Documentation Examples > Examples of documentation to aid teachers' own reflections

On June 5, with eight class days left before the end of the school year, I got my students started on an analytical essay about Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the book they had spent the previous 3 1/2 weeks reading and thinking about. I chose to begin the week by showing a simple five-minute slideshow of pictures that I had taken over the previous month. I entitled the slideshow, "Working Together in World Lit. I." I added a few titles that emphasized different types of collaboration. When it was over, I told my students that I wanted to remind them of how well they had been working together because we were about to embark on our final piece of collaborative work.

Looking back, I was struck by how smoothly that Monday went - and the rest of the week, too. Then, on Friday, the day the paper was due, there was a higher rate of completion for this challenging assignment than any other major piece of work we had done all semester. I had to wonder if it had anything to do with that little slideshow.

I have done the same paper in the same way before and have considered it very successful. But this time felt even better. The kids give me a hard time every time I take out the camera, but they always want to see the pictures afterward. I think it makes them feel seen and valued. Collectively, my students displayed greater confidence, and in most cases, greater proficiency than usual in completing this assignment which I consider to be the most challenging assignment of the course.

This is a unit in which I have been employing documentation for several years, and this time around I added many more opportunities for students to learn from one another and to revisit their thinking in very deliberate ways. How did those opportunities, combined with pictures of themselves learning from each other influence not just their work and learning, but their attitudes toward that work and learning?

None of the students mentioned any of the photos or video or any of my other documentation efforts in any of their reflections, but I feel that it had a quiet, positive effect on the atmosphere of the classroom, and the depth of their engagement in the material.

Joan:

What a wonderful way to return to school after a vacation! Were I, a student in Jen's class, would be reminded not only of the various occasions on which I had successfully worked with my classmates or benefited from such work, but of the various ways I knew how to work with them - the kinds of groups, tasks, and strategies that seemed to lead to higher quality learning and products for us all.

The slideshow may also have reminded the students of their whole-class reflections after such collaborative experiences. They were used to articulating what they had learned from others and what behaviors had contributed most to their collaborative learning. They had also offered advice to themselves about how to improve their collaborations.

Years ago, I went to a "Descriptive Review of Child" training led by Pat Carini. In introducing the work we were going to do together, she told us that in the small town in which she'd grown up, no problem had ever arisen that hadn't been soluble by those who lived there. Generally, they responded by pooling their wisdom, skills, and energy to develop and implement a solution. The moral for our work at the training: the answers to our questions about students and teaching were in the room - in us - as long as we were willing to do our most sound, most imaginative thinking together in conjunction with the problem before us.

When Jen showed her slideshow, I believe her students understood her to be saying, "The answers are in the room - in all of YOU - so remember that you really do know how to work together to find and assemble them." Such a reminder could only be empowering!

"The thing that I really enjoyed was when we were all together and we're all having fun and everyone participating and stuff. Like right now. That's one of my highlights." ~ Rasmiya

"A highlight I had this year was when we did the Odyssey play in class and my beard kept falling off. It was really funny and I think the whole group had a good time and it was just really fun. It was fun to work with everybody and (inaudible) group of people." ~ Alexander

"The highlight of this class . . . is being with everyone this semester." ~ Jeffrey (The ellipses represent a long pause during which I was sure he was thinking up something sarcastic to say.)

"Final thoughts: I like this class a lot, like, every morning I was happy coming here. Even though you make fun of me, and I make fun of some people, but this class was fun. Like I never used to like literature at all. It was always my worst subject since I was, like, a little kid. And then coming to this class I understand literature much better." ~ Calvin

"In my writing - getting feedback from everyone and Ms. Hogue shows that everyone cares about what I write and how I should write it." (paraphrased from Jean)

Joan:

So important!! When words like "team" and "family" are chosen by students, when a ninth-graders says, "I think every moment is a highlight, every day, . . . , every second," the students are clearly talking about comfort, safety, respect, maybe even love. Learning is one thing that blooms from this combination: Lina spoke of students not fearing to say, "Oh, Ms. Hogue, I don't understand this," and Chris stated, "I understand literature much better." Responsibility, resolutions for the future, and gratitude are other things that blossom: One student described her failing course grade (though her Lord of the Flies paper was high quality) as her own fault, acknowledged being helped, and gave thanks. The openness, the generosity, and the warmth create a perfect environment for growth.

Suddenly the garden has become a kind of ecosystem in which Jen and I, though respectively the chief and secondary gardeners who tend and care for it, aren't the only agents of growth and the only cultivators of beauty. The flowers, the growing things, live interdependently and we all play our roles in fostering and then sustaining the growth. Truly it is "notre jardin." And we await the next growing season and prepare for its gifts and challenges, first by looking back on last year.

"In this social allegory, Simon is the most complex person on the island. He is misunderstood because he's quiet but is probably the smartest. He has more wisdom on how to survive than the others. In the Lord of the Flies Simon represents independence." ~ Douglas

"In this social allegory, Ralph represents all the strong and good leaders. Through this character William Golding is trying to show that all good people or good leaders can't do anything by himself, other people have to work hard and help." ~ Sandre

"William Golding is trying to show that Piggy represents the weak person in society and why we have laws to protect them. William Golding is trying to show that without rules and laws it is easier to bully people and scare them, so they do not have to listen to someone's good ideas that would benefit them in the future." ~ Jeffrey

"Simon represents individuality. Lord of the Flies is an allegory for our social life and shows how society can be cruel, heartless, and ignorant to those with knowledge that is new to society." ~ Alexander

"In Lord of the Flies Simon represents having an independent mind. Through this character William Golding is trying to show that society treats outsiders negatively and ends up hurting or killing them. People have a hard time hearing new/different ideas from prophets or visionaries." ~ Max

Joan:

Lord of the Flies was a wonderful choice for Jen's students at the particular moment her class began to explore it and her choice of understanding goals ensured that students would connect their lives to the work. The book has an Edenic island setting, but the serpent is always lurking. Since the text is often as dense as the growth on the uninhabited island, Jen created student groups, each of which focused its reading and thinking energies on one character in the novel. Jen's activities and assignments required her students to know intimately their particular characters and to explore the roles of all the characters in the story's various episodes. Given that within our school and certainly in the worlds surrounding school, people often strip other people of their dignity, Jen set out to use literature - this piece of literature in particular - to help her students explore their own beliefs about how people should act given that their lives are intertwined with those of others. According to Janelle, " . . . we looked at our character as not being a character but a real person." People's treatment of others, especially as it expresses their core beliefs, has much to do with whether flowers get to bloom in the first place, and then whether they get to thrive until the natural end of the growing season.

Might the book have resonated less with Jen's students had her class not read it approximately a month after the murder of a Cambridge teenager known to a number of the students? I think the students' connections to their focus characters were so strong and the issue of human dignity so important that they still would have been compelled to engage and strive. But I do think the violence in their own neighborhood and its resultant loss of young life gave the novel a relevance it might not have had otherwise. Clearly, from their points of view, the book has lessons to teach about choices, values, obligations, consequences, and rewards.

In their final portfolio presentations, students had a very general assignment: Discuss one way your reading has improved using evidence from your portfolio; Discuss one way your writing has improved using evidence from your portfolio; Discuss one goal you have for next year; Share a highlight from this class.

I was quite surprised that so many students specifically cited the LOTF note-taking or paper-writing packet as a demonstration of their improvement in this class. For one class in particular, I spent much of the semester wondering if they could handle this unit at all. I have been improving the note-taking packet yearly, but the paper-writing packet is newer, and I have wondered if I was doing too much of the work for my students. From listening to student comments, it seems to have helped the kids to feel like they can do the work independently, and it doesn't seem to have restricted their ability to communicate their own unique sense of what is important in the novel.

What is the balance between scaffolding and restricting? How do I know when students need more structure and when they need less? Have these instructional materials been successful because the structure is clear, but loose enough to allow for a wide variety of responses? I notice that I do not ask any of the typical comprehension and interpretation-type reading questions in these materials. Hmmm.

". . . that goes into one of the best writings I had. . . my memoir, it wasn't nothing compared to the Lord of the Flies, 'cause like, I don't know, I just, I put time and effort in it and it's like everybody had something to say about the book and Ms. Hogue had us, like, write the packet. I like the packet she made us write because it made me understand. Like I said, when I first read the book I was not having - it was SO boring - but it went on when we had to do the packet I understood it more and then the paper was just like, oh, I get this, and the way she told us to write the paper just made it better. . ." ~ Ashley

"Before, if you gave me Lord of the Flies last semester, like if I didn't take this class, and after I finished it and you asked me, like, what the book was about, I just look at you and say, "I don't know." But my reading improved because I learned to talk to the text so I understand it better and I can explain it." ~ Rasmiya

"My reading has improved because, at first, I can remember that I never even opened the book. I would, like, look at the cover and be like, 'Uh-uh. This is boring. I'm not reading it.' Just because of the picture. And then, like, I would never, like, really pay attention to the book - what it was about, stuff like that. So when we had to do something I be like, 'I don't know what this is about. I don't know what to write.' I used to be lost and Ms. Hogue used to look at me like I was crazy. And then when we read the Lord of the Flies book, like, at first, I didn't want to read it, like. And I was looking at it, like, this was going to be, like, not my type of book. But then she gave us our characters to focus on and stuff like that and that was better because we could, like, focus on one character and getting to know the character. So that was something that I liked."~ Laura

"One way that my reading has improved this semester was when I read Lord of the Flies. Umm, before I read Lord of the Flies I usually, when I read, I used to skip pages and not pay attention to what I was reading. Or sometimes I would just go to the questions and not even read at all. But ever since I started reading Lord of the Flies I started reading through the whole thing and it improved my reading." ~ Jared

"One way my reading has improved this semester is also I read Lord of the Flies, 'cause usually if I had to read a book, I'd just read it straight through and not even get the meaning. But this year when I read the Lord of the Flies I was really able to analyze, you know, what the true meaning of it was - what the theme was - and how it connected to history and everything that's going on in our society." ~ Vladimir

"My reading improved this year because talking to the text made the book Lord of the Flies more understanding for me." ~ Alyssa

"One way my reading was improved was doing the reading packet for Lord of the Flies. I didn't really know how to read certain books because they're hard to understand, but when I was doing the reading packet I understand more about it because I had to talk to the text and explain what I thought was going to happen. I understand more about my character so it made it easier for me to understand it. And then when we went over it in class and you all explained about your characters so it made it a lot more easier because I wasn't not only learning about my character, I was learning about other people's characters more, too, like your attitude about your characters, too, so that's why I think my reading has improved." ~ Chris

Sara: "One way my reading has improved is, um, looking for, like, good quotes in the text and an example of this is the Lord of the Flies reading journal because I had to look for quotes to write down because that was part of the homework."

"How did that help your reading?"

Sara: "Because it makes me look at text closer and understand. Like, I really have to look at the book to find good quotes."

Joan:

Students' comments about the two packets that Jen designed - one helped them to engage with and process their reading, and the other guided them through the essay-writing process - reveal that these materials helped students improve as readers and writers: students recognized that they had acquired new knowledge and methods that they willingly employed to help them understand more deeply and to communicate their understandings more effectively. The students described changes in their behaviors as readers - how they'd kept reading even when the text became difficult and less engaging, how they deliberately employed particular literacy strategies to aid their understanding. They also described changes in their personal attitudes: they were committed to reading texts even when discouraged by them because they now believed they could understand literature and that literature had something to offer them. If the slideshow of earlier classroom collaborative work was the tool Jen used to aerate the soil of the classroom garden after her student seeds had lain fallow during spring break, then the reading and writing packets acted as stakes that gave new literary and human understandings both direction and support as they reached skyward.

While students' comments make no reference to the copious post-it notes that adhere to numerous posters around Jen's classroom walls, I feel compelled to mention them as a material crucial to Jen's students' success. So much of Jen's students' evolving thinking - later further developed in their literary essays - is captured in these brief character-centered renderings of text-based thought and questions, which live on the classroom walls, ever available for students' further additions and examination. Pastel flower petals, they flutter in the spring breezes and draughts created by the opening and closing of Jen's classroom door.

I have taught this unit several times but this time I very consciously added more opportunities for students to learn with and from one another. My sense is that these opportunities are critical to the success of the unit, but students didn't tend to credit much of their learning to times when the teacher was not in a lead role. Some students mentioned the importance of whole group discussions about each chapter's focus areas, but these discussions were definitely led, and often dominated by me. In informal and written reflections throughout the unit, students did not report significant learning from their character groups or sharing character portraits or reading the character walls - even though I think those were important to developing their understanding. I'm wondering how to help them recognize the importance of the learning they do from one another in settings where the "teacher" is not in a lead role. Here I was able to capture a moment when students were conscious of having learned something important from a peer. The occasion was the oral presentation of found poems* about their characters. It was a whole class activity, but students were clearly the presenters of information and they are responding more to one another than to me.

*The poems could use words found in the novel, words of other students found in the room, words found in other sources, or one's own words

Transcription of video segments after reading character poems:

Jennifer: So, did these poems change or reinforce what you already thought about this character (Simon)? Did they give you different ideas or a stronger idea?

Sandre: (inaudible)

Jennifer: Sandre is saying here you all talk about him being strong and he didn't really think about him being strong.

Janelle: Oh, yeah. Me either.

Jennifer: Where do you see his strength?

Douglas: In his mind.

Jennifer: What do you mean?

Jean: He uses his brains to (inaudible) force. Other people rely on visual stuff. He uses his mind. It helps him think what he should do and how he got to help others.

. . .

Jennifer: Here's my last question for you. After hearing these poems, what do you think - as a class - what do you think about our understandings of these characters? How do you feel about our understanding?

Sandre: Some characters got stronger. Simon, I think he got stronger in my opinion cause I didn't think of him as strong. You know, Ralph and Piggy, I always thought of them the same way.

Jennifer: That's really interesting, because it ties in to the reflection question about understanding how authors tell stories through changes in characters. Do you feel like you have a good, strong understanding of the characters?

Various students: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jennifer: What's your evidence of that?

Inae: Because we were all in different groups, like we all had our character and if everybody had all these characters, we wouldn't be able to understand as much because each group focused on one thing so they could find more evidence.

Jennifer: Do you think that having experts on each character helped everybody know the characters better?

Various students: Yeah. Yeah.

Jennifer: How? Can you explain how to me? Who else said yeah? OK, you and then you.

Janelle: Because everybody... it's kind of like what Inae said. If everybody was focused on one character you would probably, like everybody has their own perspective and understands things differently so, like, you would understand that character more but you like split it up into groups, like everybody had their different understandings and stated their opinion.

Jennifer: Oh, so you mean your Ralph group helped you understand Ralph better?

Janelle: Yeah, but by making that poem and by us discussing with the class it helped us look at things differently and understand things more.

Jennifer: OK, so you're saying that you wouldn't understand your character as well if you didn't have your group, and the whole class wouldn't understand your character as well if you didn't know it so well and be able to share it. Douglas, what were you going to say?

Douglas: I was going to say it worked because, like, he (gesturing to Sandre) didn't think that Simon was strong at all.

Janelle: Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

Douglas: 'Cause he thought that I meant by strong probably physically, but (inaudible), I said, no, I was talking about the mind.

Jennifer: So if you weren't focused on Simon, do you think you would have picked that up about him?

Douglas: No.

Jennifer: OK, but because you were focused you picked it up and you could share it with other people.

Janelle: Yeah, its like when you have one thing to focus on, it's easier to learn it and then have it like to focus on the whole group learning it.

Joan:

As their comments reveal, students in Jen's class recognize one another as sources of ideas and evidence in general, and of learning of a variety of sorts. Small group discussions deepen students' understandings of their own Lord of the Flies characters; foster students' understandings of all characters in the novel by allowing "character experts" to share their insights. As one student puts it, "If I just have what I know, I will only know that much. If I add other people's ideas to mine, I will know that much."

To me, very. They kept me anchored and on point. I didn't do a very good job of keeping them in the consciousness of my students, but I think I can honestly say that every moment in class was used in the service of one or more of those UGs and I feel that my students met all of the goals to a greater or lesser extent.

Joan:

Jen's work as classroom teacher ultimately revolved around the understanding goals she established for her students, whether or not she articulated those goals repeatedly to her students as a matter of Teaching for Understanding instructional practice. Her own focus on them and her conviction of their importance made her a mindful and purposeful gardener - one who transplanted, weeded, seeded, watered, and tilled diligently and strategically in order to be ready for her community's upcoming garden tour (in our case, the end of the school year). I suspect the learning experiences she designed around those goals, accompanied as they often were by formal, designated times for reflection, allowed her students to connect their learning to those goals, even if they did not refer to them specifically.

For a while, Jen and I have been wondering about the ways in which Teaching for Understanding and Making Learning Visible, both ideas developed and researched at Project Zero, can support each other. We are most grateful for the data sets that MLV documentation practices afford in connection with desired unit understandings; we are also appreciative of how documentation allows us to know our students as people with individual learning preferences, cognitive strengths and weaknesses, prior knowledge bases, interpersonal skills, and social/emotional needs. Teaching for Understanding works best for students when the instruction, performances, and assessment approaches created in conjunction with it reflect an attention to this kind of information about students.

As I'd done several times in the past (because of MLV support), I designated "walls" for collecting work and ideas on sticky notes for each of the main characters in the novel.

I had been disappointed in the past that students didn't seem to be as interested in these walls as I had hoped. I added photos of students looking at the walls and gave the students a specific assignment to read the wall of a character that they were NOT assigned, and write a note about what they learned from reading the wall. These were placed on stickies of a different color so as not to be confused with the comments of "experts."

Joan had the wonderful idea of having students create "found" poems about their characters using language found in the book and around the room. This assignment came out of our experience of documenting the students working on poetry projects and seeing how engaged they were and trying to use their excitement about poetry to fuel this end-of-the year novel unit. We were also feeling that they were beginning to develop some important understandings about poetry that we wanted to reinforce, even though the poetry unit was over. Finally, This seemed like an excellent opportunity to spend time with others' ideas - via the character walls - and for reflecting on learning. Not only would students create these poems, they would color-code them to show where the language had come from.

Looking back now, I think what was probably more important than the sequence of units, was the way that Joan and I tried to listen to the class and tried to make links from unit to unit and to build on what students were doing well to help them with things they found challenging. I'm not sure it is so important that we do the poetry unit right before LOTF, but that we keep listening and responding to the group from unit to unit.

Joan:

As I look at our classroom garden in which the flowers themselves increasingly play the role of gardeners, cultivating themselves and one another, I step back to think about what we have cultivated.

• Our garden has grown mutual respect, interdependence, and affection, largely through cycles of working in groups, representing developing ideas in visible and audible ways, further developing these ideas in consultation with others' thinking, and reflecting on the processes of learning and learning together. As a result, our students have developed a genuine appreciation of the "learning power" and social/emotional rewards of a real learning group

• From a Teaching for Understanding point of view, our garden has begun to grow the understandings that Jen?s understanding goals established as important outcomes of this "required" ninth grade unit.

• Our garden has also grown an optimistic orientation toward the future: the flowers are leaving Jen's classroom with new skills and knowledge, confidence in applicability of these new skills and knowledge to new learning situations, a shared memory of learning together, and the resolve to use their awareness of their successes and "mistakes" to commit to more learning and more academic success.

So many formalized educational ideas come to mind as I look at this collection of learning outcomes. Our garden has supported the development of "better" habits of heart, mind, and work (ATLAS Schools, First Amendment Schools) and of the thinking dispositions of ability, alertness, and inclination (Ritchhart and others).

As I strive to analyze the design and growth patterns and the processes underlying our garden's success and attempt to understand how next year's garden might be as healthy or even more robust, I appreciate how many of the practices central to Teaching for Understanding and Making Learning Visible that surface student thinking, learning, and reflective insights are highly compatible - and absolutely essential to one another if a classroom is to become a garden where students flower as learners and human beings.