Evidencing child-led learning: Innovative digital design

Evidencing child-led learning: Innovative digital design

Child-led learning offers powerful opportunities for fostering agency, creativity, and authentic engagement in classrooms, yet it continues to sit uneasily within education systems that prioritise standardised, curriculum-aligned evidence of learning. This tension is particularly pronounced in the Australian context, where teachers are required to demonstrate clear alignment with national curriculum expectations while supporting open-ended, emergent learning experiences. This article reports on a practitioner action research study conducted in a Year 3 classroom, exploring how digital documentation practices can support teachers to evidence child-led learning without diminishing its integrity. Centred on a six-week interdisciplinary project, the study examines the development and use of a teacher-designed digital dashboard that enabled real-time documentation, cross-curricular tagging, and retrospective mapping of student learning to Australian Curriculum content descriptors. Drawing on field notes, student artefacts, dashboard records, and reflective analysis, the findings show that the tool supported professional judgement rather than automation, making visible the complex, non-linear nature of student learning while strengthening teacher confidence in curriculum interpretation and reporting. The study also highlights shifts in the teacher’s role, positioning educators as curriculum translators, professional interpreters of learning, and designers of pedagogical systems that honour both accountability and agency. The article concludes that thoughtfully designed digital documentation tools can bridge the accountability–authenticity divide, offering a practical and values-aligned approach to evidencing child-led learning in contemporary schooling contexts.