Cognition, Thinking & Understanding

Making Teaching Visible: Documenting Individual and Group Learning as Professional Develop

How can careful consideration of groups at work enhance the learning of preschool, elementary, and middle school students and their teachers? Building on research conducted with educators from the Municipal Infant-toddler Centers and Preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, researchers from Project Zero collaborated with pre-Kindergarten to grade 8 teachers in Massachusetts to examine how ideas developed in Italian preschools could enhance preschool, elementary, and middle-school education in the United States. Making Teaching Visible includes the stories of what the teachers learned through documentation and provides a framework for considering how documentation of individual and group learning can serve as professional development. Because it also contains thoughts on how to support this type of professional development, it provides a valuable tool for making classrooms and schools more powerful learning environments. 

Examples of documentation to aid teachers' own reflections

Documentation collected for this purpose helps teachers stay close to students' learning and interests by enabling them to revisit a learning experience. It leads teachers to compare what they thought would happen to what really went on and informs decisions about where to go next. Sharing this kind of documentation with others reduces the subjectivity of a single person's analysis and interpretation and can deepen understanding. This form of documentation is the least shaped (or the most "raw") of the three types described here. Reviewing this type of documentation often influences the amount of time a group spends on a topic and the level of student involvement in shaping the learning experience.

Below are examples of the documentation and practices with varying age groups. 

Examples of documentation shared back with learners

Making visible images of learning and being together in a group is a way to foster group identity and learning. This type of documentation promotes conversation or deepens understanding about one or more aspects of a learning experience. It can serve as a memory of learning in the classroom, allowing children and adults to reflect on, evaluate, and build on their previous work and ideas. Sharing documentation back with learners can take many forms: a photocopied sheet of paper, words repeated back to students, work brought back to a small group or put up on a wall, or a carefully arranged panel. The examples in this section range from more immediate and "in the moment" to more fully framed and shaped.

The Eureka Effect: The Art and Logic of Breakthrough Thinking

Breakthrough thinking comes as a sudden, seemingly unaccountable moment of inspiration. In this book, David Perkins explores the common logic behind breakthroughs in many fields, historical periods, and evolutionary epochs. Drawing on a rich knowledge of both artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, he sets forth a uniquely integrative theory of how insights occur. Along the way he offers dozens of often playful puzzles and illustrations that reveal the four key processes behind breakthrough thinking. (Originally published in hardcover under the title Archimedes Bathtub.) ISBN-13: 978-0393322552

Making Learning Visible: Children as Individual and Group Learners

In this richly-illustrated book, the culmination of a two-year research collaboration between teachers and pedagogues from Reggio Emilia and researchers from Project Zero illuminates ways in which documentation can foster both individual and group learning, creating a relationship between them. They identify methods and processes that will enable educators to reflect not only on the learning processes of children but also on those of adults.