I don’t know about you, but I’ve been noticing that sometimes it takes a while for learning to land …
Here are some examples in my own learning:
- When learning to rock climb, I would try and try and try to figure out the “crux” of a climb. I would go away for a week, come back, and figure out the crux easily …
- When moving to Argentina to teach adults English, it took months to figure out how to embed Learning Power into language learning. After about 3 months of confusion and grapple, I began to figure it out …
- When exploring completely new learning territory in Learning Pioneers with Jessica Vance and Anne van Dam on documenting teacher learning in November 2023, it’s taken until now to figure out what visible documented learning can look like for our learning community.
Can you think of examples in your own life where you have learnt something and it’s taken a while for it to land?
Do you share these examples with your students? Wouldn’t this be a powerful way to show that learning doesn’t happen in “one lesson” but takes time to make sense of, embed and integrate for yourself?!
Where and when do you verbalise, make space for and encourage the slow integration of learning? In your own life? With your teams? With your students?
This kind of long-term thinking when it comes to learning, relates to many points on this visual from David Perkins’ thinking on “Playing the Whole Game” – This is an example of “Playing the Whole Game” as adult learners committed to our craft.
How are you playing the whole game in your own personal learning endeavors?

The Guts of Learning
This blogpost is about the process of applying learning from Jess and Anne’s “live”. My intention with sharing this “guts of learning”, Guy Claxton calls it, is to:
- Make this process visible so that you might be able to apply it to your learning experiences
- Give you some tools, tips and tricks to think about how you might make teacher learning visible in your schools and classrooms
This blogpost builds on thinking from a prior blogpost (see here) – You don’t need to read it to get up-to-speed, but you might want to earmark it to come back if this blogpost resonates.
I’ve also recently read a brilliant blogpost on documentation from Jon Butcher. I loved this quote from Jon’s blogpost on documentation:
“Carlina Rinaldi, describes documentation as an act of caring, an act of love and interaction. It enacts careful observation, listening to both the voices and the silences, actions and inactions. It facilitates further questioning, so that we can better understand the learner, through what educators in Reggio Emilia refers to as a meaning making process”
And we definitely want caring, love, interaction, listening, questioning and understanding to be central to our classrooms, our schools and our learning communities, don’t we?!
Diving further into “the why”

Research into what makes the biggest impact on student progress, including John Hattie’s meta-research, shows that making students’ thinking visible has a high impact on learning and progress. There are many ways to go about this, from using Project Zero’s visible thinking routines, to powerful questioning from teachers and students to visible documentation of learning, such as is developed in the reggio emilia approach.
And, if making students’ thinking visible positively impacts on their learning, then doesn’t it make logical sense that making teachers’ thinking visible will positively impact on their learning?!
And, if we figure out how to make teacher thinking visible we are not only living and breathing what we are developing with students (as Trevor MacKenzie and Mark Finnis call it, “modelling the model”), we are creating strong cultures for learning in our schools where everyone is a learner. This builds conscious competence in our craft (yes, educators are craftspeople – I hope we are owning that!) and, coming back to Hattie’s research, builds collective efficacy.
Although we have focused on developing thinking routines and building strong questioning skills in Learning Pioneers, this blogpost will focus on making teacher thinking visible through visible collective documentation of learning.
The Grapple
So, here was our grapple in Learning Pioneers. As an international online learning community which builds shared thinking, dialogue and collaboration in a variety of ways, it’s super challenging to distill that thinking in one place. We wondered:
- How can we create documentation that is clear, concise and useful to our community?
- How can we bring together key discussions so that we can return to and add to them?
- How can we make links between our inquiries and build on them over time?
- What should we include in documentation? What should we leave out?
- How can we co-create documentation so everyone’s voice is included?
- What would be the best digital software to build clear, accessible, interactive documentation?
Tough! The same questions teachers who build documentation in the classroom face every single day.
Except, we were trying to transport this online. With adults.
Climbing out of the pit

Using James Nottingham’s analogy of the Learning Pit, we had to figure out how to get out. One key way we did this was to draw on the expertise of Jessica Vance who is constantly leading and experimenting with documenting teacher learning. Jessica kindly offered some pointers, including:
- Use a key – this will make documentation easy to follow for those who are “looking in”
- Create an intention before you start documenting – What’s the intended purpose behind this documentation?
- Gather key artifacts that will bring your documentation to life
- Consider key questions or thinking routines that might drive the learning forwards
- Use a software that’s clear and accessible
We also added:
- Start with “why” – Because without surfacing our “why”, we are at the risk of thinking people can read our minds (something I forget all the time!) and losing the impetus and reason behind our pedagogy and actions … So important, so grateful for learning from Cat Place’s team at Jubilee Park who start every single inquiry with their “why”
The result – so far!
We’ve now run two rounds of visible online documentation in Learning Pioneers (see our latest here – Please do use what’s useful for your teams and your own practice in this documentation! You’ll see it’s not quite finished yet – but, then, like all great inquiries, will it ever be?!).
We followed Jessica’s guidance and are super pleased with the feedback and results so far.
We couldn’t pick one intention! Here are the few we narrowed it down to; to:
- Connect ideas and learning together across the community in one clear space
- Create opportunities to reflect back on and build on ideas.
- Ensure key ideas and learning don’t “get lost” in the threads of discussion in Learning Pioneers (there’s some juicy stuff in there!)
- Involve community members in co-creating our documentation.
- Be inclusive in our learning across Learning Pioneers – Our Learning Journeys are part of our “diving deeper” content and we wanted to find a way for everyone in the community to benefit from our shared thinking, whether they’re in our courses, “dip your toes in” or “asynch content“.
And, in this specific inquiry:
- To bring clarity and intentionality to our LPA practice.
Some of the feedback from our community we’ve received includes:
- “I love the variety of documentation used here and the collective voice it represents over a period of time. It’s like standing back gazing at a learning journey wall and reflecting together at the highlights and key learning moments.”
- “I would love to circle back to this in 6 months and hear about/document the actions that have been inspired through this collective journey of learning.” – Love this idea!
- “This is brilliant – so useful to have developing thoughts/ideas in a central place.”
- “Having the key parts in one place rather than going through the different areas on this platform is really helpful. I’ve saved them to my Google Drive so when I’m thinking about how this can support the work at my school, I have it to hand.” – Yes! Ripple effect beyond LP – love this!
- “A great place to catch up on what has been happening after my holiday!” therefore creating calm and valuing well-being – Yay!
- “This is amazing! So much information on each slide and I love the fact that it links to different Learning Pioneer spaces and “lives”. I’ll be spending a lot of time here!” Useful then!
This feedback hits so many of our values in Learning Pioneers, which include clarity, intentionality and co-creation. Of course, we’re open to postive critique too and know this is just a start point from which we can improve our process.
Between iterations 1 and 2, this is what we have improved:
- Collective and individual voice shared across more areas of the community (Masterminds, Campfires, book studies, provocations and “slow chat” discussions)
- Links to prior inquiries and inquiries moving forwards (Took inspiration from Trevor MacKenzie here, where he’d suggested creating visible links between inquiries with students – we wondered, how might we do this online?)
- More hyperlinks to link into YouTube provocations and areas of our community (therefore weaving together learning across LP)
- More visible examples of learning (artifacts) – We want to build on this and thread this in further – practical examples of applied learning really bring ideas to life and enable others to see how they can apply ideas too.
You can check out our Visible Learning Journey here.
Many of the links will work for you outside of LP; some won’t – they are there to help those in LP navigate the community and find relevant posts.
We’d love your feedback!
- Could this learning journey be useful for you and your teams to stimulate learning and discussion around “embedding Learning Power”?
- Might some of the video provocations be useful to stimulate team discussions around learning?
- What’s clear and accessible for you in this documentation?
- What would you like to see more of?
- How might we make it even better?
And:
- Do you visible document teacher learning? How do you go about that? What are your grapples? What are your “wins”?
Would love to hear your thoughts and reflections, either in the comments of this post or on social media – please tag me! (Twitter // LinkedIn)
P.S. Our next series of visible documentation will be on “Executive Functioning”. You will be able to access this documentation, plus prior documentation into “What Education Might Look Like in 2030” by joining our “dip your toes in” package (a total bargain for the learning and connection you receive in return!)

P.P.S. We are opening up our next “live” event on Executive Functioning to you all for FREE! Find out more and sign up here.
P.P.P.S Exciting news! Jessica Vance is writing a book on “teacher documentation” – It’s going to be awesome!! Follow her on Instagram for rich, thought-provoking posts and check out her website to find out more. And, we highly recommend her current book on “Leading with a lens of inquiry” – Reported by our Learning Pioneers members as one of our most impactful book studies!
