Category: UN Sustainability Goals

Parents-Friends or Foes during the PYP Exhibition? (#PYPX)

Parents-Friends or Foes during the PYP Exhibition? (#PYPX)

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I don’t know about you, but school just hasn’t been the same since COVID. There have been numerous accounts of parents overreacting to curriculum and over involvement in school. I don’t quite understand the roots of polemic attitudes towards school, but so many educators face skeptical families who feel like every classroom lesson contains a political statement, every book has a hidden agenda and curriculum is now a festooned act of indoctrination. This strange extremist view is unfamiliar to many of our IB schools,  who prize open-mindedness and free thinking, in which in pre-covid times had a lovely community spirit that had a common goal for a better more peaceful world. It’s an unfortunate situation if you find yourself in one of these school communities in which educators are now being vilified.

But I think to recede from working with our families (even the whingers and fault-finders) is a mistake. I think we can’t say that we are living our IB mission without engaging fully with community. This moment, albeit tense, will eventually come back into equilibrium, in which the family-educator bond of trust will be healed.  We have to keep the faith and do the work to ensure that a more sane and harmonious time is on the horizon. We owe it to our children’s future to act compassionately, to be a model of our IB Learner Profile.

So it was for this reason why our school invited parents into the process of PYPX. In the past our school had used them as mentors, and they were excellent resources for our students, so making them more involved wasn’t a big stretch for us. In addition to our PYPX Parent Coffee, we host a Family Inquiry day, in which families come in and explore the UN’s Sustainable Goals, brainstorming topics. It is a powerful moment to observe, as parents see their child’s passion shine through and the child experienced how beneficial it can be to consider parent ideas and opportunities for action with them. We feel that including family in the process of helping their children to develop their exhibition topic is a win-win for everyone.  I’m really proud of the work that our teachers did to facilitate these conversations, and amazed by how supportive and collaborative our families are. Here are a few scenes from the event:

Needless to say, when you witness such a powerful moment, you want to share it with others. So, if you haven’t considered inviting parents into the process with an event like our Family Inquiry Day, I would like you to consider 3 reasons why you might want to rethink that approach.

Improves student well-being

With the demands of this project, PYPX is by far one of the most stressful events that a child can go through. Of course we know that this inquiry project helps them grow in so many ways as we support their ability to develop emotional resilience and intellectual stamina. But when we add parents into the mix, students feel more supported and confident, realizing that they aren’t alone on this journey–they get to share it with their loved ones. Even if they go through a rough patch during this process, it is a comfort for them to know that not only do they have their teachers and mentors who understand what they are going through, but the families also have a clearer picture and can be of greater help.

Encourages meaningful action

Naturally when students can stay more focused and can self-regulate their stress levels, they can put more of their attention toward generating meaningful action. And parents can get involved with helping them to make connections with organizations and foster relevant service for their local community. So launching the PYPX with parents in tow, is an excellent opportunity to motivate our students to do great work in our communities. I know that last year some of the best student action came from the groups in which parents were well aware of what the student was exploring; in fact some families banded together and worked with the PYPX group to join in the community service as well. The whole family might have volunteered at the animal shelter or worked

Builds relationships with families.

If you are a parent of a teenager, you may recognize the importance of this milestone moment for the student.  For many parents, this is their last moment to really be engaged in their child’s learning. Their “baby” is becoming all grown up. We know that once students go to the MYP, there is an expectation that students don’t need any hand-holding. For parents, this can be a painful moment to accept, in which peers become more important and family relationships come in second place. As much as a parent may be eager for them to be independent and mature, it’s hard to stomach that they are becoming their own person, with different opinions and perspectives.  Needless to say, giving families this moment to feel connected and involved helps to foster positive relationships that will last into those tumultuous teen years. This is a special moment in the parent-child relationship. Having parents active in the process can really help the student cross the threshold into adolescence.

Learning is a Team Sport

Our school mantra is “it takes a village” and it’s true. When educators and parents work together, it’s the students who win. When students are the center, it’s easy to work together. We want the learning and action developed in the PYPX to be sustainable and long-lastin. I think having parents involved is our insurance policy for our students going on to doing amazing things to improve the quality of life for all.

If you have thought that it was “breaking the rules” to include parents into the process, I would caution you to consider the impact it will have on the students and the wider learning community. Yes, you might have some overbearing parents who might try to micro-manage their child’s exhibition project, but perhaps you should weigh the pros and cons ahead of time. In the past I might have been adverse to this idea, but if we want to change the dynamic of enemy shift to ally, we need our families to go on this learning journey with us and understand the power of an IB education.

Please share in the comments below the ways in which your school involves parents in productive and meaningful ways during the PYPX. Growing our ability for partnership with families is vital for student success.

Keeping Optimistic When in the Vice Grip of Crisis

Keeping Optimistic When in the Vice Grip of Crisis

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herding tigers

I’ve heard it said that we either make our decisions based on fear or out of love/passion. Fear is based on avoidance, anxiety, and maintaining current paradigms. Whereas love and passion are based on change,  potential, and new paradigms for a new world. In leadership, we need to balance both. 

Although I cannot speak for ALL schools, as I talk to others in different parts of the world, it feels like schools, especially private schools,  are caught in a vice-grip- the pressures and challenges of our teacher community coming from one direction and those of the parent community squeezing in from another perspective.  For example, communities in Brazil are grappling with re-opening businesses to keep the economy chugging along, but hasten to re-open schools. And there is a good reason for this since our transmission numbers are still high. However, from the parents’ point of view, it seems morally wrong to open bars and clubs while we fail to provide access to schools to educate children. I totally get that and I agree that this pandemic is bringing up misguided values in our societies. But there is this other issue–health and safety which has really hardly been addressed. Humans are highly social creatures so demanding that they remain distant from one another seems unholy for this extended period of time. Why is the best we can do is still to wash our hands and wear a mask? I can understand and appreciate why teachers are apprehensive to come back to face-to-face learning. Teaching isn’t a career with high occupational hazards; it’s not like when you join the military, you can expect to die when doing your duty. Teachers are public servants who haven’t considered these types of risks before, especially since their pay does not reflect the value that they offer society. Because of these competing ideas, it’s hard to find a way forward when all of us need to figure out how to co-exist with COVID and do what’s best for the long-term.

As I reflect on the uncertainty of these times,  schools are confronted often with challenges from a fear-based perspective. Fear of losing student enrollment…..fear of increasing anxiety and depression of community members…. fear of the inadequacy and outdated teaching methodologies…fear of going back to school with Draconian classrooms…..fear of learning loss and conceptual gaps…….fear of ….(fill in the blank)

These are issues that suck the oxygen out of the room. Somewhere, in the midst of this crisis, we have to find some hope and reach for the “blue skies”. 

As a curriculum coordinator, there are so many of these things that I can’t impact. I have no control of, but then again, who in leadership does these days? So I am reminded of this prayer that has been posted on my refrigerator for ages: The Serenity Prayer. This is great advice for times like these: accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

So when I look at those fears, I wonder if I have any power to change these things and if I do, what might be those actions. I think that everyone is working at their full capacity, but I wonder if there are some tweaks worth making in order to address the needs of our community and who might be those people that could be of support. Hmmm…

But what if we move into a more proactive approach? What if we looked beyond this pandemic and start to move into more visionary thinking. This is where I would prefer to spend my energy–in a state of enthusiasm and passion.

Lately, I’ve been enthralled by Dan Heath’s book called Upstream in which the main premise is how to solve problems before they even happen. Some of the most interesting phenomena he details are the concepts and barriers to change:

  • Problem blindness: I don’t see the problem or the problem seems inevitable. 
  • Lack of ownership: That’s not my problem to solve.
  • Tunneling: I can’t deal with that right now.

As I read that, I thought about all the systematic changes that we need to make in education. Equity issues, outdated curriculum, and standardizing the heck out of our students’ souls. But we fight over banal issues like should we teach cursive handwriting? Seriously? THIS is important?

I just have to shake my head when I hear that. 

So many issues are floating to the surface right now that are more worthy of our attention and focus. But maybe we have “problem blindness” or feel powerless with a lack of ownership and tunnel vision. But what if, instead of looking at the standards as our compass for student achievement and commiserating about learning gaps, we looked at those as a reference guide. Instead, what if we could address “heart gaps”, using the Sustainability Development Goals to direct our outcomes? What if solving these issues became the student focus instead of test scores?

Okay, SDGs too political for your school? What about happiness? Surely that is a neutral topic. If you aren’t going to empower learners to change the systems of the world, then why not bring more joy to the planet? I admire the work of Project Happiness Global who’s goal is to impact 10,000,000 lives through developing kindness, mindfulness, and all the other tools to bringing out the best in us, and our society. When organizations cooperate with schools, then we can get change happening. Looking at schools in New Dehli, India, it is inspiring to see how they are really projecting new possibilities for our world. Personally, if our children learned these skills early, I think the SDGs would take care of themselves because no compassionate human being would be able to tolerate people languishing with poverty, a lack of wellbeing or education, nor could they stand by passively and watch out earth be destroyed.

So, as I keep one foot present in the current trauma of this reality, another foot is planted in the future–the future I want to build for our school community and for the world at large.

Recently, we have been involved in strategic planning and one of the goals we have set is to be a “learning hub for excellence”. I love this goal! But we don’t have an expanded description of “excellence” yet and those indicators that we could measure for its achievement. We have defined traditional hallmarks like higher “quality” teachers and creating more professional development opportunities for our teachers in our community and around the region. But I feel that if we only judge success in traditional academic ways, then we have really missed an opportunity to be worthy of admiration. We have to include our mission, which is based on developing “compassionate agents for a better future”. I think we need to really unpack that and reflect on whether the decisions we are making during this pandemic are getting us closer to that goal or further away. We need to be pulled by our vision instead of being pushed by the pain of shattering paradigms. So, I’m still lingering on how we can establish Post-pandemic “New Normals” and thinking about what S.M.A.R.T. goals we can create in order to achieve our school’s mission and the larger mission of the IB. This nagging for a new normal helps me to generate optimism and hope. The time is ripe for change and we must look to the horizon beyond this crisis to see an improved state of education.

What about you? How might you stir your heart and move your mind to envisioning a future world that works for everyone?

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?

 

Why we are failing and What Can We Do About it? #TeachSDGs

Why we are failing and What Can We Do About it? #TeachSDGs

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As I look out my window, my heart sinks as I can see that it’s an extraordinarily polluted day here in Laos. This landlocked country, sandwiched between the biggest manufacturing countries in Asia-China and Vietnam- doesn’t stand much of a chance of having “fresh air” during its dry season, especially when it does its own agricultural burning, adding to the mix of the smog. I was reminded the other day that other countries like America and England were in the same boat, not that long ago, except its citizens didn’t know any better. Now, politicians want to summon all those factories back on their lands, not realizing that when we shut down all those manufacturing plants, we outsourced our pollution as well.

As I consider this, I think this is evidence of our failure in education. How come we keep doing the same things and keep expecting different results? Isn’t this the definition of insanity?

Although there are pockets of societies in isolation, it’s hard to believe that the majority of us deny the responsibility in polluting the very environment we share with others. I remember thinking that students should learn the way I taught- they should adjust to me. I could not have been more wrong. A great teacher adjust to the learner, not the other way around (5)Why don’t we care more? Why can’t we change? Why is money more important than well-being and health? Can’t we evolve our political systems to match the global needs of society vs. the interests of business?

Recently someone connected with me on Twitter and then apologized for reaching out because we have different interests. He: Politics and Leadership. Me: Education. However, in my mind, politics IS an education problem and vice-versa–whether you teach little ones or adults. Politicians are always “getting their message out”, trying to shape and form the opinion of their constituents, and our news channels, who purport to be “fair and balanced” are anything BUT THAT, summarizing information into headlines and sound bites, emotionalizing information so we stayed glued to their channel. So, when I think about the future, I think about how education has to change in order to see its ripple effects, with better-informed citizens, who can not only recognize when they are being bamboozled in order to buy soda and “think like the (political) party” but to flip this behavior so that they recognize they are being manipulated and instead the “party” starts to think like them.

I recently watched this TED talk and I found its promise both intriguing and worrying.

 

What if we took corruption and influence out of our politics? Would AI prove to be an infallible system?

However, this would have to assume that we, as citizens, not only were informed but CARED about the issues that were being voted on. In my mind, a lot of people don’t care about issues like climate change, gun violence or equal-pay for equal-work, because if they did, it would place the onus on them to change. And we all know that change is hard.

It’s for this reason why I think, and I can’t stop promoting, the need for schools to add the UN Sustainability Goals to their curriculum. In this way, we can cultivate awareness of issues that face humanity, not just the self-interest of corporations, and start changing the paradigms that ensnare us today. Care for our world will deplete some of this passivity that cultivates the narcissism and corruption that is chronic in our countries today.  Over time, I believe, will transform these systems and archaic beliefs which keep us handcuffed to the past behaviors that create the problems we face.

I know that in many IB schools, we start to reflect on our units of inquiry. I hope many schools will reflect on how they can embed these goals into their curriculum so that we may start creating a future world that works for everyone, with hearts and minds who are truly educated instead of blindly following the “masses”. We need some open-minds to dream and create possibilities not yet imagined, “clearing the air”, sort of speaking, on issues that impact, not only our corner of the globe but our world.

 

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