"Kidwatching": Discovering Every Child's Genius

When working with pre-service teachers in New York, less than two weeks into their student teaching placement, we asked them to clear off their desks except for a piece of paper and pen. We then asked them to write a class list. The next step was to look over the list and think about whether any kids were missing. Who was at the top of the list and why? Who was at the bottom of the list and why?

We then asked the teachers to create a table: the students' names on their lists each made a row, and we added two columns labeled "genius" and "passions." We asked the teachers to complete the table, to list out each of their students' strengths and interests. Their pens moved slower. Several looked around the room as if searching for answers outside of the windows and on the walls. Perhaps it was unfair to expect our student teachers to know their students so well within the first two weeks, but it seemed to have an impact on how they viewed their students after that exercise.

Prior to the next class meeting the following week, the preservice teachers' assignment was to learn about each of their students – what their students cared about most deeply, their talents, their hopes, their genius. Knowing a child was one of four children in their family was fine, but understanding the child's role in the family, their relationship to their siblings, how they looked up to or served as role models to their siblings was far more meaningful.

If you are a parent or have nieces and nephews or close family friends with children, you can probably list off each child's genius. Can we do that for all of our students? How do we find out what excites them? What makes their hearts race? How they like to spend their time outside of school? A parent survey or a student survey is a good place to start, but truly getting to know a child requires intentional observation, or what Yetta Goodman and Gretchen Owocki call "kidwatching"(Kidwatching, 2002).

Goodman and Owocki discuss kidwatching in terms of literacy – "a framework for engaging in systematic, yet very personalized, data collection in areas of literacy". Their goal for teachers is to intentionally watch children interact with one another and with texts, whether they are reading, writing, or discussing. The teacher becomes a detective, documenting children's ways of reading and writing and ways of participating in conversations with peers and being a member of a classroom. They offer checklists and charts and suggestions for keeping records of each child. While it sounds time-consuming, there is no doubt teachers are doing this all the time. We observe a child engaged in a literacy activity and note their effect, the ability to actively participate, the speech and written production, and we use this to inform our teaching moves.

But what if we jotted down notes on post-its for a handful of children each day? What if we had files for each child and added the post-its and reviewed the notes at the end of a week or two? Imagine what we might notice such as patterns, preferences, and ways in which students are developing reader and writer identities. Kidwatching is intentional and systematic.

And the benefits? Certainly, kidwatching enables us to fill in the column for "genius" and "passions" for every child based on a wealth of observations. But more importantly, careful and intentional kidwatching helps us to shape our pedagogy to meet the interests and needs of the children we are so privileged to teach. This is how we determine which books to use for read alouds, which topics to suggest for creative writing, which books to add to our classroom libraries, and what type of questions to ask our students during discussions. Most significantly, kidwatching allows us to see students as they truly are: dynamic, three-dimensional, complex individuals, not just minds to fill or test scores to rise. This is how we build a caring classroom culture where every child's genius is celebrated.

Happy Reading,

Ernest and Jodene Morrell

For more on kidwatching:
Owocki, G. & Goodman, Y (2002). Kidwatching: Documenting children's literacy development. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.