This week, I had the good fortune to meet with a small group of teachers, administrators, curriculum directors, and professional learning facilitators at Erie 2 BOCES. We spent the day discussing grounded theory, how to make learning visible, and how to use the evidence captured from documentation to formulate hunches and theories that serve learners well. This is exciting work that enriches my own practice substantially, and I appreciated meeting others who were interested in…
As teachers prepare to help students make learning visible and document what is revealed, I’ve noticed that the pace of our preparation work typically stalls in the same places over and over again: we struggle to define a focus for our studies, and we struggle to understand how learning is made visible. Until these tensions are resolved, it’s almost impossible to move forward. Recently, I shared a design sprint that can help teachers refine…
Gone are the days when WNY Young Writer’s Studio writers celebrated their accomplishments by participating in readings or showcasing their anthology submissions. We celebrate our published writers to be sure, but our most rewarding events are those that bring family, friends, and other teachers and writers from outside of our community together to learn from one another. Each spring, we host an unconference where writers of all ages facilitate conversations about strategies that work for…
This year found me recommitting to the work of daily documentation as a writer, a writing teacher, and a professional learning facilitator. This was a challenging and even overwhelming endeavor at times, but so very much worth the effort that I made. In fact, this project was so rewarding that I’ve already created new intentions for my documentation practice in 2019. These were my greatest moments of professional learning, and I wonder: If you were…
Today, I’m thrilled to welcome teacher-librarian Melanie Mulcaster to my little corner of the web. Melanie has made a home at Hillside Public School in Mississauga, Ontario. I had the great fortune to meet her in person last summer, and we became fast friends. I’m honored to feature her reflections about making, reading, writing, and documentation here today. Please follow her on Twitter and drop by her blog to get to know her better. Making…
On Friday, I’ll be working with students in the D’Youville School of Pharmacy, who are just beginning to develop habits of documentation, reflection, and qualitative data analysis. The document below will guide our initial conversations. I thought I would share it here, as it provides a quick introduction for those who are doing similar work in a variety of contexts, including K-12 classrooms. The questions and tools below will support our initial conversations. You can grab…
As I’ve begun supporting teachers’ first efforts to document for learning, this question continues winding its way through nearly every conversation: How do we distinguish learning from its products? This seems like a simple distinction, but experience is demonstrating otherwise. As it turns out, making learning visible rather its products is no easy task. It’s also no surprise when our initial efforts to document learning fall short of our expectations. Here’s what I’ve been talking about with western New York…
I’ve learned a great deal about visible learning and documentation beside the teachers I’ve supported this year. Rather than lifting and dropping a handful of previously conceived best practices into their instruction, many have begun moving through action research cycles that look much like grounded theory. This has empowered them with new insight and instructional approaches that are tightly rooted in the learning and the work that their students are doing. It’s producing powerful results…
Over the last few years, some of the teachers that I support have begun assessing learning without interrupting it in order to test kids. Their commitment to documentation is leading to the development of far better interventions. That’s not why I’m blogging about it, though. It seems that steeping ourselves in this kind of learning isn’t merely increasing our expertise, it’s igniting our curiosities and re-energizing us. As we make our own learning transparent to students, our relationships…
“You observe an effect, then build a theory to fit the observation. It may be faster to memorize facts than to experience them, but I would argue that you don’t really own that fact. ‘Hot’ is a pretty abstract concept until you’ve burned yourself.” Mark Hatch, The Maker Movement Manifesto: Rules for Innovation in the New World of Crafters, Hackers, and Tinkerers Teaching is all about learning, and learning is all about research. This reality…