Documentation as a Pedagogical Companion

Kelly Goodsir

“When we engage educators as we hope to engage children, we see them as capable participants in the project of inquiry, rather than as instructors whose job it is to transmit content knowledge and academic skills to children. We see educators as innovators, rather than technicians, as creators rather than consumers – people who generate questions and insights and new knowledge”

Pelo & Carter, 2018, p126

The Principle of Congruity

Do our values align with our actions?

Lilian Katz speaks of congruity as “the kind of consistency, harmony, or concordance between the way we teach teachers and the way we want them to teach.” When our leadership habits and pedagogical rhetoric are misaligned, our teams feel the disconnect. Culture, after all, is shaped not just by the words in our philosophy statement but through the daily rituals, decisions, and interactions we hold every day.

• If educational leaders rely on checklists and audits to guide practice, how will colleagues come to value deep pedagogical noticing and plan in response to wonder rather than simply what is required?

• If team meetings are transactional, fast-paced, and knowledge-driven, how will educators experience the kind of reflective time required to think with children, rather than be merely task-oriented with them?

• If documentation is approached only through the lens of compliance or “proof of life” offerings, how will educators come to see it as a powerful tool for dialogue and meaning-making?

• If educators are only ever engaged through the binary lens of what’s right or wrong in planning and documentation, how will they value the importance of agency — the ability to make changes when something no longer serves them?

Congruity asks us to hold a mirror to our leadership:

Are we modelling what we most hope to nurture in others?

The principle of congruity reminds us that what we value must be visible in what we do and say. The way we approach documentation in our workplaces (as compliance or as conversation, as evidence or as an encounter) reflects the culture we create. We bring teams together to engage practice not just theory so that their thinking is contextulised.

Slow Pedagogy

Clark, A. (2022). Slow knowledge and the unhurried child: Time for slow pedagogies in early childhood education. Routledge.

If we want educators to embrace the kind of thoughtful, responsive pedagogy we advocate for in curriculum, then we must examine how we design our systems and engage our leadership practice so that it invites a positive regard for documentation. Not the chore of compliance so many feel and experience.

Our daily rituals, like when and how we meet, how we plan, how we document, these rituals either model the values of thinking and reflection, or they undermine them. So, what might shift if we looked more closely at our relationship with time?

Making our relationship with time more visible may help to reveal where the tensions are held in our roles as educational leaders, and in turn, highlight small but significant steps we can take to reclaim that time - for thinking, for research, and for participating alongside our teams in their planning and documentation work.

1.     Being With

It involves the feeling and culture to stay in the moment with children - emphasizing the time to listen and to not always be rushing onto the next thing. How can we stay open to children’s ideas and questions before interpretation narrows the possibilities? How might our cycles of assessment and documentation slow enough to allow the time to really see, hear and notice?

Jill MacLachlan offers this caution in her blog FARMERS ARE SMART:

“for seeds to take root and flourish, they must be left alone….a goal or new direction that is exposed and analysed too often can be devasted by well-meaning surveillance and critique”

CAUTION: When the frequency of cycles for documentation are too high this erodes the capacity for an educator to be with and nurture the joy. This example of an inquiry into the role of 'story making' travelled over at least 3-4 months and documentation is made visible through the acts of participation in informal ways - The Learning Space, Coburg.

2.     Going Off Track

Going off track invites us to remain open to surprise, not abandoning our planning, but holding it lightly, with flexibility. Building educator confidence to sit with uncertainty, to follow children’s ideas as they unfold, even when the path is unclear takes a confident pedagogically minded educator and a good system in our curriculum design - it has the flex and creativity and is not bound by strict adherance to boxes.

Loris Malaguzzi once described teaching and learning as an act of throwing and catching the ball - an exchange full of anticipation, responsiveness, and relational attunement.

We can learn to catch the ideas of children and when we “throw” a provocation or a question back, we do so...not with control, but with hope. Hope that the child will catch it, run with it, or even toss it back in a completely unexpected direction. Going off track honours this unpredictable return. It invites educators to loosen their grip on linear plans and instead follow the trajectory of children’s responses.

What might stop us from 'going off track'?

• Accountability culture - if documentation is treated as only evidence for compliance, educators can feel bound to prove outcomes rather than explore possibilities.

• The daily pressure to post “what we did” – how did this become a ‘norm’ and who gets the time to do this in a rich and menaingful way?

• Systems that are fixed and never change - they primarily are designed for efficiency and not educator agency?

• Loss of pedagogical confidence, without deep understanding of theory and development 'going off track' can feel risky and not intentional.

CAUTION: "Going off track” is not a free fall; it’s a pedagogically grounded choice. It’s sustained by educators who are researchers -those who read, reflect, document, and engage in dialogue. When a system fosters inquiry, collaboration, and time for thinking, educators can move off the planned path with purpose. Without this foundation, spontaneity risks becoming randomness. But with it, flexibility becomes thoughtful responsiveness, an act of teaching infused with curiosity and trust.

3. Diving Deeper

Diving deeper is about moving beyond surface-level engagement into the depth of children’s ideas, relationships, and ways of knowing. It’s about sustained engagement -returning, revisiting, and relaunching ideas through multimodal experiences that invite both educators and children to think together over time.

To support this, we need documentation and planning systems that make room for depth rather than speed -systems that honour continuity and complexity. We are able to make strong connections to underpinning conceptual threads that give coherance and purpose to our curriculum decision making.

Three shifts can help make this possible:

1. Reduce the frequency of formal documentation; increase informal, living documentation.Make space for authentic, ongoing dialogue and reflection rather than constant formal output.

2. Focus on a few big ideas or questions; let go of the “20 activities plus extensions” mindset.Depth thrives when we slow down, linger, and stay curious with one idea long enough to uncover its layers.

3. Build opportunities for team collaboration; reduce isolation.When educators think together, they can trace patterns, make connections, and sustain shared inquiries across time and contexts.

CAUTION: Depth without direction can become drifting. Diving deeper requires educators to be intentional researchers, grounded in theory and attuned to children’s learning strategies and processes. Without this foundation, depth risks becoming repetition- circling around the familiar rather than unearthing the new.

This is an example of a plan that is designed to be responsive to children - with only a few ideas being explored over a month or so - yet the weekly response allows for depth to grow in that learning intention. Credit: KGlearning Approach (TM)

4.     Taking the Longer View

Fisher, R. (2023). The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time. Headline. 

Fisher (2023) invites us to transform how we see time, to take the long view. This perspective asks us not to stay fixed on the immediate moment, for example; observing only the ants outside, but to lift our gaze and notice what those moments point toward: children’s deeper inclinations to connect with the natural world, to patterns, systems, wonder and relationships.

Taking the longer view is an act of pedagogical widening. Expanding our focus from what children are doing to what is being revealed through the intersections of curiosity, theory and lived experiences.

For educational leaders, this means reimagining the rhythms we create for our teams to engage in such a way. As Wendy Shepherd reminds us in Insights: Behind Early Childhood Pedagogical Documentation (2006, p.167), “before embarking on the task of documentation, there is a need for a pedagogical positioning of self. There is a need for infrastructure – collaborative, supportive environments, professional learning, and a centre culture that values curiosity and intellectual persistence.”

So, what might happen if…

• our planning supported lingering with an idea over time?

• our documentation prioritised depth over speed?

• our systems made space for children’s developing theories and ideas?

CAUTION: Systems, too, must protect time for continuity rather than simply stretch deadlines. The long view is not about doing less or later, but about doing with greater intention and trusting that meaningful learning unfolds over time. 

When leadership and documentation move in harmony, congruity becomes culture. We start to hear the conversations of our team echoe through the hallways as a shared declaration of purpose and possibility.

Kelly has been published in several texts on this topic. If you’d like to explore her work further, you can find them here.

Documenting Children's Learning; disrupting the myths / co-authored with Ann Houghton

Redefining Planning and Assessment by Alma Fleet, Adam Christie, Anthony Semann / Chapter 10 Kelly Goodsir