The Importance of Anecdotal Reports After Early Childcare Assistant College
December 10, 2019
After you finish your program, you will be able to apply what you’ve learned to help children. Under the guidance of a teacher, you can ensure students feel safe and attended to in the classroom. When their needs are nurtured, children are able to thrive socially, intellectually, emotionally and physically.
Being an observant, perceptive presence in their lives is helpful in creating these ideal circumstances. When you can record and notice what children need, you can support them. One way of recording what you see is through anecdotal reports. Read on for why these are so important in the development of children and in your career!
What Are Anecdotal Notes?
Anecdotal notes are how educators often choose to record useful observations of students. These notes are objective accounts of occurrences or behaviours, rather than containing the opinion of the person taking the note. They are concise and clear, so that they can be used as a reference later on. When multiple anecdotal notes have been compiled, they can act as documentation on student behaviour.
It’s important that anecdotal notes contain factual information, so that they can reliably inform potential decisions and actions. Early childcare assistant college can prepare you to properly take down this information so that it is useful to you and the teacher you work with.
Tips for Writing Anecdotal Reports in Your Career
Anecdotal reports are often called observational narratives, as they are narratives of different behaviours from students. These might be interactions with other students or adults, conversations or details about classroom behaviour. Anecdotal reports are written after incidents, not during. This allows you to keep caring for and working with the students without needing to stop and take notes.
The reports are a bit like short stories in that they describe what happened in the past tense, with a beginning, middle and end. When you write them, it’s important to remain objective and not allow your personal biases or views to influence what you write down. Staying as positive as you can is also important in writing down student behaviours.
Why Are They Important After an Early Childcare Assistant Diploma?
Anecdotal reports serve many purposes after an early childcare assistant diploma program. In your career, you can use these reports to track developments in individual students. You can show a student’s behaviour over a long range of time by creating anecdotal reports for different observations.
You can also use these reports to keep records of instructional requirements for individual students. Since no child is exactly the same, each child will have their own needs. You can note their behaviour on an ongoing basis to gather more data that points to how they learn best, and what things impede their learning.
In a lot of cases, behaviours might be noticed but forgotten soon after the fact. Anecdotal reports allow you to capture these things and save them, so that they won’t fall between the cracks. The documentation you keep is useful not only to you, but also to current and future teachers and their assistants. The family of a student may also benefit from hearing about their child’s behaviours and patterns. Overall, this can create a more supportive and understanding environment for each student.
Wondering what a child care assistant course can offer you?
Contact Medix College to learn more about our program.
