Lately I’ve been interested in the concept of documentation to trace and enhance learning prompted by the book Visible Learners: Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools by Mara Krechevsky, Ben Mardell, Melissa Rivard, and Daniel Wilson. I found this book through Project Zero, a project within Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
Visible Learners is inspired by the Reggio Emilia Approach, which is “an educational philosophy based on the image of a child with strong potentialities for development and a subject with rights, who learns through the hundred languages belonging to all human beings, and grows in relations with others.”
A cornerstone to the Reggio Emilia Approach is to make learning visible by documenting how learning occurs. By documenting the process of learning, it becomes an evolving guide unveiling the many unique pathways and perspectives that children discover, interpret, and engage with the world around them, and how this progresses over time.
Visible learning is based in five principles:
- Purposeful: seeks to understand how learning provides a sense of purpose in the child.
- Social: seeks to understand how learning occurs in social relation to others.
- Emotional: seeks to understand how learning activates emotional connections.
- Empowering: assumes that learning is student-led, i.e. the child holds the power in directing their learning.
- Representational: learning is about sharing and expressing ideas in a multitude of ways, children will choose a variety of ways to express themselves.
As a guide to learning is developed for individual child through careful documentation, teachers can then use this information to optimize their instruction. Parents also benefit as they can learn to engage their child more intentionally. And of course, the child’s capacity to learn is strengthened, and progressive learning begins to occur with greater ease.
Documenting is also valuable to group learning as children can relate to one another, build upon their own learning, and contribute back to the group to advance collective learning.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Learning to Create. 