Spring Staff Development Day: Pedagogical Documentation and Research Exploring Children’s Curiosity of the Self

By Amanda Brannon and Rylee Jackson, Teachers

The Bing staff joined together on April 28 to explore the significance of documentation within our classroom communities. We began the day with a presentation from Susan Stacey, early childhood educator, teacher educator, and author of Pedagogical Documentation in Early Childhood: Sharing Children’s Learning and Teachers’ Thinking. The talk, titled “Rethinking Documentation: Revisiting to Become Re-Inspired and Refreshed,” demonstrated how documentation can be a way to make children’s learning visible.

Through Stacey’s presentation, Bing staff reexamined the purpose of our documentation, our intended audience, and our approach to communication. We established that instead of merely recounting events, our reflections should incorporate the how and why to emphasize the inherent value of sharing these experiences. Stacey drew our attention to the teachings and philosophy originating from Reggio Emilia, Italy. In Reggio-inspired programs, documentation serves as a powerful tool to track the development of young children and effectively communicate this progress to families. Although Bing is not a Reggio-inspired program, we can see how several principles and practices from Reggio schools are consistent with Bing’s philosophy. At Bing, we prioritize valuing the environment as a “third teacher,” actively encouraging our colleagues to engage as co-learners alongside the children. Additionally, we place a strong emphasis on fostering child-led exploration and learning, allowing children’s interests and natural curiosities to guide our teaching approach. Through these principles, we create an enriching learning environment that serves as the foundation for our pedagogical documentation.

It became clear that it is crucial for our documentation to resonate with our individual and collective values and goals. During the discussion that followed Stacey’s presentation, the Bing staff explored the diverse contexts and cultures within each classroom, recognizing that each piece of documentation can highlight a different facet of Bing’s philosophy while also showcasing the children’s involvement. Stacey posed myriad questions, inviting the Bing staff to delve deeper, dissect, and reflect upon the following:

• Who is our audience? 
• What do we want them to see/understand?
• What can others learn from our documentation?
• Does it provoke thinking? 
• What do we tend to document?
• Are we rushing to act or complete, or slowing down to reflect?
• Does our documentation represent our values around teaching and learning?
• What do you take from this documentation about children’s ideas and learning?

Following Stacey’s presentation, Bing staff walked through the classrooms, taking close looks at each other’s bulletin boards, reading the documentation from a stance of curiosity, forming their own questions, and thinking about documentation as a form of research. Some guiding questions to consider were: What does the documentation tell us about children’s thinking? What can viewers learn from this documentation? Teachers engaged in reflective conversations during the walkabout, discussing choice-making and presenting information in different ways. 

We then heard from Peter Zhu, a second-year psychology graduate student working alongside Professor Hyowon Gweon in the Stanford Social Learning Lab, who presented on “Investigating Children’s Social Curiosity About the Self.” We already know that, as humans, we are curious to learn about ourselves (our abilities, traits, personality, and more), but are children curious about themselves and motivated to learn about themselves from others? According to a survey Zhu sent to parents of 2- to 7-year-olds around the country, children regularly exhibit behaviors displaying their curiosity about themselves, such as asking their parent for feedback on something they did. Zhu decided to examine how strong this curiosity is and to try to measure it.

In Zhu’s study, children were invited to play a drawing game. They made their own drawings and were introduced to “Jordan” (a child they did not know and who does not in fact exist), who also made a drawing. Zhu then told the children that he would look at each drawing and place them in separate folders, adding a mark if he thought the drawing was “really good” but not if the drawing was “just okay” (unbeknownst to them, all children received the mark). The drawings were “evaluated” out of sight and then offered to the children, but before they were able to look inside the folders, the researcher “got a phone call” they needed to take outside the room. The researcher exited the room, leaving behind one of the two folders while still keeping an eye on the children. The key question was whether children would peek inside the folder when left alone, and the important difference was which folder they were left with (the one containing their own drawing or Jordan’s).

Zhu found that children were more likely to peek inside the folder when they had the opportunity to view their own evaluation (65%) rather than Jordan’s (20%). Children were willing to violate an implicit social norm (i.e., not peeking when the researcher leaves the room) to gain information that pertained to them. In future work, Zhu and his team plan to continue this research by using tasks beyond drawing and different forms of evaluation.

There has been plenty of prior work studying concepts of the self, but this research has not yet explored how children are curious to learn about themselves. Zhu’s preliminary research suggests that children are indeed motivated to learn what others think of them—early research that has broad implications for children’s developing minds.

In the afternoon, we revisited our previous discussion of pedagogical documentation and explored how it manifests in individual classrooms. Each teaching team guided us through its documentation boards and emphasized certain elements they were experimenting with. For instance, the East AM teaching team chose to highlight children’s works on a weekly basis to gain fresh perspectives, while the West PM team focused on showcasing open-ended materials, aligning with Bing’s philosophy.

Throughout this activity, the Bing staff had ample time to observe, reflect upon, comment, and inquire about the documentation boards in each classroom. This provided valuable opportunities to discuss the intention and purpose behind the topics each team chose for their boards. The staff collectively agreed that documentation is a continuous, fluid process that requires dedicated time for reflection among educators, as well as meaningful conversations and reflections with the children. After all, in a world dominated by adult voices, it is crucial that we as educators highlight the work and amplify the voices of young children whenever we have the opportunity.