Category: imagination
Are We Asking “Beautiful Questions”?

Are We Asking “Beautiful Questions”?

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We are hard-wired to be curious. Have you ever been around a little baby before?  When a newborn begins to realize that they have a body and becomes fascinated with their hands, they study them intensely. They put them in their mouths, they linger on different textures, wanting to squeeze them to feel them oozing through their fingers.

We are born curious, our brains pattern-making machines, trying to make sense of our environment, both outer and inner. Our schools shouldn’t be a place where student questions go to die.  Schools should be a place where curiosity is nurtured and sustained.

visual questionsIn  The Book of Beautiful Questions: The Powerful Questions That Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead,  Warren Berger pronounces “I am a questionologist.” I love that! When you look at the graphic that summarizes Berger’s book, you get a sense of possibility that deepening our inquiries can create through broad questioning techniques. The questions are not complicated, but the path they lead you on can branch into new avenues and creative opportunities. As educators, we should not only be modeling these broad-reaching questions but encouraging tangents of thought through open-ended questions.

A poem comes to mind which reminds me of the wonder and inspiration within the power of a question. Its words penetrate my soul and awaken the child within me, the one with a million “whys”.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

When I consider the excitement of beginning a new unit of inquiry, despite its familiarity, a fresh set of questions always come to mind. Just like the students, I am there with them, embarking upon the inquiry, seeking new understandings. I want to “live the questions” that Rilke speaks of, knowing that curiosity is a way of being in the world, experiencing awe and elegance in the search for answers. It is more than a pedagogical approach, it is a way of being. 

the searchSo to develop our “questionology” is not only important for our classroom culture but it when you think of it, it generates well-being. To question is to shake hands with possibility, and possibility opens our focus, inviting new information into our awareness.  So this drive to wonder is what makes us  “inforvores”, and is a psychological need. In fact, science is beginning to show that if we are not organizing our classrooms in such a way that spark interest, we are literally deadening the brains of our students. I’d also like to add that our own teaching practice becomes joyless when life is all answers and no questions.

So let’s take a page from Berger’s playbook and start generating opportunities for curiosity by asking more “beautiful questions”. It’s a habit worth cultivating.

 

 

 

What is an #IBEducation? Developing Moral Imagination in the #EnhancedPYP

What is an #IBEducation? Developing Moral Imagination in the #EnhancedPYP

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Recently an educator asked me what is the difference between the Primary Years Programme (PYP) and a “normal school”.  I really stumbled in describing the value of an IB education.

Yes, we do “transdisciplinary learning” with the use of our framework to develop conceptual understandings, but there’s plenty of international schools that attempt to mimic our integrated approach to the subject matter.  To me, that isn’t what makes us stand out.

Then I thought about how we are shifting our views to reflect the changing nature of the student-teacher relationship, with having “agency” as the center of learning. However, there are many great schools out there who are developing a more personalized approach to developing content knowledge and skills. I’m not sure if we really have “the corner office” on that one either.

After more reflection, I settled on moral imagination.

Morals?–that’s a word you don’t often hear these days, as it seems old fashioned, harkening back to a time of “purity and goodness”. Perhaps it conjures up some religious connotation that reeks of absolutes and “thou shall nots” as we try to discern “right” from “wrong”.  So it is no wonder why this word “moral” has gone by the wayside as something worth promoting in our secular education systems. With this in mind, just because morals aren’t taught in schools doesn’t mean that this black and white thinking doesn’t exist. In fact, probably because we don’t address it, it has become dangerously polarizing, particularly in our politics. Hence the reason why we need to add imagination to our morality.

When you think back to the inception of the International Baccalaureate (IB), its mission to develop “inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect”, came in response to atrocities witnessed around the world such as in World War II.  In the early days of crafting the PYP, the curriculum writers were heavily influenced by the progressive ideas of many educational philosophists. Consider the words of Earnest Boyer, whose ideas shaped the model behind our transdisciplinary themes:

Today, not only has this commitment to teach virtue before knowledge dramatically declined, but we now feel uncomfortable even talking about such matters. It’s all right these days to talk about academic standards, but it’s not all right, we’re told, to talk about ethical and moral standards.

And yet if history has taught us anything at all, it’s taught us that knowledge unguided by an ethical and moral compass is more dangerous than ignorance itself. The British philosopher George Steiner defined the challenge this way: “We now know,” Steiner said, “that a man can read Goethe in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert at sundown, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.

What grows up inside “literate civilization,” Steiner asks, that seems to prepare it for barbarism? What grows up, of course, is information without knowledge, knowledge without wisdom, and competence without conscience.

Excerpt from The Basic School, by Earnest Boyer, 1995

When you consider his words, you can appreciate the depth of thinking and intention that went into creating the PYP. To think that we just do “concept-based learning through an inquiry approach” is really missing the point and value an IB education.

Recently I listened to an interview with Kerry Kennedy in the audiobook Power Moves by Adam Grant. Technology can make report cards more personal, not less. (3)She talked about her work in teaching human rights and empowering students, not only with the skills to become advocates for social justice issues but the motivation to be agents of change. She understands how important it is for young people to develop empathy so that this next generation can transform how power is wielded and how problems can be solved using “moral imagination”.

So what does this term mean?-In the book, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics , Mark Johnson explains that “We human beings are imaginative creatures, from our most mundane acts of perception all the way up to our most abstract conceptualization and reasoning. Consequently, our moral understanding largely depends on our…metaphors and other imaginative structures…which give us alternative viewpoints and concepts from which to evaluate the merits of a particular moral position. They make it possible for us to envision the possible consequences of a proposed course of action, such as how other people are affected, how it might change our relationships, and what new possibilities it might open up (or close off) concerning how we may grow.” When I read this, I began to appreciate the Learner Profile and how it helps to shape our students into developing the skills necessary to examine issues through a variety of perceptual lens. It is the blend of our “essential elements” which craft the faculty of moral imagination.

Fun and EasySo how can we amplify this as we look to “enhance” our PYP programs? When I consider how we look at developing “agency”, it’s more than considering students’ ability to self-regulate their learning, it is the chance to develop their voice as a citizen and a contributor to our humanity. We need to provide opportunities to support this as we consider our students’ understanding of complex issues, encouraging the practice of courage so that they can “be the change that you want to see in the world”.   We need to show them examples of young people who are challenging the status quo, whether it is about gun violence, climate change or equity in education. In this way, they can perceive possibilities and really begin to embody the true sense “agency”.  And, in my heart, I hope it can transform our traditional views plagued by this dualistic thinking to create thinkers who can rumble in the grey-area of life to create new answers to old problems. In this way, our PYP curriculum will truly be “enhanced”.

 

 

Future Thinking: Evolving as a Part of Enhancing A #PYP Programme of Inquiry

Future Thinking: Evolving as a Part of Enhancing A #PYP Programme of Inquiry

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Not everyone wakes up on a Sunday morning and sketches out ideas for a Programme of Inquiry (POI), but I’ve been reflecting for a while on my experience from last spring when I went to the IB’s headquarters in the Hague to help design sample POIs for the Enhanced PYP initiative (see the Teacher Support Materials that can be accessed in the MyIB section of the main page for those samples in PYP resources). During that time, our teams sat down and began to create POIs that were structurally synergistic, organized so that there was more conceptual coherence and personalized to the uniqueness of that school reality and age group. In the blog post, #PYP: What is a Successful Programme of Inquiry?, I articulated the intention that was foundational in creating those sample POIs, but I’m starting to consider this definition of “success” as my “first thinking” when I consider what it might mean to “enhance” something.

Probably all you English scholars know that the word “enhance” is a transitive verb, meaning that this verb is relational and influential. enhanced pypI find it an interesting word choice by the IB in its re-branding effort. So their call to “enhance” our Primary Years Programme has got me lingering on what it is that we want to elevate in the learning experience.  Visually, “Agency” has now become the symbolic heart of the PYP’s graphic. I think many educators are painting a picture of what that can look like in our classrooms; the blog called IB Educator Voices contains a multitude of examples of teachers pivoting towards an agentic pedagogical approach. Currently, I am enamored with Rick Hanson’s definition of agency from his book, Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength and Happiness , which I’d like to share with you:

Agency is the ability to look for ways to cause an effect. It’s a sense of internal freedom when you make something happen.

Hmm…..when I consider that interpretation, my eyes begin to widen its focus upon the outer ring’s message of this enhanced PYP graphic: “Building For the Future”.  Should we not, as PYP educators, be contemplating what sort of future we wish to build? We often undermine our influence of the big picture of how society and culture are developed over time through our educational paradigms. Educators have played a big role in creating the Millennial-generation, and we are helping to create the next generation of global citizens. We shouldn’t take these things lightly, and in fact, I think we should be much more intentional with our power and ability to transform our human experience and life on Earth. We should look for ways to cause an effect….because we have the freedom to make something happen. For example, it seems obvious to me that the intelligent and thoughtful people at the United Nation’s know this, which is why they have created a call to action with the #TeachSDGs movement. Our schools should be seriously considering how we might achieve those 17 goals by 2030, because this is certainly one way to shape our schools’ POIs which is in alignment with the PYP curricular framework and values of the IB.

A Second Thought

As I reflect back to that Hague experience, I feel that this initial approach to considering what it means to “enhance” the design of the POI is still ongoing. If you look carefully at those Sample POIs, you would notice that they don’t really deviate much from each other. Because at the end of the day, whether we were using national curricular standards or the IB’s Scope and Sequence, the challenges with using either the standards-based vs. concept-based curriculum results in more similarities than exceptions when creating the units of inquiries. I think this a testimony to the strength of the PYP framework and transdisciplinary learning with how translatable it is to a variety of educational settings.  However, when I read books like Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly and  How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil, I begin to wonder if our current POIs are teaching towards the past or preparing for the imminent reality of our students. Are we, as schools, engaged in future-building, with meaningful and forward-thinking POIs, or clinging onto industrial-age ideas.

I’m not sure how familiar you are with those books, so I’d like to share a quote that persistently plagues me from Homo Deus:

As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubject reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history. In the 21st century, fiction might thereby become the most potent force on Earth…hence, if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that make meaning in our world……Fiction isn’t bad. It’s vital. Without commonly accepted stories about money, states or coorporations, no complex human society can function. We can’t play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can’t enjoy the benefits of the markets and courts without simliar make-believe stories. But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality.

Yuval Noah Harari, from Home Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.

I’ve been marinating in those words for over a year. Curious about what could be the “story” we are telling ourselves now about our future and how we can use it as a “tool”. I know that some feel that the book Future Shock is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. But what if we could choose another direction, one in which we meet the disruption that advancing technology will bring with creativity, grace, and intention. I believe wholeheartedly in that possibility, which is why I’ve been working on developing online courses for well-being in the digital age. I feel strongly that we should not resist technology but instead embrace it and use it to promote greater health and improve our relationships. That is the empowering “story” I wish to tell.

And today, I woke up, feeling alive, wanting to create a POI that was bathed in an over-reaching goal of developing well-being because I think that is the “fiction” I’d like to cultivate in the intersubjective (socially agreed upon) future reality of students. Here are the main 6 concepts that I feel need to be unpacked and gone into depth over the course of a student’s PYP experience within our 6 transdisciplinary themes.

  1. Sustainability (Production and Consumption):  because we need to shift from scarcity to ingenuity.
  2. Entrepreneurship: because we need to shift from profit-orientated goals to positive contributions in society.
  3. Computational Thinking: because we have to understand the algorithms of life and how we can co-evolve with exponential machine learning.
  4. Digital Citizenship: because online relationships and media are influencing us and our society. We need to navigate this reality skillfully.
  5. Social Emotional Learning: because attention and emotional awareness is vital to our health and is the new currency in our economy.
  6. Imagination (and Poetry): because creativity is the by-product of imagination, and we need to find more beautiful ways to express it.

I’ve started to create potential POIs that take these main concepts and build them out so that the overall force of the programme is one that develops well-bing: resilience, awareness, positive outlook and generosity. It’s really hard to translate these ideas into words without a fully fleshed out sample POI to show as a model but hopefully, the spirit of this quest has been communicated and I will have something completed soon that I can show as an example.

An Invitation

Now, whether you agree with me or not about what concepts need to be on a future-orientated whole-school POI isn’t the point but I do hope to open up a debate. I know in schools that are moving towards personalized learning culture, very broad and general central ideas are highly valued so that there is a lot of flexibility in the direction of a student’s inquiry. In my own experience, I am grappling with casting such a wide net with central ideas in the curriculum, uncertain if the overall outcome behooves the students and is manageable for teachers. But the purpose of this post is not to incite discussion around central ideas, but instead to provoke a re-examination of “the big picture” of your current school’s POI and reflect upon the future that you want to create through the curriculum.  Especially in schools that have authorized programmes, we need to be really challenging ourselves, moving beyond horizontal and vertical articulation. Perhaps this is my new working definition of the Enhanced PYP. I’m calling it “trans-articulation”. It’s less about ticking boxes and more about growing the future today, evolving consciously and actively within our curriculum approach.

As always, I hope you share your reflections, wonderings and concerns in the comments below.

 

#SOL: Not Your Average Homework

#SOL: Not Your Average Homework

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“We’re up to 7 now. Sophia brought in a Koala” I nudged my chin into the crook of my husband’s shoulder, destined for sleep. “7! You need a pet manager.”, he suggests. My eyes pop open. I sit up in bed.

“Yes, yes we do! That’s a brilliant idea.You’re a genius”

Let me tell you how it all began. During the summer, inspired by a former colleague of mine, I purchased a stuffed woodpecker and a fun storybook. woodpecker book I introduced the book and the bird, Benny,  as a home learning activity for the students, discussing the responsibility of having a classroom pet. Here’s how it has worked: one student every day was “picked” by Benny (he does this little bird call when you press him) and they would take him home, read him the story and write a bit about what they did at their home inside a writing journal. benny The kids loved it. They took him to restaurants. They took him to school plays. They took him to soccer matches. Benny was really enjoying himself and the kids were too. They didn’t mind writing a few sentences with their families, and the “homework” wasn’t overwhelming.

Pet #2: Then my 7-year old daughter said that she has a cat, cutie pieCutie Pie, that probably needed to go to Grade 1 and learn more math. Cutie Pie needed some support with math story problems. Huh, I liked that idea. So I had Hannah come into Grade 1 and introduce Cutie Pie to the class. How could they not love that adorable face? Now we had a Math Cat!

You know where this is going right? Because it was only a matter of time before a student was going to ask about bringing in another “pet”. Every time a student said they wanted to bring in another class pet, I’d ask them, “Well, what do they think they could learn from Grade 1 students?”.  There is no end to their imagination. The diversity and interest of these “pets” really amaze me.

We also have a world-traveling monkey, Fruity, who loves to learn about culture and geography. And our latest addition is Joy, the Koala,  loves numbers. We’re hoping that Joy can practice some expanded notation and decomposition of numbers.

Yesterday we opened up the discussion on the “pet manager” job to the kids. They loved it!–of course! So now we will have 4 students who are solely responsible for keeping track of all of these pets.  I personally love that we have such a large Grade 1 family of pets and I love how the students are really showing their initiative and independence with managing them. This is definitely not your average kind of home learning and I hope in years to come, the memory of these little projects finds a home in their heart, cherishing their experience of Grade 1.

 
Eat, Sleep and Learn: In A State of Perpetual Practice

Eat, Sleep and Learn: In A State of Perpetual Practice

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Practice is a kind of severe devotion… This kind of discipline creates muscle memory, but even more so, this internal sensitivity andfamiliarity with the craft opens up and sparks invention and improvisation. Any kind of regular practice makes way for discovery and subtlety, and imaginative nuance will follow. -Gail  Swanlund-

I’m starting a new unit: How We Express Ourselves- We appreciate both the patterns that occur in the natural world and the ones that we create. During my first week of pre-assessment my mind says “No, no, no–these plastic toys and manipulatives, they are eye catching and helping them to develop the concept of pattern, but I want them to observe the natural world and get inspired by the lines, shapes, and colors they see!”

I can’t begin to tell you how mixed my emotions were–most of my students are on target, as they seem to understand the basics, copying, extending  and creating models, but this unit is supposed to be about the appreciation of the aesthetic, I have to dig digger and find ways to induce a state of curiosity and wonder in order to develop creativity and expose the limits of their imagination!!

If any early years teachers accustomed to teaching 3-5 years old were to look at these photos, they would be content with the approximations and, in some cases, clear understandings of the concept of pattern in our first week of our unit.  I think these learning tools are excellent ways to develop the structure of how we can manipulate shape and color, and it also gives them practice at creating repetition in forming patterns. However, as much as I love these little people’s effort, I know if I am to continue in this vein for this unit, I am totally missing the mark of the transdisciplinary theme.

I grabbed my laminated line drawing cards and dragged our lovely art teacher into my room to help me think about my classroom design and how I can organically teach pattern in lessons. I knew as soon as I began collaborating, I was out of my depth–I am not an artist, or at least that is how I perceive myself. (God help me when I sit down with the music teacher.) Panic began to set in….

So I  have begun to convert my classroom into different “environments”. One will be “water world”, “forest world” and “human world”, respectively.  And, if I was to really nail this unit, I was going to have to work on developing my craft so I could faithfully explore the idea of the aesthetic so the kids would demonstrate higher forms of creativity and irules-coritanventiveness.

With that in mind, I have decided to embark upon a learning journey, to jump into this inquiry as if I was the student and not necessarily the teacher. I’ve signed myself up for an Introduction to Image Making MOOC  from a graphic design perspective, and start to explore how I can incorporate some of these class assignments into my classroom. As I think about this endeavor the “rules” by Sister Corita Kent really speaks to how I can approach areas of my practice which are not as I am not as comfortable and familiar with.

Since I have decided to use the context of different environments to observe patterns, I have begun to consider how I might devise different provocations in which we can look at animals and their markings. Here are just a few ideas I have for the unit during our exploration and finding out phase of the inquiry.

  • Animal tails: I was thinking about a “cover and peek” activity. Using some of the languages from the Visible Thinking strategy, I See, I Think, I Wonder, we can look at pictures of animals with only their tails showing. Later, the students would be offered the use of materials like string and felt to create wavy, spotted and swirly tails.
  • Thunderstorm: I was thinking of listening to sounds of different types of storms and have the students give me words to describe what they hear.
    • Then I would give them some instruments and let them try to model what they hear. Later I would offer some drums, but I was thinking that I might cover the drum with some white paper and tape some different color crayons on it. In that way, when they are making their sounds, there would be markings on the paper.
    • Also, I plan on offering the colored water and droppers. I  was thinking that we could make raindrops using those materials, and they could watch the concentric circles form, as they drop the colored water into a tub of clear water.

These are just a couple of ideas that I was inspired with after 1 week from that MOOC. The longer I teach, the more I come to understand how important to do things that stretch me so that I not only cultivate a classroom rich in learning but that I model the growth mindset in my classroom–even if these ideas fail, at least I developed some opportunities to show the creative process over product. I want to endeavor to experience this inquiry as a participant, as much as I am the facilitator, so I am equally excited about what the students will come up with once the reins are taken off their imagination.

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