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Indicator Checklists

It doesn’t take long for educators to learn how widely different children are and how the ages vary when abilities appear. It’s always a joy to see children grow. Experienced educators, who have seen many children grow up, often love the little emergences of new abilities and inwardly smile.

The very experienced have learned to attend to certain “marker” abilities that let them know that children are doing fine. For example, when a child calls other children by name or sees what another child needs before they ask, the educator becomes confident the child is both socially adept and attuned to others—abilities that will benefit them all their lives.

New educators and caregivers may not notice these small good things. It’s hard to see every child when one is moving from crisis to crisis. Problems are always easy to notice; noticing emergence is gained through experience. Emergence doesn’t shout itself out, so it’s easily missed when hearing an unexpected scream of “TEACHER!”

I have tried to be systematic in attending to the emergence of awareness. I wanted to make sure I saw all the children, not just the most noticeable ones. Here is the method I developed to ensure that my noticing was spread across skill domains and included every child.

It’s like birdwatching. These four checklists are like the bird watcher’s notebook: a record in hand of the birds one has observed, the past accomplishments, so the birds not yet seen rise to the top of today’s quest. This is assessment.

I’ve been collecting key abilities ever since I first started working with children. Since I had no idea what I was doing, I thought it could be important to find out. I began to see patterns from watching video of highly skilled children. Their successes weren’t random acts. I showed them to my classes so we could watch them together to mark the key capabilities. I used the lists we evolved to check on the children in subsequent years.

I found I was creating new kinds of opportunities for the children where these performances might be more likely to occur. I found the children I had forgotten to notice. I found all of the families liked knowing that I cared, which led to adding color codes to add a sense of time without having to record a date.  It has always felt like I have had to do something for a long time, at least a year or two, before I became confident in what I was doing. This simple pursuit of empty boxes gradually honed my ability to see every child, not just the ones at the forefront. For me, this was a lot more educational than any book or course I ever took.

I have helped others start this, too, so I have a bit of background to say that it takes at least two years to train the eye. As all teachers know each group of children is different, so a second year of checking boxes on each child, marking through the seasons, offers further complexity.

I found I could see better after two years of diligence. I could confidently spot those children who were trucking along just fine, so I marked off most boxes for the self-evident ones and focused my attention upon those I couldn’t see. That proved to be the ideal way to use the checklists; it minimized the record-keeping burden yet maintained my attentiveness to collecting specifics to show their families and, by the way, direct my camera lens in the right place at the right time to capture emerging abilities for Learning Stories.

Like everything one learns, systematic practice helps one find out what you don’t know you don’t know, the problem we all face as teachers. The ability to see emergence in as many dimensions as possible becomes a step up in professionalism, worthy of a wage increase, I would say.

I invite you to try the Indicator Checklists long enough to discover what it has done for you in becoming the educator you would like to be.

Social, Cognitive, Motor, and Expressive Abilities