Making Learning Visible on the primary PGCE (including development of the Understanding Children Assignment)

The Primary PGCE course that I work on updated some of its core assignments in 2013-14, and I was lucky enough to work with my colleague and course director at the time, Dr. Jenifer Smith, re-writing and embedding a new approach to our Professional Studies assignment.

The course begins, on its very first day, with an introductory lecture on Childhood. This sets the tone for the year, and the first term continues with this theme high on the agenda.

The first assignment that the students undertake is a child study culminating in a professional presentation. It is called the Understanding Children Assignment (UCA) and it evolved out of an interest in the work of Harvard’s Project Zero on Making Learning Visible, and the work of Pat Carini, of the Prospect School in Vermont. Carini’s processes of child study: observing; recording; and describing, were adapted for the purpose of the assignment, with the aim to help student teachers see and study how children were going about their learning and how they were making sense of the world in order to shape an educational environment to support their learning. The focus on unobtrusive ways to learn about their study child, and a framework (The Descriptive Review of a Child, from Carini), supports students effectively in developing teacher habits of mind, and a focus on the needs of the individual child from the start.