Question
Why should I document in early childhood education?
Answer
Why should I document? These are the real reasons that I've been coming back to throughout this course. The first reason is to understand individual child growth and learning and to make it visible. The second reason is to look at group learning and make our curriculum visible. If we go back and think again about all of those different aspects of why you should document (to celebrate children, to provide evidence of learning, etc.), these are the two reasons: we want to understand individuals and we want to understand the group. Developmentally appropriate practice goes back to typical development, what a group of children that are four years old does and what an individual child does. Also think about how the different cultural impacts, prior experiences, environments, and other things shape it? That's why we document.
There are many ways to document. Think about which of those resonates with you. Is it to honor children, celebrate what they're doing, and have children see that? Is it to provide evidence of learning? Is that what's super important in your program right now? "I need to prove to our administrators we are doing it. That's why we're making noise." I once had a principal who was so concerned with noise that I had to show him why talking was so valuable. We were learning language acquisition, among many other things, but all they seemed to care about was we were too loud. Is it to provide evidence of that?
Is it to build family and community partnerships? That's another really important thing. Is that why you're documenting? Maybe we want to get more families involved so that they can help us in the classroom. Is it so I can understand individual child learning and growth? Is it because I need to get portfolios because that's what my work says I have to do? I've got to collect this data and evidence and I've got to assess where they're at. So, I've got to get on top of that. Maybe I want to do it because I have a lot of assessments that I'm required to do.
Think about it and ask yourself, "Is that my purpose?" Maybe your purpose is just to rethink your curriculum. "I want to make my curriculum more meaningful to children. I'm having a lot of behavioral guidance engagement issues, maybe children aren't even interested, so I need to document what they're doing and think about why they're not interested. I want to start seeing what they are interested in. I might want to use this new cycle to help me do curriculum planning. I'm going to start using this in terms of getting to the next level of my curriculum planning or maybe I want to become that reflective practitioner. I want to be really thoughtful and intentional about every single thing I do."
If you think about these they're sort of on a continuum. It's like when you are that intentional reflective practitioner, you're already doing all those other things that I mentioned. Sometimes you're not excellent in one of those in another area you're working on. Maybe you're not as great at connecting with families and that's going to be an area you're going to think about. You might do documentation to help include them. You might think, "I really want to get better and I'm taking a child development class. I want to think about what development looks like for these three-year-olds I'm working with?"
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Documentation: Making Children's Learning Visible, presented by Hilary Seitz, PhD.
