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This article describes the use of documentation by teachers and their children with pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) to develop skills of self-determination. Visual feedback, such as photos and video, help teachers plan and children evaluate their performance in social situations, such as finding a friend to play with at recess. This documentation serves as a tool to create a narrative with both the child and the teacher. This narrative evolves with new iterations as documentation is regularly collected and we find that it helps the child to interpret challenging social situations. Highlighting two teachers and their students, this article describes how documentation helped draw the child into making meaning of frustrating or confusing social situations, thus allowing teachers to guide the child to reflect and reevaluate his behavior. Documentation was used to point to positive social interactions that were affirming for the child. (Contains 5 figures.)

This case study uses documentation as a tool for formative assessment to interpret the learning of twin boys with significantly delayed language skills. Reggio-inspired documentation (the act of collecting, interpreting, and reflecting on traces of learning from video, images, and observation notes) focused on the unfolding of the boys' nonverbal communication skills that helped inform planning and implementing instruction. Documentation is displayed, with an interpretation of the learning and a demonstration of the boys' strengths and competencies. The authors discuss how a public display of documentation sparked a collaborative inquiry among teachers, family, and the children themselves. Implications for practice outline guidelines in using documentation to assess learning. (Contains 7 figures.)

This article explores the use of documentation--to observe, record, and interpret the learning of children and their pre-service teachers to make that learning visible in order to point to it and engage in a collaborative dialogue. Inspired by the work of the Reggio Emilia infant-toddler and pre-schools in Italy, this study extends the idea of documenting young children's individual and group learning to adult learning in a graduate seminar with nine pre-service teachers. Shifts made to teaching a seminar included professor and pre-service teachers co-constructing the meaning of a learning group, following a protocol to look at children's work, sharing public reflections, interpreting the learning that took place both between and in each seminar. The explicit effort to document adult learning led to creating a collective body of knowledge that extended to documenting children's learning in elementary inclusive classrooms. (Contains 5 figures and 2 notes.)