Nursery World - Learning & Development: Observation

History, and the Child Study Movement in particular, can provide
some important learning about observation and record keeping. Tina
Bruce, Stella Louis and Georgie McCall offer some clarity on the main
issues.

If we look back to the lessons that history can teach us these can prove powerful. The current debates about record-keeping are not new. They have raged on in one form or another at least since the middle of the 18th century. They have never been resolved, and we cannot expect to resolve them completely today.

However, we can try to see with clarity what the main issues have always been, and how people have tackled them. We can identify the principles that occur again and again in the keeping of good records.

Having identified these, we can then translate them in terms of the settings we work in today, and thus make good records, feel ownership of them, and have confidence in them.

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