Teachers and their students are typically motivated and enthusiastic to start documenting at their school, but the Internet Technology (IT) department has or creates guidelines, which can make strategic sharing and amplifying impossible to implement. When educators are eager to implement new forms and ways to use technology for learning, IT departments need to be flexible to adapt to these new requests. When pedagogically sound reasons are behind a request, IT departments should not be allowed to say no, but work collaboratively to find ways to make it happen. While there may be valid relational concerns regarding adequate bandwidth throughout the school day for all learners—network security and vulnerability concerns or equity for device accessibility—the IT department and general policy makers need to serve contemporary learning and teaching environments, not the other way around.
Educators cannot hide behind policies that prevent them from contemporary teaching and learning. They need to take positive actions to upgrade outdated policies to modernize learning and support what is in the best interests of their students.
Documenting is about taking photographs or using technology.
Documenting opportunities involve much more than simply taking photographs or using a technology device, platform, or tool, which have been expressed throughout this book.
Based on our experiences working alongside teachers and administrators, this mindset can be a difficult one to change. The traditional understanding of visual documentation is ingrained in many educators’ minds as taking photographs of what is happening and posting them as what happened. No annotexting. No reflecting. No analyzing.
It is possible to document learning without the use of modern technology (think paper and pencil) when it involves asking learners to be cognitive and metacognitive about what the evidence (e.g., a drawn sketchnote, a long-hand written fairy tale) they created conveys through unpacking and reflecting on explicit and implicit learning in the artifact. Sharing analog artifacts can be increasingly powerful when the amplification moves beyond oneself, especially when others include local experts (e.g., sketchnotes—local artists; fairy tale—local authors). Whether analog or digital artifacts, the captured evidence must go through the documenting learningflow routine steps to create process-based outcome.
The art of reflection does not happen instantly. Therefore, it is understandable why educators who have participated in documenting FOR and AS learning opportunities often slip back into a product mindset when coaching or support is removed. Similar to a bungee cord reverting back to its original position (even though it had a great time being stretched), teachers are in danger of reverting back to taking photographs or using the technology tools and platforms to simply display snapshots and refer to what they have done as documenting learning.
Documenting involves a mindset that values the learning process. In preschool to professional environments, capturing evidence of the learning while it is taking place via unpacking, analyzing, sharing, and amplifying artifacts is essential. The learningflow routine steps embrace and showcase multimedia evidence of learning that involve textual and photographic images, video actions, and auditory recordings that collectively provide insights into learners’ thinking, as well as how they learn and apply their learning to new contexts over time.
What to Keep?
The what to keep that needs to be captured, reflected on, shared, and amplified is threefold:
Curricular focuses and goals based on the standards used to aid in determining the learning
The vision, mission, and values of the school or district
Action research to improve learning engagement and teaching practices through meaningful projects and application opportunities
Calibrating Curricular Focuses and Goals.
Calibrating is defined as adjusting to take external factors into account. In a documenting setting, this refers to adjusting the way in which teaching has been traditionally delivered to allow students’ learning-thinking to be made visible.
Curricular focuses are the concepts, content, and skills birthed from standards that students need to know and be able to do, and provide evidence of their understanding and application in multiple contexts. This requisite is the same in traditional classrooms as well, although it is not as easy to capture and unpack evidence of learning and assessing students’ visible thinking over time to strategically analyze their learning patterns and trends.
As one teacher put it in a cohort coaching session,
I am beginning to see the difference in my room between my students owning their own learning by having them unpack and reflect on captured learning evidence, and the way I’ve been teaching for years, which was more of a do-it-for-them method rather than a see-it-for-yourself method. What they are learning is the same, but I am finding they see their learning as a progression, rather than a “I have to pass a test at the end, and that is all that matters” mentality.
Curricular goals embrace the soft skills, mindsets, behaviors, and habits that meaningful and authentic learning environments provide. These dispositions need to be nurtured and practiced in conjunction with curricular focuses. Kallick and Zmuda (2017) convey this when considering the infusion of the Habits of Mind in personalized learning environments:
The teaching of disciplinary knowledge and dispositional thinking are complementary, not competing, aims. When schools include Habits of Mind as an intentional component of practice, they are ignoring that teaching for thinking is as important as teaching content knowledge. Their curriculum, instruction, and assessment intentionally address how to think critically and creatively and how to problem-solve. . . . The student’s role is to use—and further develop through use—the Habits of Mind needed to fully experience a self-directed performance. Not only should the level of cognition remain high in terms of the learning and the performance, but also the level of metacognition should bring about a consciousness and an intention concerning decisions about where and when to use the habits for effective thinking. (pp. 13–14)
Documenting OF, FOR, and AS learning opportunities are founded on curricular focuses and goals. Documentation provides authentic experiences for learners to express their knowledge and understanding through pre-planned focuses and goals, as well as unforeseen learning opportunities. The documenting learning framework is a pedagogical and heutagogical methodology, not a learning goal in itself.
Conveying the Vision, Mission, and Values.
When a school deeply believes in their vision, mission, and core values, they look for every opportunity to make them come alive in their classrooms and building(s). These statements need to live and breathe in the school beyond simply being displayed on the school’s brick-and-mortar walls, website, in a handbook, or in marketing materials.
Can every student, faculty member, administrator, and local community member give examples of what the vision looks like in reality?
Can students and parents or caregivers articulate the mission statement in their own words?
Can evidence of the core values be visibly seen or audibly heard in schoolwide assemblies and referred to often during learning experiences?
Documenting learning supports and encourages making a school’s or district’s mission, vision, and core values visible. They are not only idle words as part of a marketing package, but truly represent and convey the tapestry of the learning environment. Conveying an institution’s mission, vision, and values in action takes thoughtful and strategic planning and implementation based on the documentation phases and learningflow routine.
A middle school faculty wanted its core values to be evident in their students’ artifacts (see Image 13.2). While everyone could recite the core values by heart, there was currently no clear evidence of the values present in their students’ thinking processes or academic behaviors.
Image 13.2
During the pre-documentation phase, which took place just prior to the beginning of the school year, the teachers and administrators met as a full faculty to br
ainstorm possible ways in which their students could provide visible core-value evidence. After some discussion and negotiating, they reached consensus. They decided that since their students were already comfortable with the use of blogfolios, they would ask them to add a layer of core-value documentation when writing their posts throughout the school year.
In the during-documentation phase, students were asked to use the appropriate core value terms as a category or label for each post they wrote and published (see Image 13.3). Over time, regardless of the class period, the students were creating visible core-value connections between and among the disciplines.
Image 13.3
In the first round of the post-documentation phase, which was just prior to the school’s first grading period student-led conferences (SLC), students had to dig deep into their understanding of each core value’s characteristics to justify their reasoning for how they chose to label their blog post artifacts with a particular core value or values.
What surfaced was that the students were inconsistent in their understanding of what constituted evidence of each core value’s characteristics, which the teachers discussed during their next faculty meeting. They noted that this occurrence was not specific to a particular grade, cultural group, or boys versus girls. This realization led the faculty and staff to determine specific and strategic actions and activities to provide consistent in-school exemplars, as well as real-world applications for each core value to aid in their students understanding.
Based on the continued expectation for their students to document their content learning as well as the core-value visual connections in their blog posts, the teachers began to see an improvement pattern emerge during the next three quarters. They commented that the majority of students improved their abilities to articulate the connections between their artifacts’ indicated core values that they chose to share with their parents/guardians during the SLC meetings.
Toward the end of the fourth quarter, the teachers were challenged to sit in grade level teams, rather than by disciplines, during a faculty meeting. The principal asked each grade-level team to use the network labels in their customized blogging platform and choose one of the core values that the team would like to reflect on and analyze from a year-long learning-application lens. One team of teachers chose communicators because they agreed it was a challenging year for this group of students to communicate well, especially when working on group projects or tasks. The principal provided two reflective questions to aid in each team’s conversation once they scanned through and read the search-result blog posts:
How was the specific core value evident among students’ blog posts in your grade level?
What trend or pattern, or lack thereof, did your team notice? (Be ready to provide evidence when we meet again as a large group.)
After the large-group sharing was completed, the principal posed another question:
Which core value was embedded strongly in the school’s culture and evident in the students’ blogfolios?
Small-group discussions led to a large-group discussion. In conclusion, everyone agreed that the year-long core-value documentation process posed challenges, such as getting some students to not just be compliant when creating their blog post entries. They were also pleased that their students were building ongoing evidence. These data revealed to the students, themselves, board, and local community that the school’s core values are alive, well, and visible.
The students’ blogfolios initially served as documenting OF learning. The students, as primary learners, had to select blog posts they felt best conveyed evidence of their growth as a learner over time. Students then shared the data in their SLC meetings.
When the faculty used the students’ blog posts in a collective analysis through a core-values lens at the end of the school year, documenting FOR and AS learning was taking place. A larger degree of sharing and amplification also happened because more people were viewing and reflecting on the blog posts beyond a student blogger, his or her parents/guardians, and his or her classroom teacher.
Conducting Action Research.
Chapter 1 mentioned that mindful documenting educators purposefully have the inquisitive minds of scientists and the curiosity of researchers.
In classroom or professional learning environments involved in documenting opportunities, the learners—whether students or teachers—actively participate in the learning by asking questions, analyzing data, and communicating their findings while conducting the research.
Hagel, Brown, and Davison (2012) note that when people want to expand their knowledge boundaries, they do so based on knowledge flows, where new information flows from multiple people, experiences, and resources to gain or evolve the current knowledge of a topic, or the ability to better apply the understanding:
Knowledge-flows naturally flourish on the edge. Why? Because, by definition, participants on these edges are wrestling with how to match unmet needs with unexploited capabilities and all the uncertainty that implies. Edge participants therefore focus on ways to innovate and create value by connecting unmet needs with unexploited capabilities and then scaling these opportunities as rapidly as possible. In the process, they create significant new knowledge. (p. 53)
Culberhouse (2017) observes in reference to Hagel, Brown, and Davison’s note:
It is at the “edges” not only where new ideas, new thinking and new knowledge are discovered and formed, but where we learn to overcome the “genetic” drift that often entrenches our organizations in stasis, status quo, and eventual irrelevance for the future. Most organizations tend to push creativity and innovation to the outer edges. . . . Creative and innovative leaders not only tap into those edges, they find ways to fold them back into the core.
Modernizing classrooms and professional learning needs to include students and educators who perceive themselves as action researchers willing to go beyond the edges. When learners share their questions and findings through documentation artifacts and strategic amplification they are promoting and fostering research as collaborative inquiry. Price (2013) acknowledges that:
[In] a culture of collaborative enquiry – educators see themselves as researchers and developers. They are encouraged to look outside education for inspiration and innovation. They are required to share those enquiries, involving students, parents, and other staff. Their learning spaces welcome the disruption of visitors, because, as Stephen Harris [Founder/Director of Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning] says ‘the more students have to articulate their learning, the more they live it.’ (p. 186)
Remember, conducting action research requires innovation to improve learning engagement and teaching practices through meaningful projects and application opportunities, which means thinking outside the edges of the box to get beyond the way in which I or we have always done it.
Documenting embraces educators as action researchers who have read a professional learning book and participated in a workshop or coaching cycle, and who are open to now applying new practices in their learning environments, but want to make that application (action) visible and shareable with local and global learning communities as they search and re-search their professional growth. The same is true for students who desire authentic applications of their learning and research and learn about themselves from analyzing their evidence of learning over time and in various contexts.
What to Upgrade?
Documenting FOR and AS learning can be viewed as a modern assessment methodology. It provides opportunities for deeper meaning and authentic purposes to apply what is being learned to inform learners, teachers, parents/guardians, administrators, and the local/global community. Kashin (2017), who works specifically with young learners, points out
When documentation has meaningful content that depicts learning and development, early learning teachers share it with children, families, the community, and with each other as a way to demonstrate children’s competency and capacity. This is a form of assessment of children
’s learning as it is visible, transparent and meaningful. During this process, educators seek to make meaning in their continued reflection of the documentation in order to seek ways for it to authentically influence the direction future teaching and learning will take.
As we work with educators from around the world on implementing and sustaining the documenting learning framework in their environments, there is often a clash between traditional assessment measurements and documenting’s new forms of evidence of learning. This clash is often due to traditional grading practices and the perception that the captured and analyzed artifacts do not fit the norm of what is permissible as evidence to determine their students’ grades.
Sadly, the opposite is true. Sackstein (2015) comments on this false dichotomy:
Every time a grading period ended, I struggled with how to assess my students meaningfully and became increasingly less satisfied with how the system expected me to do it. Something had to change—I was doing my students a disservice even if they didn’t realize it. Assessment must be a conversation, a narrative that enhances students’ understanding of what they know, what they can do, and what needs further work. Perhaps even more important, they need to understand how to make improvements and how to recognize when legitimate growth has occurred. (pp. 13–14)
Due to her frustration, Sackstein asked her administration for permission to experiment with a non-graded measurement system. Reflecting on her initial implementation, she shares
A Guide to Documenting Learning Page 30
