From Display to Documentation to Discourse: The Challenge of Documentation in a High School

Abstract

In this article, two secondary school educators explore the challenges of using documentation to support learning in a large public high school and explain why tackling those challenges is worthwhile. The authors discuss the problems they had in beginning to use documentation in the absence of high school exemplars—and in the presence of the time, space, and accountability mandates common in public secondary schools. They present key moments in their learning journeys that reveal the expectations, misconceptions, and habits of thought and practice that complicated their initial efforts to use documentation as a tool to support the learning of students and colleagues. Then, they offer the lessons they learned so that other secondary educators can more easily and effectively begin to incorporate documentation into their instruction and assessment repertoires in order to support authentic collaborative learning.