Collaboration & Group Learning

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.

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. 

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. 

Challenging Educational Assumptions: lessons from an Italian-American collaboration

Abstract: In this paper, the authors argue that in order to create a curriculum of the future, we need to re-evaluate at least four key assumptions about teaching and learning that have guided educational decisions in the past...