#PYP Déjà vu or Jamais Vu? Approaching Familiar Units of Inquiry in Unfamiliar Ways
Picking up the strand of LED lights, I felt overwhelmed at the Chinese Hardware Market, I had this disorienting feeling that I’ve been here before, discussing the color of lights in broken Mandarin. As I walked out with 2 meters of lights, I felt like I was in a dream world, realizing that this whole experience was a déjà vu.
But having the luxury of teaching a unit of inquiry year after year creates the same experience. You read over last year’s planner, reliving the experience and ready to proceed in the same way. Easy, right? Then you can tick that off your To-Do list and move onto other things like setting up your classroom or having meetings. But this year, I can’t do that. I’ve promised myself to take myself and the students “where the streets have no name” and that means that I have to approach units of inquiry from a stance of jamais vu, selectively having amnesia about what provocations and activities we used in this unit.
So why on Earth would I toss aside all the thoughtful planning of the past? Because it’s the past. And we’ve grown professionally a whole year since our team originally designed that unit. Yes, we may be re-inventing the wheel a bit, but our experience and knowledge require us to develop more dynamic and empowering units of inquiry. We know more pedagogically. Moreover, we have a whole new group of students, with new interests and questions. We need to readjust our sails because we are going on a whole new adventure.
So when we examined our current Who We Are unit (Our choices and actions define who we become as a community), we decided to use “the end”, with a water-downed version of our summative task, a “learning fair”, to begin our current unit. It made sense that they needed more practice making learning choices so they could cultivate their self-identity and self-management skills. Now we can use this data to reflect and refine how we might use this jumping off point to have them become leaders in their own learning.
I think using the end as the beginning is an approach that we may use again in future units because it provides the context for all the skills and knowledge that we would have “front-loaded” on the students in past units. For example, last year we did several lessons on Kelso’s choices and How Full is Your Bucket? before we gave them the agency to make learning choices. How silly, right? It’ll be so much better having the context of conflict as a provocation to really engage in deeper conversations. If we bring these resources into the unit, it would because the students needed it, not because we wanted it, because it was on LAST year’s planner. In fact, coming from this angle has really helped us to see how capable and eager our students are to be in control of their learning. Maybe we don’t have to waste time on the previous year “staple activities”.
As we embark on another year of learning, I intend to embrace the jamais vu, putting old planning aside and coming at familiar units from unfamiliar approaches. And I wonder what insight the children we give me about how I can amplify learning and empower them. This is what I look forward to so much: I grow as they grow. How fun is that?
Developing learners as leaders is my joy! I am committed and passionate International Baccaluearate (IB) educator who loves cracking jokes, jumping on trampolines and reading books. When I’m not playing Minecraft with my daughter, I work on empowering others in order to create a future that works for everyone.
As I reflect on that research, I believe the answer to my questions is to play. Not just because it develops curiosity and self-expression, but it cultivates self-motivation and an appreciation for the pleasant surprises that our mistakes bring us in our learning process. Moreover, from Boaler’s academic point of view, “they become more deeply engaged and perform at higher levels”. Um…so why on Earth wouldn’t we connect play and math?
These are the open-ended statements that can help me understand where the students are now:
I know we have our checklists of paperwork that we have to stay on top of, but at the end of the day, I’d rather have teachers focused on making sure the kids have engaging, authentic and impactful learning and I have rarely found that paperwork inspires them to create that. This is especially true at PYP schools in which we have to reflect often on our students’ learning so that we can determine the next steps in their inquiries
And it’s poor form to throw teachers under the bus in front of teachers. Trust is so important in your work so if you undermine others, expect staff to lose their confidence in you.
Call me Old Fashion, but I prefer the personal touch of staff meetings over email any day. I like connecting with colleagues and having a common understanding of the events in our community and our school’s pedagogical approaches. Also, consider the fact that if teachers are more concerned with keeping up with emails, rushing to read them then they are not examining students’ work or reflecting on the discussions they had, then the focus isn’t on improving learning. We want teachers to be spending their cognitive power on making learning for students awesome rather than your 18-bullet email about professional development goals. Let that one sink in a bit. It’s good to have a weekly newsletter to communicate important things but if you find that your staff emails began as a couple of sentences and now is evolving paragraphs, then it needs a face to face. A quick and dirty chat will be more impactful than a back and forth conversation over the internet.
Go through news articles either on a social media news feed or through an internet search on a topic that is relevant and interesting to your students or controversial (ex: climate change). Have the students examine at least 3 websites or sources of information and put them through the filter of the 
I can’t believe they haven’t gone by the waste side yet, like horse-drawn carriages or 8-tracks. It doesn’t serve where we are in education and what we know about learning and teaching. And, as a parent, the letter A (approaching), M( meets) and E (exceeds) next to a subject area with a couple of sentences that explains the justification of those letters really doesn’t help me figure out how I can support my child. And, as a writer of those comments, knowing that parents are intended audience for these report cards, you end up summarizing the skills gained vs. the conceptual understandings–because at the end of the day, parents just want to know if their kids can read and do math up to the “standard” of their peers. So really, the report cards provide late feedback that schools may feel “report” the learning but ultimately doesn’t serve any of the stakeholders involved, students included.
A classic definition of a concept is an enduring understanding that is broad enough that you can transfer it across disciplines and time. But I’d like to add that a concept is something that makes you think, makes you wonder, gets those neurons firing. A topic fades from your mind, just like a rainbow after a shower–it seemed lovely at the moment, but quickly disappears from your memory. You see that quote from Chip and Dan Heath–our goal whenever we write a Central Idea is nearly the same–an idea so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning about it. This is why the PYP makes such a fuss about developing conceptual knowledge and skills. Learning facts and skills without a context is a waste of time and often evaporates unless we make units that are “sticky”. Concepts are like a bad rash that won’t go away. Concepts get under our skin and stick with us and reappear in new contexts that broaden our perspectives.
I’ve been examining standards and 
This year a snowball has been building, from the “Me Too” movement to reading 
And now I am seriously considering it–I’m sure to my team’s chagrin–to bring it into the curriculum. But this isn’t about the sexist commentary that I witness in an influential boy in our class, it’s also about “white-privilege”, classism and economic disparity that I have observed in silence as an international educator. Furthermore, I know that these topics may also touch a nerve in me–how do my own actions and words contribute to the –isms? I am just as much a student as I am a teacher in this sort of inquiry, recognizing that I am blind to so many things just because of the privilege that I have experienced in my life. There is something personal at stake when I start poking around these cultural “sleeping dogs”.
Yes, developing content knowledge and skills are really important, but what’s more important is the WHY that knowledge and skill are important. I think we can all agree that if you can google it, it shouldn’t be in a line of inquiry, let alone a central idea.
