Cognition, Thinking & Understanding

Visible Learners: Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools

Inspired by the innovative educational philosophy that originated in Reggio Emilia, a small city in Italy, Visible Learners offers research-based practices for fostering learning in groups through documentation. In this approach, first developed during a long-term collaboration between researchers at Harvard's Project Zero and Reggio educators, learning becomes a visible activity that develops students' intellectual capacities as well as their individual and group identities as learners. Visible classrooms can be identified by five key principles—that learning is purposeful, social, representational, empowering, and emotional. The authors define each principle using illustrative learning portraits, quotes from students and teachers, pictures, reflections, and examples of student work. Additionally, the authors offer teachers and administrators practical ways to enhance learning by increasing collaboration and critical thinking across grade levels and subject matter. Also included is a section containing dozens of tools for making learners and learning visible, incorporating guidelines for the classroom and the staffroom as well as ideas for engaging students' families. Visible Learners shows how observing and documenting learning can change the nature of that learning, and asks teachers to look beyond surface to understand who their students are, what they come to know, and how they come to know it.  ISBN: 978-1118345696

Supporting Learning in Groups in the Classroom (Ch. 11)

Tools included in this section of Visible Learners: 

- Getting started with Making Learning Visible

- Looking at Learning in Groups: Classroom Discussion Guidelines

- Considerations for FOrming Small Groups

- Entry-Point Charts: Engaging All Members of the Group

- Structures for Giving and Receiving Feedback 

Supporting Learning in Groups in the Staffroom (Ch. 12)

Tools included in this section of Visible Learners:

- "Throwing Your Money Away": Exploring Group Learning and Documentation

- Designing and Facilitating Adult Study Groups

- Looking at Documentation: The Collaborative Assessment Conference

- Creading Documentation or Public Viewing Protocols

Learning that Matters: An Expanding Universe

What's worth teaching is perhaps the most central question of education. Choices about what's worth teaching made by educators, school boards, and governments fill up the schooldays of students. However, many educational leaders today feel that this fundamental question does not get enough attention. Too much effort goes toward doing the same job better and not enough toward rethinking what the job is. In this spirit, educational leaders in many independent schools and some public schools have introduced new themes, such as 21st century skills, digital technologies, interdisciplinary learning, world citizenship, global perspectives and global problems. While mastery of reading and mathematics remains a tremendously important agenda, the universe of what's deemed worth teaching by one or another advocate is expanding dramatically.

This white paper offers a broad but brief overview of trends in that expanding universe.

Documentation: Transforming our Perspectives

This 16-minute film by Melissa Rivard and Stephanie Cox Suarez for the Documentation Studio at Wheelock College features conversations with leaders from Reggio about the practice of documentation and its role in teaching and learning.