Documentation and Learning Stories
“Reflection is thinking rigorously, critically, and systematically about practices and problems of importance to further growth. Reflection is a disciplined way of assessing situations, imagining a future different from today, and preparing to act.”
— William Ayers
When Ann Pelo and I were teaching together at Hilltop Children’s Center, we used to say that documentation is both a verb and a noun, both a process and a product. In other words, the tangible results of written documentation - newsletters, learning stories, blogs, panel displays, and so on - are only a very small part of the ongoing reflective work of documentation. The process part is the much more significant mass of the iceberg: watching and noticing, gathering notes and photos and drawings, reflecting on and discussing these traces, and making plans for what to offer back to the children. It’s very easy, I’ve found, for educators to become focused on generating documentation product, and to short-change the reflective process that informs it. This is totally understandable - we feel excited to share-back our stories with children and families, and we may feel pressure to “produce” and prove that good work is happening in our emergent curriculum. That’s why I’m committed to reframing the definition of “Documentation” as describing both the invisible but critical process of observation-reflection-planning, and the eventual product that communicates the process to others.
This duality of documentation is part of what draws me to other terms for describing our efforts to support, consider, extend, and record children’s learning:
Some educators, including my colleagues at Hilltop Children’s Center, use the term Pedagogical Documentation to denote our intention that the record-keeping and storytelling serves a pedagogical purpose. It informs our ongoing study of teaching and learning, and drives the unfolding of our responsive curriculum.
Some educators, including my colleagues in many of the Canadian provinces, use the term Pedagogical Narration to help identify the educator’s role as an engaged and attentive “narrator” of the children’s ongoing work. As in a story or play, the narrator reports on action that the audience didn’t get to see, and adds commentary or analysis of the unfolding story.
Some educators, including those working with the TeWhariki framework in Aotearoa/New Zealand, use the term Learning Stories to convey the opportunity for capturing and describing learning that happens for both children and adults. This formative, narrative model highlights the strengths of the learners that can be exposed through telling the stories of their work.
So if our focus is on the reflective cycle that drives a responsive curriculum, then when and why would we choose to actually create a finished piece of documentation, ready to share with others? Our intentions, when we create written documentation pieces, are:
to honor and record children’s experiences – spotlighting particular moments and reflecting them back to the children
to reflect on children’s work, and plan for future invitations and provocations – many of us find that the process of writing down the stories helps us think through what we observed, make meaning, and develop our hypotheses and future plans
to share children’s work with their families – beyond just “one thing she did today,” offering our insights and wonderings, and inviting families to respond, and to help us think about the play and make meaning together
Forms of Written Documentation
During my years at Hilltop, we experimented with many models and formats and strategies for sharing written documentation with children and families. Eventually we arrived at two complementary forms that we found useful:
“Four Elements” compositions to recount group activities, so called because they always contain four components: Tell the Story, Reflect on the Story, Begin a Dialogue with Families, Describe Next Steps and Future Plans
“Learning Stories” to celebrate moments of discovery for individual children, which are based on the models from New Zealand and from Seattle’s own Tom Drummond
In many ways these two forms are very similar, and we began to consider using the two formats interchangeably, or calling everything we wrote a “Learning Story” regardless of whether it described individual or small-group learning.
Perhaps a Learning Story could be written about an individual, or a group? Perhaps any story about children’s learning is, by definition, a learning story? I think that may be true…and I also think there are some qualities that characterize an effective Learning Story.
Learning Stories are personal: written by a thinking, feeling person, describing their authentic wonder and wonderings. Learning Stories are often written to the child or children featured in the story.
Learning Stories are meaningful: beyond just reporting on events that happened, they uncover possible layers of complexity. Learning Stories describe the learning that might be happening for the children and adults in the story.
Learning stories are readable: avoiding jargon and rhetoric, and possibly even written with a child audience in mind. Learning Stories are stories…the kind you might even want to read aloud.
Some years ago, when Tom Drummond was visiting Hilltop,he was speaking about the power of Learning Stories to impact a child’s self-concept, to help a child come to better understand herself or himself as a learner. When I think about what makes a story a Learning Story, these are the words that resonate:
“You learn who you are through the people you love telling you what they love about you.”
— Tom Drummond
In my experience at Hilltop, we used the completed pieces of written documentation for a number of purposes. We would display them on curriculum boards in the classroom, adding a few stories each week, and cataloguing older stories into a classroom binder. We chose the name “curriculum boards” very intentionally, to emphasize our belief that a responsive curriculum is “everything that happens” in our classrooms, and therefore that these stories of children’s work and play are the curriculum. For most stories we wrote, we would also include a copy in individual children’s journals for each of the children who were featured in the story. A child’s journal would come to include a variety of pieces: stories about events that the whole class participated in, and smaller-group experiences, and individual Learning Stories about that child. When small or large groups of children engage in an In-Depth Investigation, we would gather all the documentation about that specific research into it’s own binder (see photo above) to chronicle that exploration. We also offered many other less structured forms of written communication: weekly blog posts from each classroom, short notes, photos, e-mails to families, bulletin board displays, conference write-ups, and more…
Here are a few of my go-to resources about Documentation and Learning Stories:
Learning Stories: Constructing Learner Identities in Early Education by Margaret Carr and Wendy Lee
Making Learning Visible from Harvard Project Zero
Writing Learning Stories by Tom Drummond
You can’t document everything.
Once when I was working with a group of educators in Richmond, BC, I shared my perspective that it’s not possible to try to document everything that happens in the classroom each day. It would be like that person on vacation, I said, who misses fully experiencing the sights because they’re trying to capture every moment on a video camera. In an effort to emphasize my point, I mimed a gesture of an upside-down pyramid, explaining that hundreds of things happen in our classroom each day, and we could never notice all of those things. And of the things we do notice, there’s an even smaller slice that we might start to take note of, and discuss with our colleagues. And of those traces that we do get to consider and discuss, there’s an even smaller portion that we’d actually choose to capture as a completed piece of written documentation.
Jennifer Chen, one of the participants in this conversation, created this diagram afterwards, and sent it to me with the title “Sarah Felstiner Documentation Model.” Thanks, Jen!
Charmed as I was to have this notion made visible, my main point in offering this image was to emphasize that a completed piece of documentation is impactful because it helps us share the important stories with children and families, but we’ll never be able to capture and share everything. I remind myself - and anyone I work with - that we need to trust our own instincts for which stories to share. We are skilled educators who know and love the children in our care, so the filtration that occurs through this funnel will naturally bring forth the right stories.
A window into my child’s learning…
During the years that Brayden was a student at Hilltop, I got to experience the value and impact of Documentation and Learning Stories from the “parent” end of the communication flow. In this photo, Brayden and a friend are together in their classroom, poring over the pages of Brayden’s own journal. You can see the words and pictures in the story written by one of their teachers, as well as a pink sticky-note from me, writing back to the educators to share my perspective as a parent. Our intention at Hilltop was for written documentation to be part of an interactive dialogue between educators and family members, and even - as you can see in this photo - a way for children to revisit their work.
The first time one of Brayden’s educators - Ellie Dawson - wrote a Learning Story about him, it shifted my understanding of him as a learner. She had observed a game he and some friends were playing with stuffed cats and Unifix cubes, and noted that Brayden made a point of comparing the length of the Unifix stacks in order to figure out which kitty cats in the game had more Unifix “cat food” to eat. Her explanation of the math concepts Brayden was exploring through his kitty-cat dramatic play opened my eyes to his natural number-sense. After reading Ellie’s story, I began to notice numeracy in much of Brayden’s play, like how he sorted his toy cars, and compared amounts of peas and carrots on his dinner plate. Not being a math-y person myself, I’d missed it, but reading Ellie’s perspective helped expand my view of my own child.