Making Learning Visible

Learning is social. Every day, children and adults learn from and with others, encountering new perspectives, strategies, and ways of thinking. Together, groups can achieve greater perspective and understanding than any individual can alone, but we need tools for sharing thinking and making learning visible to others.

Learn how to unlock the potential of group learning in your classroom by making learning visible. In this course you will explore the Making Learning Visible framework, which began as a collaborative research project between Project Zero and educators in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and has since been adopted by hundreds of teachers to promote group learning. You will begin learning how to use documentation to “make visible” both what and how students learn.

What past participants are saying:

“I used to think documentation was just to give feedback on a piece of paper. Now I think documentation is more about the process while performing an activity—the tools we use before, during, and after.”

“I used to think documentation helps make students’ thoughts visible. Now I think documentation helps learners understand their journey—they can self-assess and feed forward. Documenting students’ work is also a reflection for teachers to see how they have guided learners from what their prior knowledge was to what they know now.”

“I used to think that collaborative learning was the result of teachers knowing their students’ learning preferences and personalities so pupils could be grouped easily to work better. Now I think creating and sustaining learning groups is much more complex and has a variety of variables that need to be considered. These do not only include a learner’s social and emotional needs but allowing pupils to form their own groups. If pupils are engaged emotionally, their learning experience is enhanced and extends beyond the learning of individuals to create a collective body of knowledge. It is important to remember that the teacher is also part of the learning group and to remind pupils that everyone brings something to the group experience as we learn from one another.”

Course Designer

Mara Krechevsky is a senior researcher at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Mara has been conducting educational research for over 30 years, including directing Making Learning Visible (MLV), an investigation into documenting and assessing individual and group learning in U.S. classrooms from preschool to high school. MLV is based on collaborative research with educators from Reggio Emilia. Mara has worked with hundreds of teachers and administrators in the U.S. and abroad to create powerful learning environments for children and adults. She has authored or co-authored seven books and over 30 articles and book chapters. Her most recent book, coauthored with Ben Mardell, Melissa Rivard, and Daniel Wilson, is Visible Learners: Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools.

Course Instructors

Steve Seidel is the director of the Arts in Education Program at HGSE. At Project Zero, he was principal investigator on projects that study the use of reflective practices in schools, the close examination of student work, and documentation of learning. This research currently included The Evidence Project, a study using student work as evidence of learning and teaching, and Making Learning Visible, a study of group learning and assessment in partnership with the Reggio Emilia early childhood schools in Italy. He recently completed Arts Survive, a study of the sustainability of arts education partnerships. His teaching and writing for the past decade have largely focused on arts education and the improvement of teaching and assessment across elementary and secondary settings. He also convenes a monthly discussion group on collaborative assessment for educators: ROUNDS at Project Zero. Before coming to the School, he taught high-school theater and language arts in the Boston area for 17 years.

Terri Turner began working at Project Zero in 1999 and is currently a Project Specialist on the Learning to Think, Thinking to Learn (LTTL) Project with Principal Investigator Ron Ritchhart. Prior to joining LTTL, Terri was part of the Cultures of Thinking (CoT) project, the Visible Thinking (VT) Project, and the Making Learning Visible (MLV) project. All of these projects share an interest in better understanding how to create environments that encourage critical thinking, and how to make these critical thinking moments shareable with learners inside and outside of the school context. Terri is also interested in how to assess classroom and school cultures, and how to evaluate changes in these cultures over time.

Since its inception in 2008, Terri has also been the facilitator of “DIG” (Democracy Inquiry Group), a Reggio-inspired critical friends group comprised of teacher educators from 11+ colleges, universities, and early learning centers.

Perhaps at the core of all of Terri's work with teachers, spanning from kindergarten through higher education, are two essential motivators: a philosophy of children as highly capable citizens and an excitement about ideas being provisional, meant to be revisited and revised.