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Indicator Checklists

It doesn’t take many years on the job for educators to recognize how unbelievably different children are and how ages when new abilities appear naturally vary widely. When those who have seen many children pass through their classrooms see key abilities emerge, they take note and inwardly smile.

They have learned to attend to certain ‘marker’ abilities that indicate children are doing fine in each area of growth. For example, when a child calls another child by name or gets what another child needs before they ask, they become confident in the child’s sociability and empathy toward others. They know these abilities will benefit them all their lives.

New caregivers may miss these emerging indicators of significant abilities that make a full life. Usually, they’re busy cruising from cleanup to crisis. Problems dominate perception. Nascent desirabilities are tiny little things, easily missed when so much is going on.

I gradually learned how to make sure I saw all the children in the classroom, not just the few most noticeable ones. My data on teachers talking to children showed that adults spoke the most to the same 30% of the children, day after day. Then, too, it was startling for me to realize I forgot whether quiet David was even here.

When I realized that not only did I miss all the children I missed the new things they did, I developed a method to ensure that my noticing included every child and the major skill domains. I had a problem. I took it on. I wrote, and gradually expanded, an easy-to-use set of indicator checklists.

Assessment Informs Practice

This is not a normal kind of checklist. Usually educators are handed checklists where someone unrelated to this classroom and these children decided it was important to check boxes to ‘prove’ learning was happening.

This isn’t that. These four checklists are more like a notebook for bird watching: an easy form of an observational record of the birds one has seen.

It’s not about how good the birds are; it’s a record of my own success. The checkboxes enable me to look for the birds I have not yet seen. In this form, assessment isn’t a burden: assessment informs practice.

The Indicator Checklists examine learning: the emergence of new capabilities over time.

It’s not easy to see learning at the time of its emergence, the very time that it’s most important for a teacher to see. It’s easy to see the marvelous capabilities of highly skilled children shining brightly. They somehow learned essential skills I wished every child learned.

In order to build this list, I recorded the skillful children, doing what was so delightful, and I showed them to my students, so we could watch them together. We discussed what we saw and then worked to specify what was so good. We came up with lists of indicators of the capabilities that mattered. I used those lists to check on children over many years, gradually expanding to include the expressive arts and physical skills.

Expanding Opportunities

I found it changed what people noticed. They began to look for the good things more. I found that we became interested creating situations where we might be able to find out about the checkmark boxes that were empty. In this way we could look for what we didn’t see.

Families also liked knowing what I was looking for and how those abilities changed over time, which led to adding color codes to the seasons of the year. We could see changes without having to write a date.

I have had to do something for a year or two before I became confident in being able to do it well and verify something’s value. Indicator Checklists proved well worth my time.

This pursuit of empty boxes honed my ability to see every child, not just the ones at the forefront, because I learned where, how, and when to look.

Gaining Experience

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