Category: student agency

Putting Theory into Practice: How to Develop Student Agency through a Translanguaging Approach.

Putting Theory into Practice: How to Develop Student Agency through a Translanguaging Approach.

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I was so captivated that I think I leaned in so much on my laptop that my face was barely on the Zoom screen. It was hard not to get carried away when Eowyn Crisfield talked about multilinguistic pedagogies. I was really reluctant to spend the last week of my school holiday taking a course from Erin Kent Consulting (EKC), but I am glad I did. Translanguaging is not a word that just rolls off the tongue, right? So naturally wrapping your head around what this could look like in practice isn’t easy as well. I think of all the books and articles I have read about translanguaging and all the webinars and workshops I have taken, but Eowyn’s clarity made it all come into focus.

SO WHAT?-Perspectives on Multilingualism

Although many in the field of education can agree that Language is a verb and not a noun, that doesn’t mean that what looks like conceptually in our brains is agreed upon. Because expressing ideas as “languaging” is thinking itself, not everyone agrees if multilingualism is one unitary system or if it’s developed cross-linguistically, in which thinking is transferred from the dominant language to the language that is being acquired. Eowyn was quick to point out that the theory of “one linguistic repertoire” is too abstract and isn’t helpful for teachers in designing their lessons or supporting multilingual students in the classroom. I have to agree. But once we get all the abstraction out of the way, it is easy to see how we can empower our multilingual students to not only acquire new languages but to develop student agency–the ability to exercise voice, choice, and ownership in their learning.

Voice

Whether you believe that providing students with the opportunity to express themself in their home or dominant language is a human right or a resource to support academics, cultivating a learning community that values other languages honors the identity of the child by defacto. This is a foundational element of developing student agency, in which a child feels that they have something to contribute to the learning community despite not being proficient in the academic language(s) of the classroom.

Though it’s important to also apply the skillful use of translanguaging and requires thoughtful consideration and the WHEN, WHY, and HOW students will use it in their learning. Most classrooms default to its serendipitous use, allowing students to speak and write in their dominant language or discuss their home culture in classroom discussions. And although this might be appropriate for our youngest learners, as students mature, we have to improve our classroom practices and intentionally plan for it in. Eowyn calls this careful planning the “translanguaging cycle“, in which academic tasks and activities are thought through the lens of the input/output of language within learning. Moreover, ensuring that students have an opportunity to process the content of the lesson, is another part of the intentional planning process to scaffold knowledge and skills in the target language.

The question posed in this graphic is succinctly explained in this video, as well as an introduction to task design in this video.

Choice

Intentionally planning is a great way to get into the habit of translanguaging within instruction, but the next level can be offering students choice in…

  • the resources that they want to use to access the content
  • the language group they work in during collaboration
  • the language that they want to research in (which can change the cultural perspective that they get of the learning material)
  • the tools they use to record their learning (for example, making a video in the target language rather than a live presentation)
  • the language that they want to communicate their ideas (speaking or writing)
  • the language that they want to demonstrate their understanding

Ownership

Of course, the goal of developing proficiency in the target language doesn’t have to be sacrificed in the name of “choice”, and teachers must ensure that there is a balance of using their dominant language over the academic languages. So teachers must support learners in taking responsibility of the WHEN, WHY and HOW of their choices. Eowyn offered two frameworks that support building metalinguistic awareness and accountability in attaining proficiency in academic languages.

A Classroom “Language Policy”

A lot of schools might already have language policies but this is really specific to the learning culture of the classroom. In a straightforward way, the learning community decides as a whole what is going to be the “Language Policy” of the classroom and develops Essential Agreements for it. Discussing what the collective language goals of the learning community and how we might use our home languages as a resource are necessary to talk about when developing the “policy”. As you can imagine, co-constructing Essential Agreements is a powerful way to not only provide personal safety for students to use their dominant languages in academic discourse and completing tasks but ensure that the “policy” can be adjusted throughout the year.

Using a Choice Board

Many of us know what a choice board is and have used it in a variety of ways, but this one has the twist of providing students with the power to decide how much of their dominant language they are going to use within an activity or task. The choices should be in student-facing language, and although the choices were offered only in English, you can imagine that some truly emergent students would benefit from having these options translated in their home language so they could effectively make choices and set goals. Examples shared by Eowyn of choices might include:

I will use my (home) language to plan my work and then use English.

I will talk with my learning partner(s) in my (home) language and then complete the task in English.

I am going to use English for this task so that my classmates and teachers can also share in my learning.

NOW WHAT?

As I reflect on the journey that we have been on to create a culture of translanguaging at our school, I believe adding some of these ideas to promote empowered learners will help us continue the momentum of our initiatives. But whether or not your school is dedicated to a translanguaging approach, using a student’s home language or dominant language as a vehicle for increasing autonomy and self-direction is an integral practice, especially in PYP schools. It is my wish that you might consider some of these practical approaches that I gleaned from my EKC training and start leveraging languages to support student agency. And if any of these ideas got your head spinning and your heart thumping, please share in the comments below.

Muted? Student Voice during Remote Learning

Muted? Student Voice during Remote Learning

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“Go ahead and remain unmuted during our Zoom meetings.”, Tonya Gilchrist informed our cohort. “I find it’s easier for people to share ideas and ask questions that way. But if you have background noise, then please mute yourself”.

At that moment I was confronted with a reality that I hadn’t considered before: what it means to mute someone online: psychology and emotionally. 

For most of us who teach or have a meeting online, muting “participants” is usually the first thing we do when they come online in order to conduct your meeting uninterrupted and distraction-free. We often don’t provide the choice to do so and if noise does creep into your meeting, then you immediately scramble to find its source and mute it, lest your wise words fall on deaf ears.

And so, when Tonya shared this essential housekeeping rule, it got me wondering if remote learning has made us more teacher-centered or student-centered in our pedagogical approaches.

I’m thinking teacher-centered. 

And here’s why.

I have a folder full of schools’ Online Learning Plans/Academic Continuity Plans. Whatever you want to call it, those were designed for learning in a crisis. From Argentina to China, to New York to Vietnam, none of them considered the importance of student conversations when we went online. Globally we worried about teachers disseminating information to their students, providing them with the systems and tools to do that; all the while ensuring that students had access to that information—not to each other. The tools we insisted upon, were ones that made it easier for teachers to assign work and talk with students. Whether we went with Google Meets or Zoom, SeeSaw or Schoology, Google Suite or Microsoft–the focus was on an urgent need to explain the content and cover our standards.

Sure students probably found ways to connect with each other–that’s not the point I’m trying to make. It’s that, we, in education, didn’t think enough about the peer-to-peer interaction when we went online. We have thrown out social constructivism and used more didactic approaches to validate the “quality” of our education. 

And now that we are facing the possibility that the next school year might have a continued online component, we need to re-examine those “emergency learning plans”  and not only think about “the standards” but to think about pedagogy. We cannot just plop our classrooms online without providing students with access to each other’s minds as a core component of learning.

And so it gets me wondering if what makes remote learning so exhausting is the lack of interaction. There’s little exchange of our energy and enthusiasm for learning among our community of learners. How might we re-design the learning experience if we go into Phase 2 of our Academic Continuity Plans? I think we need to be debating the merits of apps and platforms that encourage student voice and collaboration like FlipGrid and Explain Everything instead of using our teachers’ creative energy on BitEmoji Classrooms. We need to stop pining for the past, teaching like we are in crisis, and start developing learning for our future.

I’m wondering what else have you noticed that should be reconsidered in your school’s version of online learning 2.0?   This isn’t a time to bury our heads in the sand but to engage and debate in critical conversations. Please share your ideas!

Is Agency the same as Personalized Learning?

Is Agency the same as Personalized Learning?

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There are two words that are trending in education right now: Agency and Personalized Learning. It’s rather funny that these ideas have been around since the 1960’s and are now emerging as shaping forces in our educational paradigms. However, I hear them used as if they are synonymous, but are they the same thing?

Is Agency the same as Personalized Learning?

This is a question that has been tumbling in my mind for a while. Ever since the PYP introduced the new branding symbol, I kept staring at the center of it and wondering how schools were really going to be “enhanced” by the updates? enhanced pypI also have been seeing a trend in which schools are starting to shift from a guided inquiry into an open inquiry approach, giving primary students, particularly ones in the upper grades, more say in the content of their learning. Although I have not directly visited those schools, I am given the impression that the children get to write their own units and learning is on their terms, in this way, the learning is quite personal and self-directed. I think these schools must be highly motivated to be innovative and deeply committed to this ambitious approach; from leadership to every member of staff, they focus their energy on creating a student self-directed learning approach. So is THIS personal learning? Personalized learning, by its definition, is to customize learning for each student’s strengths, needs, skills, and interests. So what can be more agentic than this?-As a student, I ultimately choose what I learn and when I learn it and teachers just coach me into my next steps.

So should we, as PYP schools be creating more personalized learning for students in order to enhance our student agency? Hmmm…..

A learning community that supports agency offers opportunities for students to develop important skills and dispositions, such as critical and creative thinking, perseverance, independence and confidence. These are vital to the learning process and the development of self-efficacy. The learning community further offers students multiple opportunities to experience the impact of their choices and opinions, which support their evolving perceptions of their identity. In return, students with a stronger sense of self-efficacy bring a stronger sense of agency to the learning community.

From The Learner – PYP, developed by the International Bacchaleurate

After reflecting on that, it seems to me that the answer is NO. Personalized Learning and Agency are not the same thing. Moreover, schools do not have to create “Studios” or “Learning Labs” in which teachers are supporting 20 different personal units of inquiry that the students have created in order for students to have agency. Of course, this is fabulous to have these structures and resources but to assume that this is the gold standard that all of our PYP schools should be doing would be missing the point of the enhancements. It’s about student empowerment, not individual inquiries or personalized learning tracks. So we don’t need a lot of tech and teachers in order to do this. How this looks may differ according to the context and budget considerations of that school. But to think that we need to recreate the wheel in order for us to cultivate student agency would build more barriers to getting started now in our classrooms. We need to think about learner agency as self-efficacy and not individualization. When you look at that excerpt, its the culture of the Learning Community is what creates learner agency, and this is more about developing competency and confidence and less about designing specialized learning spaces.

Agency is Self-directed Learning

The book, Empower: What Happens When Students Own Their Learning by John Spencer and AJ Juliani,  to me is one of the best books out there that really empowerarticulates how student agency can happen in our classroom. When students have the motivation and skills to explore content, they can take action that goes above and beyond our expectations for them. They can develop self-direction. THIS is the GOLD STANDARD  that we should be aspiring to.

Moreover, this book helps educators to cultivate the mindset necessary to relinquish control of classroom learning so that learners can become self-directed. It contained an important question in there that I think teachers should tape to their computers (or planning books) when they are sitting down to lesson plan:

What decisions am I making for students that they could make for themselves?

I know I found myself going to my class and asking the students “How might we….”

  • show what we know about this concept
  • explore this idea
  • experience our learning differently

No bells or whistles were required. It was about bringing them into the planning of their learning and supporting their decisions. Sometimes students wanted to go off and do their own thing, but more often than not, it meant collaborating with peers. I think this is why we shouldn’t confuse personalized learning with agency, especially since we, as PYP educators, are social-constructivists. We shouldn’t create “learning islands” in our classrooms, rather learning hubs, in which we can connect with different people and resources because, in the real world, this is often what we do to solve problems. This is true ownership of learning. This is the essence of a true Learning Community. We need to work at getting REALLY GOOD at collaboration, so students know who and what can support them in their personal growth.

PYP Coordinator Footnote

As a leader of learning at my school,  I can’t begin to express how much misunderstanding there is out there about student agency. I know I have to be careful to tread lightly on pushing student agency without being more informed about how I can support my teachers in supporting their learners. We get into vigorous conversations about this term and often teachers feel that this means that we should “kill” teacher-directed lessons or if we help students manage their decision making, we are squashing their agency. It seems that many teachers equate agency with kids having a free-for-all in classroom learning. Or, on the other hand, we should be differentiating every lesson all the time. Yikes! These are extremes.

So, I think we need to be careful about how we approach this at our schools.

I’m wondering what other terms like “personalized learning” are getting confused with Agency at your schools. Please share so we discuss and debate, arriving at greater clarity and purpose when implementing the PYP enhancements at our schools.

 

 

 

 

The Journey to Develop an Enhanced #PYP Programme of Inquiry

The Journey to Develop an Enhanced #PYP Programme of Inquiry

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As a curriculum coordinator, deciding where to begin with the Enhancements has not been easy. I have read through all of the Programme Resouce Materials on the IB’s website and stared at this new re-branding symbol in the hope of greater clarity.  When I gaze at the word Agency, I recognize that it isn’t a small word–it’s full of big ideas and demands a significant amount of energy and change in our schools’ culture. Agency, in my mind, has become the driving and sole mission of the PYP Enhancements. But there isn’t a guide book on this topic–A sense of “Start Here”! I feel as if we are defining this collectively as we inquire into Agency in our PYP schools.

poi why
My reflection on the rebranding symbol, which feels connected to the work of Simon Sinek and his beacon call to Find Your Why.

So, you can’t simply direct staff to change their paradigms overnight.  One of two clever provocations during a staff meeting isn’t going to cut it. It’s a process and will take time to evolve our thinking. I recognize that I am deeply and personally involved in the changing of mindset as well. I do not sit outside of others. I too am a caterpillar incubating in its cocoon. I am completely in the midst of transforming what school is to what school could be. This is as much a personal as well as professional journey that we all are engaged in.

So, as a pedagogical leader, I have decided to start with our “What”–our written curriculum. It feels like our map on our journey. We need to have the “right” map in our hands before we go about transforming our school. With that in mind, our school has embarked upon enhancing our school’s Programme of Inquiry and in the first phase of change. To be clear, it’s not about rephrasing central ideas– if we are going to do this, we need to do this with our students. The students need to be involved in this process. They need to have a say in WHAT we learn so teachers can start developing new strategies into HOW they learn it.

We are breaking with the traditional approach that we, as educators, get to decide what is important to learn. The students are our “standards” and they will guide and decide our “learning outcomes” through means of direct input into our POI.  Agency into the WHAT we learn at school feels like the first step in figuring out the HOW we can put kids in the center of our pedagogy.

So we have embarked on a “listening campaign” that involves the students first and foremost, but we intend to mine for the gold in our community–What are the values and concerns that our families hold? What are the cultural forces in our community and the resources that we can tap into? This is also a component of our Listening Campaign.

enhanced poi

Teachers have formed teams that will help organize and collect the information we need to start re-envisioning our POI. There are 4 focus groups that will capture the elements of student agency, transdisciplinary learning, international-mindedness, and the Learning Community. Throughout the coming months, we will be doing a school-wide inquiry into the following areas which will influence how the POI will be enhanced:

data groups

Student Voices

Our current thinking is that we will have students in Grades 1-5 reflect on the units of inquiry from the grade level below, their current grade level, and the grade level above in order to gauge their level of interest. In order to do this, we will conduct a special school assembly that will explain how we will do this.

Outside of classroom discussions, we intend to have these grade-level POIs posted and give students the chance to have discussions and rate the units. For the ease of data collection, we will use stickers to have them “mark” how they feel about the learning within a unit of inquiry. Here are the stickers:poireviewstickers Along with critiquing the current Programme of Inquiry, we will provide opportunities to make suggestions and express how they enjoy “showing what they know” as well as improving current units. In this way, we have more insight and feedback into the current units of inquiry.

Student Hearts

There is a myth in our world that children lack depth. I believe that we are hardwired to care and empathy is a skill that can be developed naturally in our learning communities. As an educator, it simply isn’t true that kids are completely selfish and self-absorbed. Yes, their worlds are small, but it’s obvious when you teach young children that you can see how learning about issues impacts them.

With that in mind, teaching the United Nations’ Sustainability Goals is something that needs to be embedded in our Programme of Inquiry. Currently, it is not a trend, let alone an expectation to do so in our schools. There is a smattering of educators who take it upon themselves to discuss and include the goals in their units. I find this to be a missed opportunity. The Sustainability Goals are for our current generation of students, as it aims to achieve these goals by 2030–that’s only a decade away!

So, in order to draw awareness of these issues, we want to tap into the hearts of our students and call their attention to these goals. We have decided to create a school-wide week of provocations (March 23-27th ) since there are lots of international holidays that tie into the goals then. We would send out announcements to families about our intended activities and then use our Art Fair as an opportunity to reflect on the Goals and see what inspired them. That school event is in high attendance so it could be a great chance to get the parents educated a bit too.

Malala Yousafzai | SJSU WOMS 20. Women of ColorWe would use these reflections from this week to inform our curriculum, considering which SDGS really sparked a natural interest and could gain overall support from our community. You see, in my mind, it’s not enough to just “expose” kids to the UN’s SDGs, but we would want them to take action to actually work on them. Garnering their interest and using it as a springboard for continued efforts toward achieving these goals would help cultivate the change agents that they would need to become in order to make their goals a true reality.

Community Values

Every school has a unique composition of its members, from parents to teachers to other community members. In short, we want to determine the strength of our Learning Community by tapping into its main shared values. This will help us to determine our main mission and focus of our Programme of Inquiry. It’s easy for our Learning Community to rally behind its school’s pillars when its member believes in it and want to support it. This is the essence of what we want to do and who we want to become: grounded in our values and driven by our larger mission. 

So, we have designed an activity that we will promote during the Art Fair that will help us collect data about the values that our families. They will, in short, share their top 5 values and help us to appreciate why they are important to them. We will use these values as a component of strengthening our Programme of Inquiry, particularly in developing stronger bonds between home, school, and our local community. We hope to have more coherence and collaboration with the “big L” of the Learning Community as a result of including this information in our decision-making process.

Resources

This is a tremendous effort underway to create a database of people and places that we can have access to which will enrich our learning. We are lucky to have a wide swath of professionals in our parent community who are willing to come in and share their knowledge and experience with our children. So, this database will include families just as much as it will include other community members who can benefit and expand the experience of learning in our school. We will also include information for planning field trips to streamline the vetting process and help teachers design more authentic and meaningful experiences outside of classroom learning.

One of the important aspects of curating these resources is that it must be organized in such a way that it makes it easy to filter information and locate the resources we have. So, this group is not only researching and collecting this information but also determining what is the best way to sift through it.

Whole Learning Community Listening

Needless to say, this isn’t a little endeavor, but a larger desire to listen to the WHOLE community. To get everyone on board and engaged. We want our students to be truly inspired and ignited into action. We want to tap into their interests, their concerns, and their families’ values, so we can truly have agency that is authentic and relevant to them.

Needless to say, this journey into creating a truly “enhanced” POI is an experiment–an inquiry in and of itself. At our school, we say “it takes a village” to educate a child, and we believe that this listening campaign can help us capitalize on “our village” and inspire the generation of students we have in our school today.  Once we have collected this data, we will use it to revise our current Programme of Inquiry to reflect the students, the families and our community at large.

 

**Please feel free to comment and add questions that will spark ideas and help us to further refine our process. How is your school ‘enhancing’ the Programme of Inquiry?

 

The Role of the Coordinator: Deep Listening

The Role of the Coordinator: Deep Listening

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I think to ask and not assume is probably the most important part of my job description. One skill that I believe needs constant effort for improvement. So, during this past year,  as I moved to a new country and a new school, I was very aware of the need to understand the complexities of my new environment and my role in shaping a more agentic culture. As a new leader to an already established learning community, I created a 90-day inquiry into my school in which I explored and examined our current practices and asked questions in the following areas:

Who We Are…

  • What are the values and beliefs of our community?
  • What level of influence do parents have on our school’s decision-making process?
  • What do we believe collectively and as individuals about education in the 21st century?
  • Who are the influential and important people on staff?
  • What are the beliefs that teachers have around technology? What are the beliefs around technology use in the home?

Where we are in place and time…

  • Where are we with respect to accreditation recommendations?
  • Where are we with transitioning to the enhancements?
  • Where are staff in their depth of understanding of the PYP?
  • How is the technology used? (SAMR/TPACK)

How we express ourselves…

  • What are the ways and means that we communicate?
  • How frequently do we communicate? What gets communicated?
  • How is information shared on Social Media

How we organize ourselves…

  • How do we order resources?
  • Where are important docs “housed” and how are they shared?
  • What do timetables look like?–What are the teaching/non-contact periods ratios with co-teachers? How much does each subject “get” on the time table?

Sharing the Planet…

  • What are the expectations and responsibilities of teachers and staff? Beyond teaching, what else are teachers expected to do?
  • What sustainability initiatives are underway? 
  • What opportunities exist for student action and community service?

How the World Works…

  • How is professional learning encouraged and fostered?
  • What are the budget restrictions? 
  • How do we plan excursions or get involved in community action? 
  • What are any political considerations when we consider initiatives?

Now that the 1st semester is over and I have a sense of “How We Do School Here”, it’s time to turn my attention and focus to the students themselves. I am currently engaged in what I am calling a Listening Campaign–a term generally used for a communication strategy that helps to identify and prioritize the concerns of stakeholders. Hearted Quotes - Page 3 | QuoteHDIn this case, I want to dig into the hearts and minds of our students. I have created a simple survey using Google forms which provides the opportunity to deeply listen to students and I am interviewing each student one by one to get a sense of what they care about and how apt they feel at engaging in our learning community. So, as I record their ideas, there is an interaction that I hope communicates how keen I am to hear from them. When I think of my practice of mindfulness, deep listening is a vital component of our relationships–whether it is with our closest and most beloved people in our lives or people who we have more obscure relationships with. I hope that as I sit with them, I communicate that I care about them–they are a valued school member– and I wish to support them on their learning journey. I love how this practice is described in the quote below:

There is only one purpose of deep listening: to help him or her to empty their heart.

“Darling, I’m here for you. And, Darling I know that you are there.”

The gift of your presence is powerful and transformative.

-Thich Nhat Hanh

And, so, I find the answers to my questions revealing if the students feel they have agency and how they might use their agency to make an impact. Here are some of the questions I am asking:

  1. Do you feel that if you have an idea, adults at school will let you try it out? 
  2. The reason why I think this way is because…..
  3. In your homeroom classroom, do you feel that you are interested and active in your learning?
  4. The reason why I said that is because…..
  5. How often do you give feedback or offer suggestions to your classmates?
  6. What kind of feedback do you receive from others?
  7. If I got to be the boss of school, the first thing I would change about how I learn is…
  8. If I got to be the boss of the school, the first thing that I would change about snack/lunch and recess is…
  9. One more idea that I have about how to improve the experience at school is…
  10. Is there anything else you want to tell me...

Now I know what you are thinking, they probably answer that we should eat candy at school and be able to play whenever they want. But I have to say that when you lean in, and they know that you want to authentically listen to them, the issues and ideas that come up really expose a deeper level of concern that they have.

I consider this time spent a great privilege and rare opportunity afforded to me. Since this is the first year of implementing the PYP enhancements, I really wanted to get a snapshot of how students see themselves as learners and what issues do they feel need addressing in our learning community. I call this an Agency Audit, and I hope to repeat it after we implement more of the strategies that create the culture of agency at our school.

What questions do you think we need to ask students? How would you approach talking to students? What other questions do you think are important to developing a larger understanding of the learning community?

 

 

The #EnhancedPYP Planner: Who Gets to Plan the Learning?

The #EnhancedPYP Planner: Who Gets to Plan the Learning?

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They say that life begins at the end of your comfort zone. This couldn’t be truer when we consider the full impact of bringing the Primary Years Programme (PYP) enhancements on board. Making AGENCY front and center of what we do is a major paradigm shift, and if you don’t think so, then your school is either on the cutting edge or so far from the edge that the thought of empowering intelligent children with the capacity to self-direct their learning is downright heresy. Most of our schools fall somewhere in between–in our hearts, we want this, but in our heads, we aren’t sure how to make it happen.

Recently we got together in Sao Paulo to discuss how the Primary Years Programme Enhancements were rolling out in our schools. So much to talk about…so little time. But planning was a topic that we kept coming back to. There are quite a few schools that are developing their own planners, and their teams had a lot of discussion about, not only what elements need to be on the planner, but also where they wanted to begin their focus on the planner.  Here are some of the ideas that were shared that were Must-Haves and potential starting points of “The Planner”:

Reflection: Where are we now and where do we want to go?

Learning Goals: The purpose and conceptual focus of learning.

Language: Using the language of the PYP and developing academic language in meaningful ways.

Students: Their passions, interests, and resources that they can bring to the unit.

Assessment: Co-constructing success criteria and developing a continuum using solo taxonomy.

Tools and resources: The people, places, and tech that can be used to invigorate and engage learners.

Approaches to Learning: Ways in which student-initiated learning and agency can be nurtured.

Through these conversations, my mind wandered back to a blog post that I saw a few years ago: “We’re Going On An Expedition” and I keep wondering how we might make learning more like a journey for all students–not just during the PYP Exhibition–but for all grade levels. Moreover, asking the students who they want to become (Learner Profile Alert) as a result of their experiences this year and how teachers could be their guide through this journey. What if THAT was our starting point for planning?

comfort zoneAlso, if I think about “The Planner” like the map of this journey, then I am wondering how we might open up the planning of a unit to the students themselves. Instead of “The Planner” being a teacher-directed document, what if we had our official “Planner” for student-created which became the basis of the inquiry?  We flip the responsibility of this document so that students got to direct the learning. Hmmm….How might we structure the document in order for students to authentically co-plan with us teachers? I think THIS is the type of PYP planner that I want to create with my team. But what teacher team is so courageous to do this?

Now as someone who has co-constructed units of inquiry with students, I can attest that this made me uncomfortable. These kids don’t know about THE STANDARDS, so it’s not what guides them when we co-construct units. They think about what THEY want to learn, not what some educational body has mandated for them and outlined in THE STANDARDS. So I wonder how we can have true AGENCY if we are the ones telling them what they should know and when they should know it?

In my mind, Who gets to plan the learning? seems like the foundational question to ask when we develop new planning documents. Because if we, as teachers (bless us), get to plan the learning then I think we are the ones who “own” the unit. And if we define Agency as Voice, Choice, and Ownership, then clearly it will be a challenge for students to really take authentic action.

I’m am thinking about how we can use our Exhibition documents as the basis of creating an Enhanced PYP Planner, but I’m afraid that I have more questions than answers in how to approach this. However, the pursuit of these answers is something that I want to explore in earnest.  The process of this Enhanced PYP Planner will be a journey unto itself, but I am willing to engage in going deeper into how we create genuine student plans for THEIR learning rather than documenting OUR teacher plans.

I’m curious if anyone else has embarked in this direction or would be keen to go what has-been into what-could-be? What approach would you take?

 

 

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”.

 

 

Becoming “Educated”: How to Give Up Control and Gain True Power

Becoming “Educated”: How to Give Up Control and Gain True Power

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I just turned the last page of the book, Educated by Tara Westover, an engrossing read about a girl who struggled with her “homeschooling” by her fundamentalist Mormon family and pursued a formal college education. I was deeply touched by her internal conflict to find herself in the midst of the incessant drone of her upbringing to follow a path of a “righteous” compliant woman who remains ignorant of the world and tolerant of abuse. And, although her story has a backdrop of extremism, there are many parallels that many of us can relate to. Think about this quote for a minute:

“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

As I ponder this quote, not only can I see the connection between roles and power in my family dynamics but also in our educational system. Most of us have been brought up by the “Shoulds”, an unrelenting group of people who we have given our power over to. We have been socially engineered, and they influence how we design and navigate our lives. And now, as educators, we are presented with a challenge to create agency in our students, something that many of us never had a direct experience of as a child. This paradigm-shifting requires a deep examination of our beliefs about education and what it means to be “educated”.

One of the turning points for Tara Westover was when she read Isiah Berlin’s essays about Positive and Negative Liberty, in which she came to recognize that personal freedom and political freedom are interwoven. And when I say political freedom, I am not talking about Democrats vs. Republicans or Labour vs. Conservative parties, it is broader than that: the ability to choose and exercise one’s values and beliefs in society.

To coerce a man is to deprive him of freedom–freedom from what? Almost every moralist in human history has praised freedom. Like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems able to resist…… Men are largely interdependent, and no man’s activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in anyway. `Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows’; the liberty of some must depend on the restraint of others.  Two Concepts of Liberty, Isiah Berlin

powerAs we move further away from our “totalitarian approach” of teacher-directed learning and transition into more student-led learning, it may appear that our role as a teacher is becoming irrelevant. That ‘Freedom for the pike is death to the minnows’, in which empowering students to be self-directed diminishes the need for teachers altogether, especially with the technology that is out there. But I disagree. As we provide for more opportunities for students to determine where the content takes them in their learning journey, our true power lies in the craft of empowering them to manage themselves wisely. So, on the surface, it looks like we are giving up control, but in actuality, when we are eliciting more student voice, choice, and ownership, we are amplifying our influence and consequently we need to develop more skillfulness in the practices that shape and promote agency:

  1. Fostering aspiration. Cultivating a vision that is orientated in inspiring others to follow their interests and solve problems that seem impossible.
  2. Reflective Conversation. Having discussions that lead students to think deeper, beyond the “what” and more about the “why”.
  3. Feedback. Appreciating that there are levels of quality and students understand where they stand in order to feel empowered to take the next step.
  4. Seeing Systems. Developing the classroom as a living system so that they recognize what they are teaching each other. And then what is the awareness of the larger context in which we’re operating in beyond our classroom?
  5. Actions Matter. Reminding them that you always have a choice; even inaction is an action–a choice to do nothing is still something, so make better choices.

I think all of us can agree that in the midst of our shifting paradigm in education, our knowledge of content is less important and instead, our knowledge of our craft is more highly valued. When I think about professional development for educators, there are 3 things that we have to get particularly good at: Motivation, Feedback, and Awareness.

I think honing our ability to motivate students is a necessary component of our craft. The focus of “classroom management” is becoming less to do with bending the children to our will but more about helping them to sustain their learning through practical and organized systems in our classroom. No more “I’m done” because they appreciate that there is another step along their learning path to take.

Hence, developing real acumen with giving timely and effective feedback is another area for developing expertise. Knowing when to say less yet ask more can be a real talent. Using the ancient wisdom of Socrates to dig deep with questioning is an art of revealing understandings and misconceptions to truly coach students to their next level. Needless to say, teaching students how to engage in this process with each other is just as vital. When we recognize the relational quality of learning, it goes without saying that conversations matter and students need to learn how to communicate ideas and opinions thoughtfully.

So it goes to reason, self-awareness and social-awareness are the driving forces that make education worth pursuing. When we come into an understanding of our own beliefs and behaviors and take action on them for the betterment of our world, that is truly a life worth living. Creating self-mastery involves appreciating the recesses of our minds and the caverns of our heart, and recognizing the consequence it may have on others is another layer of complexity that is worth learning. Now the “why” can be extending into the “how”, creating a meaningful impact on our relationships and communities. To foster this is a great honor that is bestowed upon us as educators. We should not take this lightly and should endeavor to become proficient in it. Though, of all the areas of our craft, this might be the hardest one to master, since it requires an equal amount of our own personal development as it does professional development. As the saying goes, “You can’t teach what you don’t know.” So we are standing elbow to elbow, right along with our students, as we become masters of our own emotion and influence.

To that end, we now must consider what it means to be a teacher, a true leader of learning, a role model of curiosity and open-mindedness. As our roles change, we gain insight and clarity into the value and purpose of education. We no longer need to stand with clenched fists but instead open palms in order to evolve our notions of learning and expand our reach of the classroom. In giving power to the voice of children, may we find our own in the process.

#PYP “Sharing the Planet” by Design

#PYP “Sharing the Planet” by Design

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I think one of the hardest decisions an educator has to do is to release the curriculum into the hands of the students. On most days, it’s just being in the “teachable moment”, but what if you handed over a whole unit of inquiry. Forget vertical alignment this once. Could you do it?

Last year we had a unit that was an abomination that I wrote about in Post Mortem Reflection: Autopsy of a Failed PYP Unit (Sharing the Planet). Needless to say, we WEREN’T teaching that unit again but then what would we teach?

In our new approach to planning, we usually properly launch a unit with doing provocations and THEN determine the learning outcomes. But I felt like we were trying too hard to interpret what the students were really interested in and assess their previous knowledge to determine the direction of the unit. Upon reflection, I felt it’d be better just asking them so we waste less time. I prefer to “pre-pack” a unit of inquiry rather than “unpack” it, so we took a Design Thinking approach to co-creating this unit with students.

design thinking.jpeg

With that in mind, we had to understand what the student’s prior knowledge might be. We felt a simple class discussion in which they could do a “turn and talk” then share their thoughts and feelings about what it means to “Share the Planet” would be perfect. Funny enough, they touched on every dimension of the transdisciplinary theme, which just seems like a testament of the genius behind the framework. Here are some note that captured some of their ideas:

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After reflecting on the ideas they shared, we summarized them into 5 main areas which touched upon the descriptions of the theme and highlighted the main concepts. We thought we’d have them rank them as their “learning priorities”. We spent some time describing the concepts and then gave them an opportunity to consider which ideas they felt most intrigued by. (The link to this doc is here.)

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While they were cutting and pasting their priorities, we went around and asked them to tell us a bit about how they were ranking them to gauge how much prior knowledge they might have of the concepts. The main concepts were:

  1. Sharing with living things
  2. Pollution
  3. Resources
  4. Earth Cycles
  5. Poverty

My favorite part of this exercise was actually when the students came back into the “big group” and talked amongst themselves about why they ranked the concepts in the order they did. Their conversations were gorgeous to listen to, and we found out if there were misconceptions or ideas that we need to clarify. Great data!!

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After that, we surveyed the class about their learning priorities to find out how we might craft central ideas to suit their interests. The students “took a stand” for what their first learning priority, and then we had them repeat the exercise for their second learning priority. We then added those up to get a total vote count. This helped us to define what the unit was going to be about: Sharing the planet with living things and Pollution were nearly tied.IMG_8335

Afterward, our team met and debated the concepts from this survey. We found it really hard to resist the urge to override the majority because we felt that “poverty” would be an interesting concept to delve into since most of our students have such limited appreciation for their high quality of life. Also, lower grades rarely touch upon this aspect of the transdisciplinary theme, and we were compelled by the challenge, especially since it would have a strong transdisciplinary math link with using money as the fodder for addition and subtraction. However, at the end of the day, we all agreed that if we were to honor the voice and choice of the students, we had to put aside our desires, but would see how we might add this concept to other units this year.

Once we were in alignment with that, we started to pour over our notes and curriculum documents to evaluate what they already have learned, examining our school Programme of Inquiry and ManagBac to get a bigger picture of where we might take the learning. We began to ideate, brainstorming some central ideas, and agreed on 3 potential central ideas. To be honest, we spent so much time looking at the data, we didn’t have much time to wordsmith anything unique so we modified a few that we found on other school’s POIs. If we had more time, however, we would have had the students help us write them in more to suit them specifically and in kid-friendly language. These were the central ideas that made it to the final round of debate and voting by the students:

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We discussed each central idea with the whole group then pinned them up around the classroom. Students took a moment to talk amongst themselves about what those central ideas meant to them and why they thought they would be interesting to learn about. IMG_8337After some time to discuss, we asked them to “take a stand” again, and migrate over to the corners where the central ideas were posted.  The vote counts were extremely tight, and we ended up having a near tie, which provided a great opportunity for students to debate and deliberate their choices. We asked one of the groups to re-choose and so the “leading” central ideas had to persuade those individuals to choose their central idea. It was fun to hear their interpretation of the central idea and their reasons why they thought that central idea would be the best one for our learning. At the end of this exercise, we came back as a teaching team to refine the central idea and create lines of inquiry that balanced student interests and the objectives of the TD theme:

Central Idea: Living things are affected by and often adapt to the natural world.

Lines of inquiry

  • Adaptations to weather (change)
  • Habitat loss (connection)
  • The impact of pollution on living things (causation)

Following the flow of a Design Thinking approach, we are in the prototype stage, and when we come back from holiday break, we will test this unit with our thoughtful provocations. It’s hard to describe the level of excitement for this unit by the students, and by us, the teachers. Emphasizing their voice and providing them with ample opportunities for choice grows their agency and engagement.

I hope you consider how you might apply a Design approach to co-constructing units with your students, no matter the age. I don’t know why we wait until the “Exhibition Year” group to have them write their own units. That puts tremendous pressure on those year group teachers. I understand that we didn’t have them write lines of inquiry, but we could certainly do that in our next unit since we already have a template of this experience to build upon. Perhaps this has sparked some thinking around this, and if you have alternate ideas, I would LOVE to hear them.

 

The Only Thing You Need To Do To Develop Student Agency

The Only Thing You Need To Do To Develop Student Agency

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Every school is trying to define and articulate how they are developing “Agency” in their curriculum, but I’m going to tell you the only thing you need to know. I’ve come to realize that it’s not that complicated. First of all, if the term confuses you, change it to “Independence”, because that is what it really means. Don’t overthink this jargon. Now, simplifying this term should help you to realize that you don’t need to create huge innovative initiatives at your school. In fact, I believe it doesn’t begin with our heads, it starts in our hearts. So what is the ONLY thing you need to develop student agency (i.e. independence)?–It’s TRUST. So ask yourself right now, Do I trust my students?

That’s a really important question so sit with it for a minute because our level of trust gets communicated with our words and actions (or inaction) toward our students every day in our classrooms. Have a think about this quote from Peter Johnson, author of Choice Words.

When you figure something out for yourself, there is a certain thrill in the figuring. After a few successful experiences, you might start to think that figuring things out is something that you actually can do. Maybe you are even a figuring out kind of person, encouraging an agentic dimension to identity. When you are told what to do, particularly without asking, it feels different. Being told explicitly what to do and how to do it–over and over again–provides the foundation for a different set of feelings about what you can do and can’t do, and who you are. The interpretation might be that you are the kind of person who cannot figure things out for yourself.

A few weeks ago we had a parent meeting, and there was a lovely debate about what was “better” about teaching through inquiry vs. traditional methods. Parents questioned why education was moving in this direction that felt “slow” to them. “What has changed since we grew up?” was the essence of that sentiment. Perhaps you could say that technology has taught us teachers that we are not the beacons of knowledge anymore–but I replied “brain research”. In my opinion that is really the heart of why we are shifting because inquiry-based approaches have been around since the time of Socrates–maybe even longer. This approach isn’t new either, it’s really an ancient technology that is making a comeback, if you will, in education. However, now we have evidence that our brains get wired differently when we have passive vs. active learning experiences. Since these ideas are still under research, not many schools develop metacognition through the use of using neurological terms like synaptogenesis and neural plasticity, but I do think that the term Growth Mindset has become more commonplace which reflects this phenomenon. Having a Growth Mindset is the key to cultivating the confidence that encourages this “agentic dimension to identity”, as Peter Johnson calls it.

So what does trust look like? We’ve filtered it down to 3 things: giving students more choice, voice, and ownership in their learning. And because we are educators, we feel the need to unpack this, create criteria and continuum that demonstrate the growth of these things in our classrooms.  If you are not sure what I am talking about, here’s an example:continuum-voice-web

It’s a great reflection tool for us when we examine the culture of learning in our classrooms and schools, but this is not in and of itself the means by which agency is developed–we are not trying to force kids into action (not that these teachers are suggesting this with this infographic but I know there are some school leaders who may take it that way) just so we can say that we are ticking the box when it comes to “Voice” with student agency. Truthfully, our kids come with lots of “voice” when they first arrive at school–we can just “shush it” out of them. I know, I am an Early Years educator, and there are lots of gentle and not so gentle ways of doing this; it’s a burden to consider how much our classroom culture shapes their identity and confidence level in these formative years.  But their voice is the expression of their thoughts, and when we suppress that, we limit their motivation to think and contribute to problem-solving situations. Furthermore, if we never offer them choices, then there is no practice in making good decisions, which means “ownership” is void. How can you “own” something you never have the privilege of thinking carefully about and solve problems around? I’m sure you can relate to this through your own experience.Future (5).png

In my mind, this quote from Ron Ritchart really summarizes the work we do to not only create “cultures of thinking” but foster agency. When we promote students making connections and the mindset of “I can do this”, it is no longer a question of IF they will take action, it’s just a matter of WHEN. And we have to TRUST that too–that time is on their side.

Recently we had a student-led Performing Arts assembly that was outstanding. It was extraordinary because every element of that assembly was created by students. Our performing arts teacher, Graham Baines (aka PYP Chef), provided the props and structure, but otherwise, it was purely the students. They’ve been working on a personal “dream goal” for months, spending break time, lunchtime and after-school time to practice and perfect the performance that they designed independently or in collaborative groups. Here is one of the fun student performances–an audience favorite:

It was such a stark contrast from previous assemblies which felt awkward, tense (at moments) and contrived, from the teacher written MC scripts to the songs performed to the order of the acts. This one was energizing, fun and inspiring. There is no doubt that other students will be eager to put in the effort and time to improve their “dream goal” and perform for a large crowd just like this. Also, imagine how those students feel with having such wonderful success, which they get to completely own. However, Graham had to completely trust the students and relinquish control of “the show”, even if it meant that his reputation might be diminished as a teacher in our parent and teacher community.  I have high regard and appreciation for that level of vulnerability and visible courage, as he broke the mold when it came to providing this opportunity to students.

So, with that in mind, how can we not only let go of trying to control everything and trusting students but how can we get more of their thinking expressed in general? Because when we give them space, I truly believe that they will exceed our expectations and their own.

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