Watch This Space!

“If these walls could talk!” Cambridge Friends School’s walls do just that! “Documentation panels,” prominently displayed along CFS hallways, on bulletin boards, and taped onto whatever available spaces are accessible, offer passersby visual archives of its students’ learning. The school’s documentation panels tell stories about growth, about progress, about process, about the excitement to learn or to reflect. Or, to employ a Quaker phrase, documentation panels acknowledge “continuing revelation”: Unfolding happens. New insights appear. Understandings deepen over time. Advances show up; scholarship continues. (So let’s tell the story about that unfolding; about those new understandings!)

Commanding much of the hallway facing the Meeting Hall, for example, an impressive swath of brown wrapping paper backdrops a detailed story of how CFS’s middle school students are mounting the play, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Their documentation panel an interactive, “Watch this Space” timeline of photographs and captions, where these students are in this collective process is denoted by where a tall, thin, Ichabod Crane paper cutout, a pushpin through his right shoulder, currently points to another paper cutout which announces, proudly, “We are here.” (Judging from Ichabod’s and his sign’s placement, the middle-schoolers are about one-third into this project; they’re currently problem-solving how to block the play’s action.)

After Matthew’s third and fourth grade class spent time learning about Wassily Kandinsky, his paintings, and how that Russian abstract artist’s synesthenia meant he’d heard sound in color, the students picked up their own pain brushes to explore, to interact with geometrical shapes, and, as Matthew’s contribution to the 3/4 Class’s documentation panel wonderfully elucidates, to listen. Inspired by Kandinsky, Matthew has produced “Door Bello,” which draws us in, doesn’t it? Its title, itself an echo, perhaps, invites us to listen, too.

Documentation panels, first developed by Italy’s Reggio Amelia’s early education innovators, check off several boxes: like Matthew’s contribution, a panel’s creation offers an immediate meta-cognition experience for its creators. “I did this. I tried this. I see this thing differently, now. And now I can . . . ” Teachers can assess students’ individualized progress using criteria other than how many answers a student got right on True/False quiz. Just as exciting, teachers, parents, other CFS students, and visitors walking though Cambridge Friends School’s hallways can witness for ourselves what thoughtful, rigorous, and collaborative education happens in this space!