Making Children’s Learning Visible & Meaningful:
the Use of Documentation in
Abstract
The current reform aims to modify curricula to be diversified and flexible to suit local and individual programs’ needs. However, many directors and many teachers of kindergartens have great difficulties in implementing the new curriculum and pedagogies. It is acknowledged that teacher professional development is crucial to the success of curriculum reform. Concerning teacher’s professional development, “documentation” is a very effective tool. It can promote teacher to think about children’s behavior; promote dialogue; facilitate the interaction relationship between the activity participants; assist teachers to analyze and reflect themselves, then improve their own pedagogical behavior. Documentation make teachers listen to child attentively, peruse child and understand child; make teachers can see more children’s potentials, make teachers realize what they can do indeed and what they did do actually; also make teachers re-think their relationships with children. Observation and documentation of the pedagogy process can make teachers clearly see children’s learning and teachers’ pedagogy behavior. This peruse between theory and practice can make teachers to reflect and realize what they can do practically, what they did do actually; to reflect the things they did, what were valuable, and what were valueless; to think how they can do better. Many causes show what happen in the really classrooms.
