Use “Documentation” to Reflect Pedagogy
and Improve Teachers’ Professional Growth
Zhu Jiaxiong
Abstract
Up to now, Chinese early childhood education reform has been taken nearly 20 years. Nowadays, the basic stand of the reform has been gradually changed to the aspect of improving teachers’ professional growth. It has already become a very important aspect for some kindergarten teachers to understand children’s learning process and to improve teachers’ teaching by using “documentation” as a tool to reflect their practice and make teachers’ teaching and children’s learning meaningful.
Through some case studies, this keynote presentation demonstrates how kindergarten teachers use various media to choose and document what they believe valuable and having close relationship with the context; to make the children’s meaningful learning and teachers’ meaningful teaching a visible process. Meanwhile, the teachers will reflect and improve their educational behavior by revisiting and discussion.
These cases will demonstrate how “documentation” helped teachers to focus, think and understand what is going on during the teaching process, to think how the children will be and what the teacher should do? Not merely to let the teachers simply accept the so-called “best way to do it”.
