Exploring Pedagogical Documentation and Emergent Curriculum
OUR JOURNEY
Kindergarten teachers explored pedagogical documentation and emergent curriculum from a Reggio-inspired lens. The team made learning visible to the children and hoped that it would build curiosity and increase reflection, ownership, and depth of their learning.
How might pedagogical documentation support and deepen thinking while learning through emergent curriculum?
Forms of documentation to drive emergent project learning:
Floorbooks
Projecting photos onto the white board to spark class discussion
Children’s art displayed or available to refer to ideas
Building an understanding of the purpose of documentation
Writing children’s quotes directly onto photos or in floorbooks
Teacher Learning
The creation of floorbooks enabled us to reflect daily on students’ experiences and learning. As we wrote learning stories, we became more familiar with the BC re-designed curriculum and learned to integrate subject areas into student interest. Through documentation, we were able to capture formative assessment data and explore possible lines of development.
Student Learning
Through floorbooks, the students reflected on experiences through teacher-led discussion as well as student-initiated conversation. As a result, students developed their metacognitive and oral language skills. As teachers invited students to contribute to the floorbooks, they were motivated to experiment with emergent writing and creation of non-fiction text features.
Resources
The Power of Inquiry is a book written by educational consultant Kath Murdoch. Our most important take-away from the book was: Inquiry is a mind-set and it can be applied to multiple subject areas and integrated studies.
Frog Hollow hosted teacher researchers from Opal School in Portland, Oregon to speak to educators about the benefits of using emergent curriculum in early childhood learning. Our most important take-away from the workshop was: The idea of people having both “inside stories” and “outside stories”. This allows the children to understand how not to judge someone by their exterior appearance.
TEAM
Wendy Cheng
Norma Rose Point Elementary
Erin Ritchie
Norma Rose Point Elementary
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