Interaction Imagination

Sometimes something catches your eye and you just have to read it... my two 14 year old daughters love Sherlock Holmes, so when I saw the post by Brain Pickings on Konnikova: Mastermind: How to think like Sherlock Holmes, I just had to give it a read. ... and I am glad I did... as I started seeing parallels to my work as a preschool teacher... in that observations and how we observe and analyse what we have seen can allow us to deduce what is the best continued path for the c

We often talk about being co-researchers with the children, but I also think that we are co-documenters - especially in the sense of the Reggio Emilia approach sense of pedagogical documentation... I do not feel that we should be producing documentation FOR the children, but WITH the children. And if we are collecting data by documenting the children through photos, note-taking, filming, audio, collecting work etc together with the children and then analysing that with coll

This is the final post - number four... the previous ones in this series you can check here... ONE - about observations TWO - about analysing and THREE - about making plans and taking action This post is about PUBLICATION - about how we share the learning as a more finished product of thoughts... how we make the learning visible on the walls, in portfolios, books and films etc. It is usually the part that most people tend to call pedagogical documentation - yet when you g

This is the third in a four part series on Pedagogical documentation. part one can be seen - here and part two can be found - here In Part one I covered the topic of collecting data, while in the second post it was all about the analysis of the collected data... this post will be the decision making and action planning using the analysis as a basis. You might make the decision to introduce a project idea to the children... your observations have lead you to understand tha

This is part TWO in a series of four posts introducing pedagogical documentation. Part one was about collecting data... and can be read here if you missed it. The idea is that these posts are for educators just at the start of their journey with pedagogical documentation, the kind of post that is not giving you a step by step method of what you must do but a post that aims to give you ideas and inspiration and to feel a little more confident as you try it out. So you have c

This is a guide... it is not a step by step manual. So please read, let it fill you with ideas and with questions... and the courage to start... this is a post for pedagogues that have not yet started using pedagogical documentation and are interested in learning more about this documentation approach... This is post one of four... Pedagogical documentation differs from documenting in the sense that it is a tool for the teacher to learn more about the individual children

One of the questions I have often been asked is - how do teachers do observations... as most teachers talk about that the teaching is based on their observations of the children. Most of the preschools I visited with educators from Palestine we only visited for a short time, so that made it hard for us to observe the educators observing the children... and the preschools we visited for a longer period of time said that they were not doing any activities with the children yet

This post will have it's main focus for educators that do not work together at the same setting but meet up in learning circles etc... of course this approach can be used by educators in the same setting too. I will try to keep this as simple as possible by writing it in steps... The aim of this post is to offer a kind of routine for educators to use when analysing the documentation and therefore supporting the reflection process and also explore the effectivity of the doc

Sometimes I think we make pedagogical documentation more complicated than what it really should be... and much of that is to do with policies and the need to write reports and updates about each individual child. While I think it is important to see each child, and to ensure that we see and understand each child... writing reports/reflections in this manner does not always allow us to see their learning... it is more about measuring and proving to authorities that the work is

Today I will look at taking photos... I remember back in the nineties when I started working in preschools how we used cameras to document what we were doing and what the children were learning. I can openly admit that back in those days there was a lot more focus on what we were doing, a kind of record of our activities to show the parents ... I feel like I have come a long way in the last 25 years. I now use photography in many different ways... and I am so incredibly gra

This is just a short post to start an exploration of why do we document the children? What is the purpose of the documentation? How much time does it take? Does it interfere with the children playing? Learning? How do we use these notes, films and photos, quotes, audio recordings etc? How much time do YOU spend practicing the art of documentation? When do you practice? Is it a skill that can be learned through books and lessons or some that we need to do to learn? or both?

How to get started... what is it that you want to document? What should you be filming or taking photos of or taking notes of? I think this can be really daunting... as everything is of value... yet we do not have the time to document or process everything. it is simply overwhelming. So why not start with a project for yourself? I want to learn about....? how the children are using their fine motor skills how the children are developing their language how the childre