Learning Stories and Teacher Inquiry Groups: Reimagining Teaching and Assessment in Early Childhood Education

by Isauro M. Escamilla, Linda R. Kroll, Daniel R. Meier & Annie White

Enhance your professional development and partner with children and families to improve learning experiences in a range of early childhood settings and programs. Learn how to integrate the Learning Stories approach and teacher inquiry groups to promote authentic assessment to inform instruction, and foster collegial team building and collaboration. The writing of Learning Stories integrated within the professional development process of teacher inquiry, documentation, and reflection offers a new model of professional support and a method for reaching out to children and families.

The Learning Stories approach is used primarily with children from birth through age 8, and educators in classrooms and programs, administrators, professional development specialists, instructional coaches, and teacher educators can benefit from this approach.

Learning Stories in Practice

by Margaret Carr & Wendy Lee

Featuring a variety of examples of real-life learning stories from around the world, Learning Stories in Practice by Margaret Carr and Wendy Lee provides clear, practical advice on how to initiate and create learning stories and why they are valuable. The authors show readers how to write stories that capture the excitement of each young child’s journey through the early years and how to develop a deep professional understanding of the learning that takes place during this time in their lives.

Learning Stories: Constructing Learner Identities in Early Education

by Margaret Carr & Wendy Lee

Margaret Carr’s seminal work on Learning Stories was first published by SAGE in 2001, and this widely acclaimed approach to assessment has since gained a huge international following. In this new full-colour book, the authors outline the philosophy behind Learning Stories and refer to the latest findings from the research projects they have led with teachers on learning dispositions and learning power, to argue that Learning Stories can construct learner identities in early childhood settings and schools. By making the connection between sociocultural approaches to pedagogy and assessment, and narrative inquiry, this book contextualizes Learning Stories as a philosophical approach to education, learning and pedagogy.

Assessment in Early Childhood Settings: Learning Stories

by Margaret Carr

This book shows that an early childhood setting can be described as a learning place in which children develop learning dispositions such as resilience in the face of uncertainty, confidence to express their ideas, and collaborative and thoughtful approaches to problem-solving. These dispositions provide the starting point for life-long learning.

The author asks: How can we assess and track children′s learning in the early years in a way that includes learning dispositions and avoids the pitfalls of over-formal methods, whilst being helpful for practitioners, interesting for families, and supportive for learners?