| Making Learning Visible: Documentation Strategies to Improve Teaching and Learning

Guided by Lindsay Stewart, elevate your teaching methods using impactful documentation strategies and imagery, enriching the educational experience through compelling visual narratives.

Lindsay Stewart invites educators of all subjects and all levels Pre K – Graduate level to develop a practice of documentation in the classroom. Using photography and learning to listen carefully to the cues and clues of learners, we will apply photography and the power of observation to see the learning taking place. The practice allows for reflection and collected ideas and words from the teachers and learners – which has proven to support collaboration among the many stakeholders in the education system…from teachers, learners, parents and administrators by making learning visible. By building a practice of documentation using photography and video, journaling, and listening carefully to the learners, we encourage teachers to share ideas, embrace inquiry based learning, and trust the process of an emerging curriculum.

Who is this workshop for:

This workshop is for educators, school administrators, and anyone curious to learn more about the documentation process to enhance teaching and learning.

Participant goals:

• Immerse themselves in a simulated classroom context for connected teaching and learning.
• Adopt a research mindset and learn new techniques that will inform their teaching and understanding of student thinking.
• Create a photographic record of the learning process, highlighting and narrating observable themes.
• Engage in qualitative research practices in a phenomenological, arts-based approach in order to ‘mine for the essence’ of the learning and experience.

Topics to be discussed and explored:

• The emerging curriculum and inquiry-based learning
• Exercises and games in listening and observation
• Daily journaling and arts explorations
• Photography exercises and participant support as necessary
• Design work using Pages 
• The role of the camera: Allowing teachers to shift to researchers and facilitators, letting the learners lead
• Educational approaches, inspiration, and examples using documentation practices
• Collecting emerging learning with transparency
• Dialogue and communication around collected documentation
• How to add documentation into a daily teaching practice to supplement, strengthen, and guide your teaching practice. 
• Relevant neuroscience and research on creative thinking and the development of focus and the imagination

Over the course of the week, workshop participants will photograph an active classroom environment, develop practices to collect the emerging learning, review documentation examples to build conversations about teaching and learning and discuss the merits of embracing this documentation practice.

Visiting expert Nancy Frohlich Harris, will join us one day and share her expertise as an educator with 45+ years of experience as an educational leader embracing the Reggio approach and arts based practices.  

Participants will design their own project board with collected evidence through photographs, work samples, student quotes, and teacher observations.

Teachers will develop a deeper understanding of their students as learners and students will have visual information from which to reflect on and expand their own thinking. Documentation offers teachers the opportunity to make positive changes in their classrooms and feel confident about the process.

Students should bring:

• A journal and favorite writing implements  
• Camera or iPad (prefer not to photograph with a phone for privacy challenges in a classroom setting) 
• Laptop 

Suggested but not required:

Visible Learners: Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools 1st Edition

by Mara Krechevsky (Author), Ben Mardell (Author), Melissa Rivard (Author).