Watch in order to understand, not in order to have watched

Observation has quietly become a documentation activity, and something important was lost in the conversion.

There is a way of watching that is really just harvesting. You stand at the edge with the tablet, waiting for something photogenic, and when it happens you capture it and move on. The child has been recorded but not understood. There is another way of watching in which you have a live question in your head: why does this child abandon everything at the point of difficulty, or what is she actually doing when she lines those objects up, or is he avoiding the painting or avoiding the child who is at the painting. Same room, same shift, entirely different professional act.

The question is what makes the difference. Watching without one is passive and produces general impressions that are mostly a record of who was loudest. Watching with one is investigative, and it accumulates. You form a hypothesis on Monday, it is contradicted on Wednesday, you revise it, and by the end of a fortnight you know something about that child that no single observation could have given you. This is the intellectual core of the work and it is almost entirely invisible from outside. Nobody photographs an educator thinking.

It also has to be said that we watch some children far more than others. The child who is loud, the child who is new, the child who is struggling: they generate attention. The competent, quiet, socially fluent child can pass through an entire term barely observed, on the reasonable but lazy grounds that they are fine. Fine is not the same as extended. A deliberate rotation, where each educator takes responsibility for genuinely watching particular children over a period, is one of the few reliable correctives, and it costs nothing but intention.