Blog 12

Discuss the importance of documentation to teaching and to a child's learning. What are the challenges of documentation to the classroom teacher? What are some strategies that would help address these challenges?


Documentation is important as a teacher because it helps you to understand the child's learning needs and growth. Documenting the child helps you as a teacher to look back and understand what problems arose, or if you weren't able to pick out the problems at the time, you might be able to see the problems more clearly when you look back at the documentation. It gives you the chance as a teacher to reflect on your teachings and to improve a lesson the next time you run it. Also you get to see how a child grows over time.


I think that the most important challenges of documentation to a classroom teacher is that you have to manage a lot of students, and having to document all of them is a hard task. In-class documentation is especially difficult when you are focused on whether some students might need help or if the classroom behaviour level is being maintained.


I definitely think a way to address these challenges is to have parents or community volunteers help out during class. They could help out with the documentation process by taking pictures of individual students or groups while you are teaching, or monitoring the process while you are documenting.