1. How can we use documentation to make learning more visible to our students, parents and school community?

Documenting Learning in the Early years

ABSTRACT
Our research is about finding an effective way to use documentation as a tool to make learning and teaching visible, to take a snapshot of thinking, to make public what we value based on our new educational culture. Our goal is to change our reporting system by documenting the learning process based on a more flexible and open student-driven approach.
Documentation should tell a story and reflect children’s learning and thinking, individually as well as within a group. After determining the period, frequency, and format of our documentation, we will test different documenting tools and methods in order to create learning stories that will replace our end of unit reports and change the way we communicate with parents and the school community. We will look at one class project and two individual learning processes in order to create a sample learning story that we will present as the last piece of our research: a new format to report student learning that will provide continuity and consistency across the program, document growth and progress over a whole Early Years cycle, and be more demonstrative and appropriate for the Early Years age group.

KEYWORDS: Early years: reporting system: documentation: learning stories: student driven

RESEARCHERS
The Early Years Documentation Team: Nancy Loschiavo; Irene Romeo; Nicky Shamash
N.loschiavo@isfitaly.org; i.romeo@isfitaly.org; n.shamash@isfitaly.org