When I began to observe children 30 years ago, I would fill my notebooks with pages of handwritten narrative which detailed what children were doing and saying, minute by minute. I would have no sense of what I was looking for. I also took hundreds of photographs.
Everything I collected was stored and used occasionally when asked to provide evidence that children could do something. Looking back, I can see that the emphasis was on collecting and storing these observations, and not on using them to inform my understanding of my teaching on children’s learning. It took up a lot of time; I did not have capacity to think about the quality of what I was doing with children.
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