Looking for Learning in the Wild
Looking for Learning in the Wild (LLW) is a routine for identifying and reflecting on evidence of learning and engagement in other educators’ classrooms or learning settings. The tool and routine serve at least three purposes. First, it removes the educators from their own settings and places them “in the wild” of another learning setting. This is intended to give them the time and space to document learning and engagement in another setting. Second, LLW provides educators with an opportunity to document evidence of the kind of learning and engagement that is important to them in their own learning settings. In doing so, educators may be able to refine what constitutes evidence of learning and engagement in their value. Third, and similarly, educators may be able to see the variety of learning and engagement in their value. In other words, they might be surprised by how children in other settings still demonstrate evidence of learning and engagement in their value. This too supports educators’ ability to refine the criteria for their value.
In our learning community, the LLW also plays an additional role. Our learning community meets monthly and these meetings are hosted each month at a different member of our community’s school or organization. The LLW serves as one additional way that we can de-privatize our practice and leverage the learning experiences taking place at each host school or setting.
Routine
The LLW tool and routine is broken up into a pre, during and post routine with the “during” serving as the opportunity to be in a classroom. When educators are documenting evidence of learning and engagement, we insist that they are specific as possible. For example, instead of summarizing what a learner says, we write what the learner said (as best we can). Or instead of writing a general behavior, like “one student was helping another” as evidence of collaboration, we write what the helping was, like “one student handed another student a pencil” or “one student held the beaker while another poured in the liquid.” In this way, we can reflect on the learning and engagement in specific ways.
Pre-Activity
Each person takes their observation sheet and writes their value at the top of the page (in the space provided). Then, they take five minutes to write down what they anticipate that they will see as examples of learning and engagement and briefly explain why they think these examples. These examples can be bullet points and are intended to prime the minds of the educators before the observations as well as be sensitive to the context in which they will be observing. For example, if the classrooms will be high school level classrooms, then the educators who are accustomed to teaching younger students might adjust their expectations to more developmentally appropriate engagement. The examples that the
In the “Why do I say that” column, the teacher is able to provide a brief explanation as to why the teacher expects this to be a form of engagement and/or why the teacher sees their example as a form of evidence of learning and engagement in their value.
Post-Activity
Throughout the walk through learning each person has documented evidence of their chosen value. The documentation may be in the form of photographs, narrative describing evidence that the observer listened to, narrative of evidence that the observer witnessed or other methods of documentation. The post activity creates the opportunity for participants to work in small groups and share the value that they documented with colleagues. After small group sharing, the whole group shares collective insights and implications for learning.