What are pedagogical documentation, portfolio learning, and formative assessment?
"Stand aside a while and leave room for learning. Observe carefully what children do, and then, if you have understood- well, perhaps teaching will be different than before.”
Simply, pedagogical documentation is observing for example children’s play, projects, discussions, and inventions. Taking photos, making notes, writing down explanations as well as tricky questions, saving artwork, recording action on video, recording voice… and using all the documents purposefully.
Pedagogical documentation is compiled systematically e.g. in a portfolio and educators use the documents wisely. They reflect and modify planning and teaching accordingly. Formative assessment - not summative - is used to follow children's learning journey.
Pedagogical documentation is an essential, integral working method in early childhood education. It supports planning, implementing, assessing, and developing early childhood education in many ways. It is an ongoing process, which gives holistic knowledge about children and makes learning visible.
Pedagogical documentation gives educators new angles on children’s behavior, thoughts, ideas, challenges, and creative processes. Each lovely, unique child deserves to be known and understood as an individual ❤️
Why do we need pedagogical documentation?
Here are five strong reasons to practice pedagogical documentation:
- Learn to know individual children – their interests, thoughts, skills, potential, and ways of participation and expression. Via visible documentation educators, as well as children themselves, can deepen their understanding and appreciate each child’s uniqueness.
- Enable parents’ involvement in their child’s education. Parents become aware of their child’s experiences at kindergarten and get the opportunity to contribute to the activities.
- Learn to know the group and understand the dynamics between the children in the group and their creative processes. By documenting group processes and play, educators learn from children and how they work and think together.
- Recognize and acknowledge the characteristics of communication between children and educators. Documentation opens possibilities for educators and children to plan activities together and be open to each other’s ideas, interests and challenges.
- Educator’s self-assessment and professional growth. Assessing the pedagogical documentation is important as educators gain information about the pedagogical activities, their own teaching patterns, and the children’s creative learning processes. Assessing the documentation provides opportunities to develop and grow.
The most important part of pedagogical documentation is to return to it and use it for formative assessment from the perspective of educators, children, child groups, and parents. Only then the documents will open up and share their secrets❤️
How to master pedagogical documentation?
Now we know that pedagogical documentation is an important part of early childhood education and care. It is not just paperwork, but it is for the best of the children, the parents, and the educators. Here is a 4-step framework for how to implement pedagogical documentation.
1. Topic and question
What is the most important issue in your childcare situation now? What should you focus on? Pedagogical documentation is a systematic process, so you need to think what are the central questions that you would like to have answers to. It is impossible to document everything and if you try to take too big a piece, it soon starts to feel overwhelming! Discuss with your colleagues and decide which areas you want to focus on now.
2. Observe and document
Next, you need to think, what are the best ways to get answers to the questions you have and then start to look for clues. Go to different situations during the day, observe with an open mind and use various documentation methods, for example, photos, videos, audio, artwork, and discussions.
3. Share and reflect
Documents get pedagogical emphasis once they are looked at and discussed. Share and reflect on the documentation with the families, with children, and with your colleagues. Having the parents and children involved in the reflection process makes the interpretation richer. What do these documents tell about this child/group/childcare center? What is the child doing? What skills did the child practice or learn? What are the child’s competencies? What type of answers did we get to the original question? What kind of different views do we have? The aim of reflection is to plan, assess and develop early childhood education and care in collaboration.
4. Develop and plan
The process of pedagogical documentation is meaningful only if you take advantage of the possibilities and challenges it offers. It is important to think about how you can develop the activities. What themes, methods or goals should you choose next? What is your next step towards better early childhood education?
How to get started with pedagogical documentation?
Pedagogical documentation is one of the cornerstones of Finnish Early Childhood Education. But of all the obstacles that educators face trying to document children's work, simply finding the time and right working methods is perhaps the most challenging. Just using manual working methods and tools is too cumbersome and leaves too little time to provide quality education.
Overall you will need to rethink your work with the children. With smart working methods and an efficient digital solution, such as Kindiedays, you will have time for the children while practicing pedagogical documentation to reach your pedagogical goals.
Kindiedays Portfolio is a leading-edge tool for documenting and assessing children's learning
Kindiedays Portfolio is a highly flexible digital solution for implementing a high-class learning process - inspired by Finnish best practices.
How does digital pedagogical documentation happen in practice in the middle of a busy day?
First of all, always have materials and tools ready for documenting! A camera, mobile phone, tablet…and when using Kindiedays naturally the Kindiedays Educator App.
Educators add photos and videos of learning moments quickly and connect them with meaningful context, eg. curriculum objectives or notes. Connect the observations and notes to the kindergarten’s and child’s individual curriculum and include the learning areas that have been left out in future planning.
Think in advance about what to document specifically in your group. What are meaningful and current questions, issues, or topics? It is impossible to document everything so narrow it down. Once you have chosen a topic, sort the documentation and plan your future activities according to your curriculum’s learning areas, such as 'Rich world of languages', 'Diverse forms of expression', 'Me and our community', 'Exploring and interacting with my environment' and 'I grow, move and develop'.
Sit down and discuss with each child e.g. once a week or month about all the things you have done during that period. Show all artworks, photos, videos, recordings, and other documents from that time. Let the child tell his/her views and write down the child’s words.
Finding out the child’s opinions and views is the most important thing! Ask the child questions like 'What was fun?' 'What was difficult?' 'What made you happy/unhappy?' 'What were you thinking at this moment?' 'What would you like to learn or do in kindergarten?'
Plan the next themes and projects according to the discussions with the children and families, observations, and documentation.
Benefits of digital documentation
Digital documentation can be shared with families easily, gets organized automatically, and is secured behind passwords. The digital solution should support and benefit your work and save you time so that you can truly be present with the children more often.
The digital solution helps families to see all documentation in real time. They are able to reflect and discuss it and the child’s day at home. A child’s learning can be directly connected to curriculum objectives and personalized notes may be added by the educator. At the end of the term, all digitally saved pedagogical documentation can be shared with families in the form of a portfolio. It’s your choice if you’d like to print it out or save it on your computer.
The manager loves pedagogical documentation as it makes tracking children’s learning so much easier. It is interesting to look at charts and reports of different child groups or individual children. The manager can instantly see which learning area of the curriculum is lacking or which one has been focused on. Reports are great for team meeting discussions and educators’ professional development.
