A Guide to Documenting Learning

by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano

  Traditionally schools have used analog materials and direct mail (e.g., newsletters, flyers, handbooks, occasional write-ups in the local newspaper) to share information about their institution to the community. The content most often is to inform the community about what has happened on campus, upcoming events, policies, or new initiatives. Community interaction, if any, is minimal, such an inquiry phone call to a school or district office to clarify content or ask a personalized question.

  Interaction increases when special events take place (e.g., theater productions, concerts, sporting events, STEAM fairs), but traditionally, these are passive interactions where the community members in attendance are only receptive. When there are exceptions, it most often involves conversations between a community guest or two, and one student or small group of students explaining what has already happened (e.g., STEAM fair—prototype with specific criteria that has been created to solve a particular problem). This traditional method does not provide insights into what is currently taking place as schools move toward the attainment of desired outcomes or learning goals.

  For example, think of an instrumental performance where students are beginners to playing an instrument, let alone playing in an orchestra or band. Oftentimes administrators require the teachers to have the students performing pieces that are more difficult than should be allowed to showcase the school or district. Unfortunately, the reality is that this type of demand is detrimental to the students’ learning. When beginners are encouraged to play ability-appropriate pieces, learning becomes less stressful for all. During the community performance, the conductor/director should explain to the audience why the students are playing the pieces from a learner-in-progress point of view. Better yet, the performance should be filmed from various vantage points in the theater or room, including a post-playing question-and-answer time when audience members can ask the student-players questions related to their struggles and successes in learning to play the performance pieces. Back in the classroom, the students can unpack the concert performance footage and Q & A interactions from various perspectives, such as band/orchestra performance skills or communication skills.

  Strategically using targeted email lists with interactive components and engaging in active social media network to increase and amplify a school’s or district’s reach in defining, developing, and strengthening its brand is important to do. A co-created journey is developed by reaching out and asking the community to go beyond merely consuming the shared information to contributing their perspectives to the organization’s story. Visible community social media interactions based on incremental degrees of amplification include

  Providing an emotional reaction (e.g., like, heart, favorite, sad face)

  Re-disseminating content (e.g., re-tweet, re-pin, re-share)

  Leaving a comment

  Creating artifacts and sharing one’s perspective on the learning (e.g., a parent creates Facebook post that features student interviews about a school’s maker-faire event)

  To encourage ongoing community interaction, a school or district can take advantage of popular social media content ideas and relate them to the student learning and professional learning taking place on one or multiple campuses. Six strategies that can aid in establishing or expanding an educational brand-identity are highlighted: memes, challenges, selfies/USies, throwbacks, crowdsourcing, and visual quotes.

  Image 12.2

  Memes.

  According to Google (2017), meme is a humorous image, video, or piece of text that is copied, often with slight variations, and spread rapidly by Internet users.

  One popular meme: What I Really Do can easily be personalized to What They Think I Do for a student, teacher, administrator, or stakeholder to share and amplify using his or her photos and perspectives (see Image 12.2).

  Challenges.

  Consider promoting participation in a monthly or semester educational-oriented challenge that embraces a school’s or district’s mission, vision, goals, or recently implemented learning or teaching initiative.

  Participants, both in-house and in the community, are encouraged to post their contributions to the learning organization’s designated social media platform or platforms. A challenge can be one that

  is already established and has an educational feel or theme (e.g., book bucket challenge);

  can be modified with an educational twist (e.g., mannequin challenge where the scene is in various locations on a campus that collectively convey a specific type of learning moment); or

  is a new challenge that is strategically shared and amplified using multiple social-media platforms and networks (see Image 12.3).

  Image 12.3

  Using hashtags (e.g., #bookbucketchallenge) purposefully will only heighten amplification degrees and encourage additional local and global community interactions.

  Selfies/USies.

  As mentioned previously, selfies and USies are intended to be taken and shared via a networking platform. Therefore, they are perfect for branding!

  If selfies or USies are uploaded as is to social-media platforms for branding purposes, they only represent a documenting OF learning moment, given the photograph captured what has happened as display; and, there may not be any annotations included to convey the identity/purpose for the selfies or USies. To make certain these types of images serve the dual purpose of representing FOR and AS learning, a selfie or USie cannot stand on its own. The image needs to be part of a collection, such as a contribution in a crowdsourced action, or documentation over time.

  For example, a teacher or principal can brand himself or herself as a lifelong learner by posting a selfie of each book he or she has read, holding up the book so the cover is visible and giving it a thumbs-up. The brand-identity does not happen when one or two selfies are posted; it happens after 10 or 20 selfies are shared because the cumulative selfies convey the message that reading and the act of learning new information is important to the selfie taker. To amplify this teacher’s or principal’s sharing of his or her love for reading and calling for community members to also share their own selfies reading their favorite books will contribute to painting a story of the importance of a reading community (see Image 12.4).

  Throwbacks.

  According to Wikipedia, throwback days are a trend among social media sites where users post or repost older photographs, often from childhood. Engage a community by strategically sharing nostalgic photographs of school- or district-related past events or memorable moments (e.g., first-day-of-school pictures, graduating seniors as freshmen, field trips, alumni’s favorite school/district memory). Encourage them to contribute their own throwbacks from past learning experiences at a school or while in a district.

  Image 12.4

  By conducting throwback days, a brand-identity is being built or expanded because the interaction provides visual and emotional connections among in-house and local community members. When the community is invited to provide an emotional reaction, re-disseminate, leave a comment, or add their own throwback images, it continues to deepen the human connectivity. For example, a teacher, principal, or superintendent shares a throwback in-a-school-sport-uniform photograph on Facebook and asks the following in the description field: Please like if you played sports in school and add your own “I played in school sports” photo. Go Saber Cats!

  Throwback images encourage community members to find connections to their own learning and lives, as well as help them gain an insight into the lives of the educators caring for and teaching their children. For example, Image 12.5 includes a photo collage representing three of Janet’s firsts. The key message she is sharing in her curated descriptions is that who she is as a teacher has been affected by her youth, as well as the love and loss of her mother. When colleagues, stakeholders, and community members are afforded transparent glimpses into the people they work alongside or interact with, the institution adds emotional and empathic perspectives that convey who the collective school or district is, rather than o
nly identifying what the institution believes in, strives for, or represents.

  Image 12.5

  It’s Time to Take Action!: Chapter 12 Action Step

  It is selfie, USie, or throwback time! Based on what you have read in these sections, use one of the ideas or examples shared to experience a brand-identity opportunity for your classroom, grade level, department, school, or district office. Or if you prefer, brainstorm with colleagues and come up with your own idea.

  Remember to invite your community to contribute a selfie, USie, or throwback photograph. When sharing and amplifying your call for a crowdsourced image (e.g., how you take care of the environment, the love for your pet, your first or favorite family road trip memory), be sure to use the #documenting4learning hashtag on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram; or by mentioning @documenting4learning on Facebook and Instagram, and @doc4learning on Twitter.

  Crowdsourcing.

  While crowdsourcing has been addressed in previous chapters, thinking about its purpose adds a branding layer to its usefulness. Oxford English Dictionary defines crowdsourcing as the practice of obtaining information or input into a task or project by enlisting the services of a large number of people, usually online.

  Schools and districts can aid their online branding efforts by engaging their community in creating crowdsourced content that conveys learning topics and themes happening on its campus or campuses.

  Asking the community to elicit a one-word or one-sentence perspective pertaining to a posed question can be powerful (see Image 12.6).

  For example, responses to “What do you think is one skill future leaders need to learn now?” can become a posted video containing the one-sentence submitted answers with background music.

  Another crowdsourcing idea is to create a collage of selfies with written responses to a posed question, such as, “What does documenting learning mean to you?”

  Visual Quotes

  Visual quote cards were explained in Chapter 8, including examples of creating them while attending a conference or reading a book (see Image 12.7). Sharing quotes from books, magazines, films, music, artwork, and other forms of media related to a learning focus or supporting vision, mission, and core values can also contribute to a school’s or district’s branding.

  Community members can be invited to share comments about the posted visual quotes or share their favorite media-based quotes to be added to a visual quote showcase.

  Image 12.6

  Using Documenting Learning to Re-think Teacher Observation

  The documenting learning framework is not meant to be a must-do addition to an already full plate for educators. It is meant to be a learning-and-teaching replacement model that supports students and teachers who authentically own their own learning while the learning is taking place.

  When a teacher is required to be formally observed, his or her learner engagement and classroom culture should be captured, reflected on, and shared over time. Artifacts that convey curricular focuses and goals need to be made visible multiple times to express a teacher’s pedagogical patterns and trends (see Image 12.7).

  Image 12.7

  While officially observing a teacher in person has its purpose, do traditional classroom observations two or three times a year or via random walk-throughs truly

  Paint an accurate picture of a teacher’s learning and teaching capabilities?

  Provide adequate evidence of a schoolwide or districtwide initiative’s implementation or its sustainability?

  Provide adequate evidence of a teacher being a risk-taker and innovative?

  A learning organization that meaningfully incorporates the framework throughout the year can upgrade teacher observations and evaluations by using a teacher’s students’ artifacts, as well as his or her professional learning. When re-thinking teacher observations and the inclusion of documentation artifacts, here are a few more questions to ponder:

  What will we accept as evidence of learning for professional growth related to a pedagogy or practice?

  Could a teacher blogfolio that includes annotexted images or videos better reflect his or her growth over time?

  How could a teacher’s engagement in a year-long, self-selected area of growth within a local or global network provide authentic documentation evidence of his or her learning journey?

  Since teacher observation and evaluation procedures are often controlled by policymakers (e.g., school boards, unions), current practices for now might not easily be changed or modified. Armed with pedagogical reasoning, it calls for educators to become disruptors of the status quo and present relevant alternative measures to policymakers. Since sustainable change takes time, an immediate action can be incorporating professional and student artifacts in post-classroom observation meetings. These authentic documents can aid in spearheading meaningful conversations and thoughtful decision making that can offer stronger evidence of what has been taking place in a classroom beyond an in-person observation time.

  Another re-think that leverages the use of documenting FOR and AS learning artifacts from a teacher-evaluation perspective is to use the documentation as an evidence component for an accreditation or reaccreditation process. While accreditors have policies and procedures they must follow (which most of them need to be upgraded as well), it is refreshing when they have opportunities to analyze these types of artifacts of student, teacher, and administrator learning and teaching over time. The availability of authentic documented evidence over time eliminates the need for the in-house accreditation task force to develop evidence to satisfy accreditation requirements.

  Documenting Learning to Create and Embed In-House Professional Learning

  Everyone in a school struggles to find time to learn and work collaboratively in meaningful ways. There are plenty of meetings scheduled, but many times, teachers comment that they leave the meetings feeling as if the time or content did not contribute at all or significantly to their students’ learning or their teaching in a personalized manner.

  Jacobs and Alcock (2017) name participation in a learning network as one of the most powerful tools of a professional learner:

  Making connections and participating in a community with purpose empowers the participant as an educator. Finally, there is a power in publishing. Participating in a network above the level of observer indicates a commitment to the community. That commitment is rewarded by increased connections, feedback, and a sense of emotional ties to the community. It is also an investment in the strength of the community, achieved by sharing learning and active research with other participants, and sharing reflections about process and product development in the fastest way possible. The combination of rewards and investments makes participation in a learning network among the most powerful tools of a professional learner in the field of education. (p. 43)

  Throughout our book, the call for participating in digital learning networks or in-person learning communities to aid in making documenting opportunities meaningful and purposeful has been emphasized. These professional learning hubs do precisely what Jacobs and Alcock advocate: increase connections, invite feedback, and evoke emotional ties to a community of learners. And, it causes the educators as learners to walk the talk, not just talk the talk. If educators want students to

  Be avid digital readers and writers, they need to model what digital readers and writers do when they are learning

  Learn to collaborate and work on a local or global learning team, they need networking opportunities to apply the skills necessary to learn and work collaboratively in a virtual environment

  Share their learning with peers and experts for feedback, they need to be transparent and openly share their learning with colleagues and experts to engage in feedback experiences

  Become network literate, they need to have personal experiences with strategically using network platforms and tools, including creating a professional identity and gaining understanding of network capabilities through authentic experiences

  Leverage the
power of a learning network to solve problems and find answers beyond Googleable questions, they need to be connected and actively engaged in social media inquiry networks

  Own their own learning by actively participating and contributing, the teachers need to own their own learning too and the evidence thereof by producing artifacts that represent their growth in understanding and application over time

  To brand a school or district as a strong learning community and/or network, teachers and administrators need to be empowered as professionals by self-selecting personalize learning topics of interests, similar to the Edcamp model. This allows them to be heutagogically engaged while growing as educators and leaders who foster and support the learning of those in their care.

  Using the learningflow routine steps will not only benefit an individual educator as a learner, but it contributes knowledge and understanding to an entire community, which serves as evidence of a school’s or district’s collective ongoing professional development. The teachers and administrators’ learning-thinking artifacts can be captured, unpacked, shared, and amplified using the social media platforms and tools mentioned in Chapters 8, 9, and 10 to aid in the branding process.