Documentation and Record Keeping: When Practice Pulls in Different Directions
Part 1: Living with the Dilemma
For many early childhood educators, documentation and record keeping can feel as though they are pulling practice in different directions. While documentation invites us into the rich, relational work of making learning visible, generating meaning and pursuing questions alongside children, record keeping can feel like a demand to step away from this work to capture, categorise and account for learning in other ways.
What happens when these two aspects of our practice seem to ask different things of us, drawing us between the work that feels most meaningful and the work we are expected to do?
One of the enduring challenges in early childhood education lies in navigating the relationship between recording and tracking what children know, understand and can do, and engaging in pedagogical documentation as a means of developing deeper understandings of how children learn; unveiling their ideas, theories and collaborative knowledge building strategies. It can be argued that both have a place in educational practice, yet serve different purposes and invite different ways of seeing, thinking and responding to children’s learning.
We know that some of the most valuable learning emerges through moments of productive struggle. Educators recognise and value this in children’s experiences, making room for the value and uncertainty of not yet, the persistence required when something feels difficult, and the possibilities that emerge when answers are not immediately apparent. Extending the same generosity to teachers’ own learning, however, can be more challenging. When familiar practices are questioned, competing expectations come into view, or new ways of working unsettle established routines, genuine tensions can emerge. Finding a rhythm between the demands of record keeping and the possibilities of pedagogical documentation is one such challenge.
It is in the space between not knowing and knowing that transformative learning can take shape. This paradox offers something important to sit with, particularly when considering professional identity, roles, learning and practice. The relationship between pedagogical documentation and other approaches to tracking children’s learning is one place where this uncertainty becomes tangible. Teaching teams grapple with questions that rarely have straightforward answers: How much should learning be scaffolded, and when is it time to step back? How will educators recognise what children have learned, what they can do and what they understand? What needs to be made visible, and what might remain unseen when attention is directed primarily towards what can be measured?
These are not simply questions of technique or time management. They invite deeper consideration of what counts as knowledge, what is valued in children’s learning, and how educators come to understand and make decisions about the learning they encounter.
This was one of the questions we debated rigorously while writing Finding Our Way: Developing a Shared Pedagogy. Although we felt aligned in so much of our thinking about children, childhood and education, this particular discussion asked more of us. It invited us to consider the realities that many teachers face in systems that have explicit expectations of practice, and dig beneath the surface to examine the beliefs, assumptions and values sitting at the very core of our thinking.
We kept returning to a familiar contradiction.
Alongside the many teams we have worked with, we have often encountered educators who felt overwhelmed by the idea of documentation as a sustaining pedagogical practice. Too often, pedagogical documentation had become another demand on an already crowded day, a burden to be managed, ticked off and completed before being filed away. At the same time, we also sensed a persistent disquiet about the factory-line checklists of skills and knowledge used to measure and monitor children's learning and development… and we think that something here doesn't sit quite right.
Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between. Perhaps it asks us to resist the temptation to resolve the tension too quickly, instead making space to examine the relationship between what we are required to do and what we believe matters most. This work asks us to bring out heads and hearts fully into conversation. To interrogate our own beliefs and processes, asking not only what we do, but why we do it and how.
Perhaps the thing we are looking for has been hiding in plain sight all along.
Making room for another story
Like so many of the ideas we explored in Finding Our Way, we needed time and space to reflect, contemplate, talk and approach this conundrum with curiosity. First, we needed to acknowledge that our work is rarely undertaken in isolation. Teachers are almost always working within systems of education that bring expectations, standards, assessment schedules and established pedagogical practices. These are inescapable systems that require organisation, systematicity, strategy and accountability - but they too hold potent opportunities for reflection, for those that are brave enough to look below the surface.
What should we record? When should we assess? How do we track and monitor progress? What matters most? What purpose does documentation serve? And how might we make enough room in the busy life of a school to consider these questions from different perspectives?
In many systems around the world, record keeping holds an important place in education. It provides a means of accountability and a way of making children's learning and development visible against established expectations. It can offer useful information about what children know, what they can do and where additional support might be needed.
But the story that record keeping tells is not the only story available to us.
Whether or not a team shares a common understanding of the relationships between record keeping and documentation is worth exploring. This is where we believe teachers owe themselves and one another the time to stop and think more deeply. Not to arrive at an agreed formula or a new set of instructions, but to give themselves permission to wrestle with ideas, challenge assumptions and shape their practices together. These conversations invent new possibilities. They bring into view ways of thinking and working that we might never have encountered, or even imagined, had we continued to work alone.
Seeing the children in front of us
Every school day, we walk into early childhood and primary classrooms, many of which were designed for a time and a world that no longer exists. Time is carved up into chunks and the curriculum is delivered in bite-size pieces, while agentic time for genuine exploration and meaningful engagement with ideas, others and the world around is relegated to the moments after the ‘real-learning’ is done.The rhetoric is uncomfortably familiar.
Children, meanwhile, are among our most vivid expressions of the present. Arriving at school everyday brimming with unique ideas, discoveries, stories, new connections and things to share. Their ideas, enthusiasms, questions and experiences carry the potential to give the process of learning new shape, depth and colour in ways we cannot always anticipate. A fertile landscape for the co-construction of curriculum, but this depends on whether we are prepared to listen.
Documentation offers us one way of engaging in this work.
The process of documenting learning gives us opportunities to notice what might otherwise pass us by: a theory emerging through play, a friendship being negotiated, a question that changes direction, an unexpected connection between ideas. It invites us to look beyond the immediate activity and become curious about the thinking taking place within it. Documentation can help us recognise children's agency, attend to their theories and honour their creativity. It allows us to see learning as something active, relational and continually unfolding, rather than simply a series of milestones to be reached.
The challenge, of course, is finding the time for this essential work while meeting the expectations of the systems in which we operate. Teams need to examine what they are expected to do and what they need to do in order to teach well. This calls for open and thoughtful conversations with school leaders about how to safeguard time for documentation alongside the expectations of record keeping. Part of this involves taking a closer look at the systems and routines that shape daily practices. Which requirements are non-negotiable, perhaps because they are mandated by government regulations or other external bodies? And which practices have simply become part of the way things are done, rarely revisited or questioned? Making these distinctions visible can create space for reconsidering what is being asked of teams, what truly serves children’s learning, and how time might be used more intentionally. We need to ask what we might do differently, or even what we might choose to let go of.
While these records are regarded by many to be important for monitoring individual progress, understanding children’s growth and development, and meeting regulatory requirements, they often lack the depth and collaborative engagement that characterises the art of genuine pedagogical documentation, a dynamic approach that builds educators collective understanding and supports children’s continuing pathways.
Finding Our Way - Developing a Shared Pedagogy p.164
Teachers who document have a generative opportunity in front of them. Through observation, listening, dialogue and revisiting children's experiences, they can begin to see something of the processes through which children construct knowledge, build relationships, test theories and make meaning of the world around them. Documentation draws attention towards the questions that live inside learning. How is this child making sense of an experience? What ideas are they testing? What relationships are shaping their thinking? What might be possible if we respond differently? How does the environment, materials or context shape the learning that becomes possible?
Record keeping, by contrast, tends to draw attention towards outcomes, skills and demonstrated understandings. What can the child do? What have they achieved? At what point did they demonstrate a particular competency, and to what degree?
Both offer valuable information. Both have a place in our work, but they are not necessarily asking the same questions or serving the same purpose. There is a risk that the demands of accountability begin to shape what teachers notice, value and respond to. As more time is devoted to recording and reporting what children have achieved, opportunities for the rich processes of documentation can gradually diminish. And with them, we risk losing something precious: the space to be curious, to linger with children's ideas, to wonder together about what their learning might mean, and to imagine what might become possible next.
Maybe this is what we need to seek in the relationship between documentation and record keeping; not a fixed balance, nor an equal distribution of time and attention, but an ongoing process of negotiating what matters, what deserves our attention and what we choose to make visible. Ultimately, how a team approaches documentation and recordkeeping speaks to something much deeper: the identity of their pedagogy. It reflects how they see children, what they believe about learning, and the role they understand they play as educators.
This brings us back to where we began. If the relationship between documentation and record keeping remains unfamiliar territory for many teaching teams, then there is much to explore together. Asking questions, challenging assumptions, revisiting understandings and considering how everyday choices reflect what a team values. Ultimately, finding our way through this territory is not simply about deciding what to document, what to record, or how to make time for both. It is about ensuring that the ways a team spends their time remains true to their image of the child, their understanding of learning, and the pedagogy they wish to nurture, together.
Fiona and Anne