Research Base
The reading behind the wall
The wall was shaped by four sources I returned to throughout the unit.
Jessica Vance’s Evidence of Inquiry (Vance, 2025) and her workshop in Shanghai in April 2026 (Vance, 2026) gave me the working frame: find a blank space, set an intention, make connections, leave space for wonder, co-construct for personal meaning. The workshop also surfaced specific structures I had not used before — the Question Continuum, the Question Pencil, the Research Unstuck Wall, and the Pull Up a Chair routine — all of which ended up on the wall in some form.
A learning wall is a teaching tool, not a documentation tool. You teach into it. You do not just record on it.
Ritchhart, Church and Morrison’s Making Thinking Visible (Ritchhart, Church and Morrison, 2011) provided the broader family of routines that gave the wall most of its content. Tug of War and the related question-sorting practices appeared physically on the wall during the unit. The book’s central argument — that thinking becomes available for teaching only when it is made visible — is the operating logic of the whole project. The follow-up volume (Ritchhart and Church, 2020) extended several of these practices in ways I used in Weeks 6 and 7.
Dylan Wiliam’s Embedded Formative Assessment (Wiliam, 2011) shaped how I read the wall as a teacher. Each week I walked the wall before students arrived and noted which groups were stuck, which questions were drifting, and which routines were producing usable evidence. The wall functioned as a low-cost formative tool: a quick scan told me where to push and where to leave alone.
The Reggio Emilia tradition — the environment as a third teacher — sits behind the whole project (Edwards, Gandini and Forman, 1998; Krechevsky et al., 2013). Reggio’s argument that physical space teaches alongside the adult was the reason I cared about wall design at all.
References
- CAST (2018) Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 2.2. Wakefield, MA: CAST.
- Edwards, C., Gandini, L. and Forman, G. (eds) (1998) The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach — Advanced Reflections. 2nd edn. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing.
- Krechevsky, M., Mardell, B., Rivard, M. and Wilson, D. (2013) Visible Learners: Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
- Ritchhart, R., Church, M. and Morrison, K. (2011) Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
- Ritchhart, R. and Church, M. (2020) The Power of Making Thinking Visible: Practices to Engage and Empower All Learners. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
- Vance, J. (2025) Evidence of Inquiry. Elevate Books EDU.
- Vance, J. (2026) Evidence of Inquiry [professional development workshop]. Shanghai, April 2026.
- Wiliam, D. (2011) Embedded Formative Assessment. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.