and brand.

  Given a school or a district is an organization, branding in an educational context is not exactly the same as branding a product or cause, but the principles apply. Sheninger and Rubin (2017) explain:

  Educators are not selling a product or services. But [a] brand is a fit for us in a modern, digital view of professional learning and progressive school thinking. This brand is made up of three foundational school elements: An image, a promise, a result. The concepts of image, promise, and result can powerfully frame a school’s brand-building communication effort, but with a distinct difference from the way these terms are used in the business world. . . . In schools, brand is a personification of a community. . . . Offering a strong institutional persona across various channels through a clear brand presence is not an option in our age of visibility. “Define before being defined” is part of the leadership agenda of visibility in a digital and social age. (p. 13)

  Sheninger and Rubin clarify that an institution’s image is developed through sharing authentic stories, which is beautifully supported by the learningflow routine. An institution’s promise can be promoted through sharing artifacts that provide evidence of the institution’s mission, vision, and core values. An institution’s result, which implies after, is reflected through sharing artifacts as ongoing assessments that convey evidence of learning, which can be shared in its infancy, as it is moving forward, and upon completion.

  A school’s or district’s brand provides its members (students, teachers, and administrators) a platform to share and amplify their learning with its stakeholders, community, and ultimately, the world. For some institutions, branding can be viewed as a form of marketing.

  Documenting Learning and Branding Identity

  While branding a school or district to convey and promote its identity, there are five strategic considerations in using documentation for branding purposes (see Image 12.1).

  Documenting the Big Picture of Learning on Campus

  As students and teachers document their learning, they can capture only a sliver of all the learning that takes place on any given day on a school campus or throughout a district. Teachers and students are busy within their specific grade or courses and do not often see or experience connections with the teacher next door, among grade levels, or across course disciplines. This is true for content knowledge, soft skills, and the now literacies.

  Administrators have an excellent opportunity to look for, capture, reflect, share, and amplify evidence of the learning to brand the big picture of what is taking place from a macro lens to a wide-angle lens regarding content learning and/or the institution’s mission, vision, and values. They can strategically connect the student and teacher documentation artifacts and provide their own learning-thinking perspectives and experiences by adding personal narratives and comments to the in-process artifacts on a campus or throughout a district. Administrators become the curators of the evidence of learning that collectively paints a portrait of a school’s or district’s learning community.

  Image 12.1

  It is important to paint a teaching and learning portrait as a shared experience. Portraits have for centuries conveyed more than just a face. They express one’s status in society and conveying memory-laden moments in time. In modern times, the paintbrush has been traded in for a camera and the portraits are often selfies or USies. According to Merriam-Webster’s (2017), selfie is defined as an image of oneself taken by oneself using a digital camera especially for posting on social networks. Selfies might have started out by being a shot of oneself, and they more often now include oneself in a group shot, referred to as USies. They capture special moments in time to be shared with a network or the world.

  Who is holding the camera to convey the heartbeat of those living and learning in an educational institution? Too often non-educators, politicians, and the media paint a grim picture of the educational system. It is time for teachers, schools, and districts to take selfies and USies to become their own storytellers. By sharing and amplifying artifacts that represent slow-and-steady progress toward successes, it overshadows false or negative press.

  QR Code 12.1 Scan this QR code to view the #thisismyschool 2017 video.

  http://langwitches.me/this-is-my-school

  Educators who strive to continuously learn and hone their craft expressed through documenting opportunities via a classroom, school, or district website or other social media platform speak volumes. When sharing and amplifying documenting FOR or AS learning artifacts, a school or distr
ict provides its local and global communities the chance to connect while the learning and growth is taking place. In-person and online communities interacting with the learners (e.g., commenting to posts, participating in online polls, using #SchoolName while attending an event) creates shared experiences, and relationship-building extends to the highest degrees of amplification. Scan QR Code 12.1 to see a school’s collaborative effort in creating a brand-identity video that highlights and documents the learning that takes place on their campus, as well as invites comments by viewers.

  Documenting Learning to Amplify Community Interaction

  When students, teachers, and administrators authentically share their ongoing documentation, they automatically communicate to parents, stakeholders, and the local and global communities who they are and who they are striving to be. Branding a school or district is a journey. A journey is not a once-in-a-while event. It is an evolving accumulation of experiences. By keeping to oneself and interacting with no one else or just a few people, the growth and potential for expanding one’s learning and understanding along the journey’s way diminishes. When constantly and purposefully interacting with others, the journey is more fulfilling. This storytelling sharing and amplifying provide ongoing opportunities for school or district community communication interactions to take place.

  It is also important to remember that branding is not just about conveying a story, but also about interacting with the reactions, comments, and re-sharing by others. In order to encourage a school’s or district’s local community to amplify their branding story, the institution needs to take into consideration what Burgess (2017) points out, “There is a huge difference between ‘communicating’ with your students’ families and ENGAGING them.”