Abstract:

Slunjski (2015) emphasizes that “teaching children is not a process occurs linearly and rectilinearly but has the feature of spiral progression and is directed towards quality and quantity competences of the person who is in that learning process”. Every educator should work on quality monitoring and observation of what the child is doing, the way it thinks, how it resolves conflicts, cooperates in interaction with others. Only continuous monitoring and documentation of the educational and upbringing process enables the identification and understanding of specific interests, opportunities, motivations in order to encourage further development of the child and provide appropriate support. In actual pedagogical practice, the advantages of systematic documenting and monitoring have not been sufficiently recognized. Therefore, we should primarily work on promoting the importance of educators becoming competent to face their practice, because, according to Miljak (2015), to rise to the meta-level of educational work means consciously thinking about how to teach and teach children in kindergarten and in various ways document what was seen or become aware of. Continuous monitoring and documenting of the educational and upbringing process fundamentally changes the manner of research and the very practice of upbringing.

The paper presents the results of research obtained on a sample of educators (N = 132) of institutions for early and preschool education in the city of Zadar. The sample consisted educators in preschool institutions of public and private founders. For the purposes of the research, was constructed a measuring instrument, anonymous survey, which examined the socio-demographic characteristics of the participants, then with Likert's scale examined their opinion on the importance of systematic monitoring and documentation of educational work, opinion about documentation functions and benefits provided by systematic monitoring of educational work.

The results of the research show that educators have positive opinions of the monitoring and documentation of educational work. Moreover, most educators use different forms of monitoring and documentation of educational work and positively evaluate their knowledge and experience of monitoring and documentation of educational work. Also high values of arithmetic means and frequencies in almost all answers, in the part in which the opinion on documentation functions was examined, clearly confirm the positive attitude of respondents on the importance and benefits of systematic documentation.

Keywords:

Documenting, documentation functions, educators, individual approach, development maps.