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…
Love is blind, and far too often, our relationships with quantitative data remain unhealthy. Despite evidence to the contrary, too many of us still believe that grades provide insight and that standardized test scores suggest solutions. Going gradeless isn’t easy, though. Numbers are far more efficient to work with. They seem to create quick and false certainty during trying times, too. Using data in healthy ways is difficult work. It keeps us on the move, and it reminds us, over and…
Interviews provide some of the best data we can gather about learners and learning, but planning and executing a high quality interview is often challenging. Whether interviews happen during writing conferences, at the end of unit of mathematics study, or on the heels of a lab experience, I find it important to consider four different elements: Structure, purpose, those questions that elicit helpful responses, and those questions that can deepen the respondent’s thinking. I recently shared…
Pedagogical documentation enables us to capture learning made visible and assess our students’ strengths and needs without disrupting the learning process. One potential anecdote to the testing mess, documentation inspires us to create rich narratives that deepen our understanding of learners and their experiences. This is a beautiful thing. Experience is teaching me that pedagogical documentation is also incredibly complex work that is not without its challenges. For instance, helping teachers and students choose the…
The Backstory: I’ve spent the last week helping Heather Bitka and Rachel O’Sheehan launch a brand new makerspace in Roy B. Kelley School in Lockport. This project began with solid visioning work that challenged all of us to think about and then rethink about what would happen in that space, how, and most importantly: why. This week has been an incredible learning experience for me, as I’ve tested new professional learning approaches and protocols while…
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…
Teachers analyze different kinds of evidence in order to construct hunches that help them serve learners well. Clear answers are rare, but if we pay attention, we know when we’re getting closer to understanding the challenges learners face and better at designing solutions. The questions we ask often make all of the difference. Traditional research processes often begin with the identification of driving questions. Intended to focus our work, driving questions can help us define powerful pathways through the research…
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…
This post continues a conversation that I started last week about visible learning, documentation, and the use of Grounded Theory methodologies. My thinking and work has evolved over time, in response to the learning I’m fortunate enough to do at the WNY Young Writer’s Studio and inside of various western New York school districts. Studio teachers use these approaches to fuel independent action research as they strive to uncover instructional practices that truly meet the…
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…