School curricula in the Western world currently have a number of goals and learning outcomes to be handled and achieved by teachers and students. Goals and learning outcomes in the Swedish school curriculum presuppose detailed planning for a successful outcome, and different kinds of school documentation have thus become a clear feature within an emerging culture of documentation in educational settings. This paper aims to identify and examine educational policy as didactic practice within a compulsory documentation practice in a Swedish secondary school. The compulsory individual development plan as policy is designed to promote current curricular values like knowledge development through goal setting and individual freedom of choice. Nationally and internationally a regulatory culture of documentation is supported by policy documents that comprise the idea that it through education is possible to attain goals in various school subjects at the same time as attaining goals of freedom of choice and individualization. Guided by the question to what extent this is possible, some main consequences of the idea will be examined. Primarily, the curriculum guidelines will be analyzed with a curriculum theoretical model elaborated from the works of Stefan Hopmann and Wofgang Klafki. Their definition of didactic is that it is characterized by restrained teaching, based on a commitment to the concept of bildung. Briefly, bildung means that knowledge goals and learning outcomes are what they are by the subject meeting the teacher and the student while meeting the content. There is no subject matter without meaning, and no meaning without subject matter. Within this understanding of didactic and bildung there is a differentiation of the written national curriculum and the actual teaching. Meaning is developed whet the curriculum content is enacted in practice. The analysis at the second level will be based on qualitative content analytical tools in order to describe the phenomenon of compulsory school documentation in a conceptual form. Hence a methodological framework will be designed in order to analyze the curriculum guided practice of writing individual documentation plans in conjunction with trialogue conversations in Swedish secondary schools. Using the previous described curriculum theoretical concern with the educational documentation culture, qualitative content analysis will be performed from three angles; national policy documents, legislated curriculum guided documentation in the educational practice and the also legislated developmental conversation where the documentation is established.

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