Different Styles

It doesn’t surprise me that these teachers have different styles of taking documentation and also interpreting the observation in their own way. I believe that since each of the teachers has a different background they most likely will have a different perspective on how to do things. For example I feel that it’s much easier to take a picture to help jolt my memory when I put the observation into the portfolios and it also takes less time away from the children. I sometimes write down observations, however, it's very time consuming and especially when I’m doing a lesson it’s even harder to write down, word for word, what the children say. When I do assessments with the children I will write things down and take the picture. On the other hand my co-worker seems to prefer to write things down and she will also take pictures. I have also noticed the students that come through the lab school write things down and take pictures, however, I rarely see what they do unless there is a red flag with the child, something extra ordinary that happened, or something to do with how or what the student wrote down.

I have seen many different portfolios and no two are alike. Some are really good and others not so good. I have never been trained to do a portfolio and I think that could be why it’s been so hard and time consuming. I will have ideas of how it should be done and will do it that way. Every few years our director changes the program and then I would come up with a new way of doing them, well, actually now that I have a new head teacher – WE have come up with new ways of doing the portfolios. I also have learned from some of the student’s ways of documentation on observations and have intertwined it with the way that I do mine.

Something I would like to change is how we do portfolios. I think it would benefit everyone if the teachers, students, and director participated in the documentation in each of the portfolios. After this week’s reading on the three teachers and how each of them viewed the observation on the children, it made me question how can we change how we do portfolios so that we can maybe getting a better rounded picture of each child. As of right now the class is split in two, where I take 10 children and my co-worker takes the other 10 children. Each of us tends to focus on those 10 children because we are doing their portfolios. However I wonder if there is a way were we both can be equally responsible of all 20 children. We have tried some things in the past to make this happen, such as: writing on note pads and putting the note pad in a documentation folder of each child. This way we would be getting all the teachers and students documentation on each child. However the flaw I had with this is that on top of, at the time 50 objectives, there wasn’t enough time to add those documentations to the portfolios and at times the way the observation was written was questionable. I have also tried sorting the pictures into each child’s folder (on the computer) but the problem was that the pictures I didn’t take, I truly had to make a judgment call on what I thought was actually happening in the picture. If anyone has some ideas – throw them my way – please!

I do like how by reading each of the teacher’s documentation on the children there seemed to be a fuller picture of what happened, because if you just read one teacher’s observation (apart from the others) you would have a different view of what happened. But is this way of documentation reasonable in you place of work? Why or why not? Is there a different way of documentation that you find easier and still meet the criteria of your school? What is it?