Rationale

Where has 2024 gone? It’s October, and we’re on the (almost) downhill run to Christmas. End-of-year activities build up. Not the least are final assessments, grades, and reporting. Of course, you’ve kept copious records and data about your students' progress. Of course, you have.

Record-keeping has expanded in scope since I started teaching. More than the sheer volume of records, the underlying rationale holds the key. My pre-service class taught me the technicalities of record-keeping, but it was a missed opportunity. We didn't delve deeper into the why.

We were taught to take anecdotal notes about behaviour, study habits, and peer interactions. By year’s end, I had a folder full of scribbled notes (computers weren’t a thing when I began teaching) and little idea about what to do with them. They couldn’t be used in any meaningful way on end-of-semester reports. Besides, there were many pages on the kids who displayed challenging behaviours.

Not so many on the kids who turned up each day, worked their way through it, and then showed up again the next day to do it all over.

Observing traits of learners without a clear rationale behind such observations is doomed to fail.

What are we observing?

More importantly, why are we observing?