Documentations

Documentations

Documentation and assessment seems to be one of my main jobs as a teacher. In fact I can’t get away from it. I always have a camera in hand so I hopefully don’t miss that most important documentation needed that will fit into the 65 different objectives that needs to be covered per child, times two (this is because our director wants at least two documentations per objective to prove where the child is at). However not only does my director want this each semester but she wants it twice a semester – once in the beginning and again at the end of the semester. So that means my co-worker and I are doing 260 documentation and assessments per child, we have 20 children in the classroom, so that would be 10,400 documentation and assessments each year.

In my opinion this is crazy! But the reason behind this is because we are an accredited college lab school, we need to be doing the latest trends and be a role model for other preschools and their teachers and for the students that come through the school. When I have talked to other preschool teachers and students who have graduated from this preschool they say that the real world is not like this lab school. I have to agree, we are not like other preschools.

It seems that this preschool is made to look good on paper, but is that all so important to have? Isn’t there other things that are just as important? Or maybe even more important? Or couldn’t we do things differently and still have the accreditation needed? I believe there is an answer to these questions and the answer is YES!

I do think documentation and assessment is necessary, assessing the children show us where the child is at and what we could do to help the child move on to the next level of learning; but I also believe that it could be done differently, not by taking two (or more) pictures/documentation, observation, or assessment per objective. I believe that the objectives could be done in a much simpler way and also in a way that would be more teacher, parent, and child friendly. The child portfolios would be just that - child portfolios. It would be the child’s work, interests and wants. After all isn’t that what the parent’s want to see – their child’s work not the teachers. As of right now the portfolios are all the teacher’s work, nothing from the child. The portfolios show what the teachers can do, not the child. This makes me sad. I’m not saying that assessment and documentation is unnecessary I’m just saying that they way we are told to do it, is.

The book poses a question in this week’s chapter readings, “How can we help children find the meaning of what they do, what they encounter, what they experience? And how can we do this for ourselves (p.79)?” I think as teachers we need to put the children first. We have many rules at this school that I believe are unnecessary and also they may hinder the children’s learning. I like the rules my co-worker, Val, came up with. There are only 3 – Take care of yourself, Take care of others, and Take care of the environment. How beautiful that sounds to me, three simple rules that could easily be followed and also don’t you think these rules should be a part of life’s lessons?

Let me give an example, today I did journals. Each child draws a picture about the subject the teacher picks and then the teacher copies down their dictation. During one of these journals one child was drawing in his journal and started to pound down hard over and over with the marker onto the paper, splashing the ink everywhere, making the tip flat and causing the ink to seep onto the next page. As a rule we are not aloud to let the children do this so I stopped this at once. But my question is why? Isn’t this also a way of learning? Won’t the child learn the consequences of his actions? Wouldn’t it be more meaningful to the child if he sees what the result is? But now as I go over this scenario it looks as if I focused on the negative so here are some of the positive questions? Wasn’t he learning about how the colors splatter or mix together? Or how his different strength made different marks on the paper? This child later went outside and used the spray bottles to create what he may have tried to create with the markers. So what do you think the child learned? Was it really necessary to tell him that he couldn’t use the markers in that way? Do you think he might have learned more if he wasn’t stopped?