Making Learning Visible

Creating strong learning cultures in schools using documentation as a tool to deepen and extend learning.

In this era of globalization, the ability of individuals to learn and function as part of a group—across cultures, languages, religious beliefs, and diverse approaches to learning—is perhaps the single most essential learning capacity we will need to survive. Started in 1997, Making Learning Visible is 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 the municipal preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy. The project has generated a pedagogical framework, two books and multiple articles, two websites, an online course, and a host of tools and pictures of practice.

Visible Learners

Explore research-based practices for fostering learning in groups through documentation

Visible Learners

Visible Learners: Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools

Inspired by the innovative educational philosophy that originated in Reggio Emilia, a small city in Italy, Visible Learners offers research-based practices for fostering learning in groups through documentation. In this approach, first developed during a long-term collaboration between researchers at Harvard's Project Zero and Reggio educators, learning becomes a visible activity that develops students' intellectual capacities as well as their individual and group identities as learners.

Visible classrooms can be identified by five key principles—that learning is purposeful, social, representational, empowering, and emotional. The authors define each principle using illustrative learning portraits, quotes from students and teachers, pictures, reflections, and examples of student work. Additionally, the authors offer teachers and administrators practical ways to enhance learning by increasing collaboration and critical thinking across grade levels and subject matter.

Also included is a section containing dozens of tools for making learners and learning visible, incorporating guidelines for the classroom and the staffroom as well as ideas for engaging students' families. Visible Learners shows how observing and documenting learning can change the nature of that learning, and asks teachers to look beyond surface to understand who their students are, what they come to know, and how they come to know it.

Additional Publications

Access articles, books, videos, and more from this project.

Additional MLV Publications

Making Learning Visible: Children as Individual and Group Learners
This book reports on a collaboration between Project Zero and the Municipal Preschools and Infant-toddler Centers of Reggio Emilia, Italy, on the nature of learning in groups and how to understand, support, document, and assess individual and group learning. The authors argue that systematic and purposeful documentation of the ways in which groups develop ideas, theories, and understandings is fundamental to the meta-cognitive activity that is critical to the learning of individuals as well as groups.

Selected Articles

"Accountability in Three Realms: Making Learning Visible Inside and Outside the Classroom"
"Challenging Educational Assumptions"
"Changing our Skin: Creating Collective Knowledge in American Classrooms"
"Engaging City Hall: Children Are Citizens"
"Places to Play in Providence: Valuing Preschool Children as Citizens"
"Zooms: Promoting Schoolwide Inquiry and Improving Practice"

Selected Videos

"Documentation: Transforming our Perspectives"
"Learning is a Team Sport: Kindergartners Study the Boston Marathon"
"The City of Reggio: Boys"
"The Color Investigation"
"Kids are the Experts"

10 Suggestions for Getting Started with Thinking Routines in Early Childhood Classrooms
Accountability in Three Realms: Making Learning Visible Inside and Outside the Classroom
Adults as Members of the Learning Group
Boston Early Civics Curriculum
Challenging Educational Assumptions: Lessons from An Italian-American Collaboration
Changing Our Skin: Creating Collective Knowledge in American Classrooms
Children as Citizens Video
Choosing a Honing Question
Documentation and Display: What's the Difference?
Documentation: Transforming our Perspectives
Documenting Individual and Group Learning (Ch. 13)
Engaging City Hall: Children as Citizens
Engaging Families in Supporting Student Learning (Ch. 14)
Examples of Documentation Shared Back with Learners
Examples of Documentation to Aid Teachers ' Own Reflections
Examples of documentation that is shared more widely
Key Features of Learning Groups
Kids Are the Experts! Making Learning Visible in Boston Public Schools
Learning is a Team Sport: Kindergartners Study the Boston Marathon
Making Learning Visible Beyond the Classroom (Ch. 15)
Making Learning Visible: Children as Individual and Group Learners
Making Teaching Visible: Documenting Individual and Group Learning as Professional Development
Places to Play in Providence: A Guide to the City by Our Youngest Citizens
Supporting Learning in Groups in the Classroom (Ch. 11)
Supporting Learning in Groups in the Staffroom (Ch. 12)
The Amazing Circus Act
The City of Reggio: Boys
The City of Reggio: Girls and Boys
The Color Investigation
Visible Learners: Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools
When Do I Document?
Why Don't You Tell the Other Kids?
Zooms: Promoting Schoolwide Inquiry and Improving Practice

Related Websites

Discover other spaces that complement Making Learning Visible.

Related Websites

The Wheelock Documentation Studio
The Wheelock Documentation Studio is a space for educators to learn about, develop, and exhibit documentation from a variety of learning contexts.

The Boston Public Schools Early Childhood Making Learning Visible Weebly
This site includes videos, documentation examples, and other resources related to MLV practices in early childhood classrooms.

Reggio Children
International Center for the Defense and Promotion of the Rights and Potentials of All Children is a mixed public-private company established in 1994 on the initiative of Loris Malaguzzi and a group of local citizens. Reggio Children’s mission is to carry out experimental research and to promote and disseminate high quality education worldwide. Reggio Children also manages the educational and cultural exchange initiatives between the municipal early childhood institutions of Reggio Emilia and educators and researchers from around the world.

Pictures of Practice

Download examples of documentation to aid in your and your students' reflections.

Pictures of Practice

Examples of Documentation to Aid Teachers' Own Reflections

Documentation collected for this purpose helps teachers stay close to students' learning and interests by enabling them to revisit a learning experience. It leads teachers to compare what they thought would happen to what really went on and informs decisions about where to go next. Sharing this kind of documentation with others reduces the subjectivity of a single person's analysis and interpretation and can deepen understanding. This form of documentation is the least shaped (or the most "raw") of the three types described here. Reviewing this type of documentation often influences the amount of time a group spends on a topic and the level of student involvement in shaping the learning experience.

Toddlers Helping Toddlers Stand on Their Own
I Want to Help You But...Students and Teachers Uncover the Workers' Dilemma During the Sit-In Movement
How Does Your Garden Grow? Questions Our Students Have Us Asking

Examples of Documentation Shared Back with Learners

Making visible images of learning and being together in a group is a way to foster group identity and learning. This type of documentation promotes conversation or deepens understanding about one or more aspects of a learning experience. It can serve as a memory of learning in the classroom, allowing children and adults to reflect on, evaluate, and build on their previous work and ideas. Sharing documentation back with learners can take many forms: a photocopied sheet of paper, words repeated back to students, work brought back to a small group or put up on a wall, or a carefully arranged panel. The examples in this section range from more immediate and "in the moment" to more fully framed and shaped.

Creating a Culture of Critique
Making Every Voice Heard
Listening: The Heart of What Really Is Transcript

Examples of Documentation that is Shared More Widely

Documentation is an act of communication; it makes public a conversation about what we value. When preparing documentation to stand on its own, documenters need to provide enough context and framing so that others can derive meaning from it. Depending on the purposes and setting for the documentation, the context could include logistical information, such as key names, dates, and age group represented, as well as the purpose of the learning experience.

Crossing the Rocks and the Water
For Children, By Children
Ring-Around-The-Rosie

Meet the MLV Team

Daniel Wilson

Mara Krechevsky

Howard Gardner

Ben Mardell

Steve Seidel

Terri Turner

Thank You to Our Funders

Making Learning Visible was made possible through the generous support of Atlantic Philanthropies, the Barr Foundation, the Ohio Department of Education, and the Massachusetts Department of Education.