Wednesday, 22 April 2015

Pedagogical Documentation

I was fortunate enough to attend today's Pedagogical Leadership meeting with the focus on Pedagogical documentation.  We looked at the Capacity Building Series: Pedagogical Documentation Revisited.  It broke down documentation to 3 phases. 
1.  Observing and Recording Student Experience.  
My own documentation style tends to lean towards this particular phase.  I find that I am pretty factual and to the point when I record the learning happening in the classroom.  I try not to add my own personal inferences or opinions.  I was not doing this because I thought that this was the way I was supposed to do it, but simply because that is a reflection my of personality.  Here is an example of a recent documentation piece I produced:

2.  Interpreting Learning in Service Pedagogy.
This is when teachers interpret the documentation.  I see this part as "naming the learning".  If I was to look at the documentation in the above piece, I could infer that "B" is able to "pose questions and state problems as part of the design process".  "R" was able to "sort and classify groups of living and non-living things in her own way."  and "O" was able to "ask question about and describe natural  occurrances, using her own observations".  

3.  Respond, Share and Build a Culture of Inquiry and Collaboration.  
This is where I see myself reflecting on the documentation with the students and my teaching partners to see where we need to go next with each student.  How can we deepen the learning for the individual and what impact will this have on others?  This is where I see the documentation informing our practice... kind of like a road map of where we need to go next.  If I was to use the above documentation piece, I could say that we need to involve the students in finding the answers to their wonderings by building an environement that has the clues they need to solve their problems. We can put out provocations relating to the growth cycle, books about farm animals in both French and English which speak to what farm animals eat and we can work on sorting and classifying living and non-living things.  By sharing these next steps with my partners, parents and students we are building a culture of moving our thinking forward.  

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