Summarizing, categorizing, organizing, and breaking down into manageable “bites” that allow creator and readers to quickly comprehend information shared
Applying metaphors and symbols to tell a learning story and aid in metacognition
It is important to remember that a sketchnote’s primary purpose is for the information being synthesized to make sense to the sketchnoter, while infographics are most often created for conveying a message to a general or specific audience. Although many sketchnoters share their work and gain followers who enjoy their content and style of visual delivery, the primary purpose is about visualizing and making sense of one’s thoughts with an emphasis on the cognitive thinking process while sketchnoting.
When unpacking a sketchnote or infographic, one’s capability to convey an intended message in a concise and succinct manner can be evaluated by reflecting on questions such as these:
What does the creator consider most important to support the information shared based on a font size hierarchy?
How is the information grouped together? Does it appear random, or can you find evidence of a logical and purposeful placement of information using shapes, containers, numbers, or icons?
How are arrows or other features used to convey connections between or among the content, sequence, or timeline?
What metaphors, analogies, or symbologies are used to convey the overall message or specific components or details?
Summing Up
The reality is that most teachers will start unpacking their students’ artifacts for their own learning and to improve their pedagogical practices. An important goal needs to also be creating a comfort level in modeling and coaching their students in being primary learners who are documenting their own learning through the process of unpacking captured-learning artifacts.
To do so, it is important to have students observe and reflect by taking an artifact apart, studying the individual components, and making connections between or among those pieces. By applying a maker culture to the unpacking process in the after-documentation phase, students become active participants in a co-creation learning environment.
Fostering students’ skills over time to unpack their artifacts is a powerful tool that promotes students practicing ownership of their own learning and determining their next learning steps based on the evidence of learning visible in their artifacts.
Going Beyond
To amplify your reading beyond this book’s pages, we have created discussion questions and prompts for this chapter, which are located at www.documenting4learning.com. To extend your thinking, reactions, and responses, you can connect with other readers by leaving comments on individual chapter’s discussion posts on our documenting4learning blog.
We also invite you to contribute and share your artifacts in other social media spaces to connect with and learn from other readers around the world using the #documenting4learning hashtag on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram; or by mentioning @documenting4learning on Facebook and Instagram, and @doc4learning on Twitter.
11 Documenting Challenge 21st Century Skills and the Now Literacies
I’m never sure what’s coming next, but I’m an open-minded person and I welcome any challenge.
—Sarah Polley
Focusing the Challenge
This chapter has a twofold purpose: (1) to provide a detailed vignette that conveys the documentation phases and learningflow routine steps; (2) to challenge you to take your own learning, or your students’ learning, and create a documenting opportunity.
Businesses are making it clear that employees, now more than ever, must display 21st century skills, known as soft skills, that aid in successful productivity. Buhl (2017) states that six essential soft skills needed are, “communication; teamwork and collaboration; problem solving; critical observations; and conflict resolution.”
It is imperative that your students as engaged learners have authentic opportunities to learn and apply 21st century success skills in meaningful contexts throughout their academic years in preparation for their work life. Many learning organizations refer to these skills as the “Cs,” which most often include: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity, although they may also include other Cs, such as connections, citizenship, and character.
There are times when you may want to be explicit about the Cs being the learning focus or goal during a documenting opportunity (e.g., students capturing how they communicate and collaborate using various medias). Other times, the Cs may serve as the mortar that binds the documentation cohesively, such as in this challenge’s vignette. You will recognize multiple moments wherein the students were critical thinkers, communicators, collaborators, and creators.
As you read through the challenge, you will experience how the now literacies, which were explained in Chapter 2, were infused with 21st century skills in a sixth-grade humanities class focused on metacognitively learning, while involved in literature circles. To create a context for this challenge, a brief summary of the three phases has been provided in Table 11.1.
Image 11.1
Remember that the documentation phases and learningflow routine steps have points of intersection in a documenting opportunity (see Image 11.1).
For example, look, the first step in the learningflow routine is a facet in all three phases.
Therefore, you may notice that some of the bullets featured in Table 11.1 may be involved in the learningflow more than once when reading the “Framing the Challenge” section.
Framing the Challenge
A middle school teacher, Emily Vallillo, had been working with her students on documenting their learning as primary learners, as well as documenting her professional learning. She determined the focus she wanted her students to work on improving for this opportunity would be applying meaningful-engagement capabilities while participating in literature circle discussions. She also determined two clearly defined student learning goals:
Participate meaningfully in high-quality, text-based literature circle discussions
Support claims with relevant and specific evidence from the text
Emily met with her documenting action-research team (three other teachers in her school), and they agreed that students participating in literature circles was an excellent vehicle for both documenting her students’ growth in becoming critical readers and their ability to be conscientious learners and critiquers. Emily shared her drafted criteria for high-quality discussion engagement and text-based evidence that needed to be visible in their discussion video. Next, they helped her generate a rubric that her students would use and refer to during their task. Before they concluded their meeting, Emily shared her professional-growth desire in relationship to this opportunity. She said, “My goal is to answer this question for myself: how do I help make my students aware of their personal strategies and behaviors when reading and discussing text?”
Silvia, who was coaching teachers at Emily’s school in applying the documentation phases and routine, discussed the student-learning focuses and goals, as well as her personal-learning goal. They brainstormed documenting AS learning experiences that would aid students in their metacognitive processing that would make their behavior observations and textual reflections visible to themselves and others. This was important, given Emily’s desire for her students to become more aware of their personal engagement strategies and behaviors. Silvia mentioned that she would be a secondary learner and aid in capturing evidence of the students’ learning since she would be in the classroom for the task components as well. They then discussed what would be considered worthwhile captured evidence of learning based on the two student goals and Emily’s professional goal.
A few days later, Emily began the documenting process by posting a task summary and asked her students to think-pair-share regarding their initial reactions to the scope of the task:
Your task is to digitally analyze your group’s literature circle discussion. With images, words, and quotations from t
he text, you will show evidence of how your participation in your literature circle discussion met or exceeded high-quality expectations, including providing constructive comments. For the culmination of your task, you will create a reflective blog post on your own participation in your discussion group. You will embed your annotated video in your post as a documentation artifact.
Emily had backward planned the necessary outcomes to reach the culminating blog post expectation and provided her students with a task calendar highlighting the various components’ deadlines (e.g., reading and annotating pre-selected text, literature circle discussion time, analyzing recorded video of meeting, creating annotexted video, drafting blog post). Given the designated due dates, students in their literature-circle groups discussed the details of the task and generated clarifying questions to ask Emily. Once they conferenced with her, they determined what needed to be accomplished individually and as a group and filled in checkpoints on their calendars appropriately.
On the following pages, you will read and see highlights from each learningflow routine step during the literature circle discussion task. Be thinking about how the 21st century skills and now literacies are interwoven into these students’ learning experience.
Image 11.2
Look for Learning
Students individually focused on a literature-discussion question Emily had provided and made sticky note annotations in their text in preparation for using text-based evidence to support their claims in their discussion groups (see Image 11.2). Part of the preparation also included each student creating two or three questions that required text-based evidence that would be asked during the literature circle discussion.
Prior to beginning the discussion time, Emily reminded her students of the discussion focus and two goals, and asked them to begin to brainstorm what each goal may visually look like and audibly sound like when they record their discussion. She noted their suggestions on a T-chart labeled: What We Will See and What We Will Hear.
Next, she displayed and had her class review their previously agreed-on discussion protocols, which would be applied in their literature circle discussion:
Discussion Protocols
Read discussion norms: Come prepared.
Share in the flow of conversation.
You can read/think ahead, but don’t talk ahead.
Stay on topic.
Be respectful.
Be responsible for everyone’s knowledge.
Follow protocol.
Be certain everyone is ready to transition.
Ask clarifying questions.
Participate in deep discussion.
Take time to debrief and reflect on points shared.
Listen closely as each person shares their reflective thoughts.
Lastly, Emily asked each student to write a personal goal to actively work on during the discussion that could be captured via the video recording of their discussion. For example, Felix noted in his reflective journal: Be better at keeping my group on topic.
As Silvia prepared to capture the learning displayed by all the discussion groups, Emily provided each group with a reminder statement summarizing the purpose of the discussion in relationship to the two class goals, their personal goal, and the documenting task: The purpose of your camera recording is to create evidence of your discussion skills and your literary analysis of the read text.
Capture Learning
Everyone joined in their respective literature circle group and collaboratively determined (a) where they wanted to meet and (b) how to best capture their discussion on camera (see Image 11.3). One group decided their camera angle was “just right” when it was leaned up against a brick wall, while another group found a group member’s pencil case worked fine (see Image 11.4).
Image 11.3
Each group began by reviewing the protocol norms and reflecting on the summary statement Emily had just given them. They used the remainder of their discussion time to address the provided and student-generated questions by answering them using text-based evidence and collaborative conversations.
Image 11.4
While the discussions were taking place, Emily and Silvia individually recorded quotes being voiced by students while they listened in on the discussion groups, as well as reflective anecdotes for two reasons: one, as evidence of the students’ skill abilities concerning the documenting opportunity’s focuses and goals; and two, to generate learning evidence for Emily’s professional learning goal. Here are a few examples of the recorded quotes and corresponding anecdotes:
“I have a deep discussion question. What made me think of it was on page . . .” (fueling discussion, supporting claims with relevant evidence from text)
“I think it is on page 1 . . . ” (supporting claims with specific evidence from text)
“What if he could . . .” (fueling discussion, looking at different points of view)
“But how can he see the future without bamboo?” (fueling discussion)
“Guys, we have to focus.” (being responsible for everyone’s knowledge, being respectful)
“What else? Do you have anything?” (being responsible for everyone’s knowledge, being certain everyone is ready to transition)
“In the book, it said. . . . Right? . . . Yes, there is also evidence earlier in the book. Turn to page . . .” (supporting claims with relevant and specific evidence from text)
“I have a counter-argument I’d like to share.” (being respectful, fueling discussion)
“This is off topic.” (staying on topic—Felix said this. He is owning his learning!)
“I still don’t understand why they left him. It is still confusing. Can someone . . .” (asking clarifying questions)
Emily signaled when it was time for the discussion groups to begin debriefing and reflecting within their respective groups in preparation to share out as a class. She reminded her students that it is very important to
Listen closely to your own words when describing yourself and your actions, as well as when others share their critiques, both in your own discussion group and as a class. This information will help guide you when you begin to reflect deeper on your personal learning strategies and behaviors.
Reflect on Learning
The following day, each student began the next learningflow routine by metacognitively reflecting on what he or she personally said and conveyed during the peer critiques, as well as each group’s share-out time.
Emily followed this personal reflection time by letting the class know that they would now begin one of the most challenging components of the task—looking for visible and audible evidence of what was conveyed in their recorded discussion videos based on seeing and/or hearing:
High-quality discussion capabilities, or lack thereof, based on the protocols and rubric expectations
Text-based evidence to support the claims made based on the posed discussion questions
She then conducted a mini-lesson on what low-to-high quality literary text-based analysis and discussion behaviors look and sound like using their rubric to spark conversation. When Emily addressed the rubric-level requirements for the two video sections, she asked her students to brainstorm examples of what they might observe for a rating of Level 4 to Level 1. She had them use their previously brainstormed T-chart What We Will See and What We Will suggestions as a springboard, as well as reflecting on what had happened during their literature circle discussion time.
After they shared their ideas and examples, Emily facilitated her students calibrating what each level’s measurable attributes would be.
She then segued into the next component of their documentation task: annotexting their group-discussion videos to generate learning-thinking artifacts. She reminded them that, “Annotexting is annotating digitally by overlaying text, directional arrows, and frames at specific moments in the video,” and added, “Remember why you are annotexting—to provide evidence of your two learning goals: high-quality discussion engagement, and text-based eviden
ce to support your claims.” She demonstrated how to annotext a video clip that she and Silvia had created for the purpose of the mini-lesson using iMovie. Her students instantly got the idea of what they needed to do and were excited. They could not wait to get started annotexting their own videos (see Image 11.5)!
To conduct the annotexting process, each group was given the choice of using iMovie, Movie Maker, or any other video-creation tool they preferred. They referred to the last row of the rubric: Overall Professionalism, as well as annotexting guidelines for their literature circle video during this post-documentation phase (Table 11.2).
During the video annotexting and editing footage process, Emily and Silvia circulated to the different student groups to observe and document collaboration in action among each group’s members. They noticed that some students requested help from a peer (for shortcuts or tech support). For example, a few needed some assistance with how to cut individual movie clips and add subtitles, while others needed reminders or asked for feedback regarding audio quality and volume.
Image 11.5
Silvia and Emily noted that some students chose to share the screen and took turns in annotexting their group’s video clips, while others split the headset’s headphones and listened to the videos simultaneously, alternating turns to work on their respective clips, adding transitions, and typing the subtitles (see Image 11.6).
The students were provided two 45-minute blocks of time to edit and annotext their videos. They then published their videos online using YouTube or Google Video in preparation to embed the team video into their personal reflective blog post.
A Guide to Documenting Learning Page 25