Category: Who We Are

A “Think Aloud” about Supporting Interventions in a PYP School’s Programme of Inquiry

A “Think Aloud” about Supporting Interventions in a PYP School’s Programme of Inquiry

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Have you ever looked up synonyms for the word INTERVENTION?

There are 711 similar words….from “meddling” to “treatment” from “interference” to “support”. And the broad range of related word meanings also brings up a multitude of potentials for designing a reading intervention program at your school.

Developing this program is in response to teaching our learners after a full school year online. We want to be ready to get them growing as soon as we can get them onto campus. We want to ensure that they accelerate when they return. We are currently bringing in Reader’s Workshop (aka developing a LOVE of Reading) along with Leveled Learning Intervention (aka the SCIENCE of Reading).

But intervention models typically require those kiddos who need more support to get pulled out of class (Tier 2 and 3). You wouldn’t pull them out of literacy, nor would you pull them out of math, so what would they miss? Their Unit of Inquiry (UOI) time? Hmm…I’m not a fan of that. Because if you add something to your program, something else has to be eliminated, right?

That’s what I am grappling with right now……and I think back to those words “meddling” and “interference”–is this what is going to happen to transdisciplinary learning?

So I’ve been considering how we might use our UOIs in service of students getting the support so they need to feel confident and capable. And since many kids’ growth has taken a hit from learning in a pandemic, I am thinking about a whole school UOI that could be used for our intervention time, but not just to address their deficiencies, but to explore their assets too! What could a UOI like that look like?

Personal

Timely

Goal-orientated

Empowering

Effective

Joyful

That’s what I want for our learners.

What Transdisciplinary Theme?

So I’m starting to think about how we would design a unit like that? My first thought is that this would be developed as a Who We Are and it would need to target many facets of the theme descriptor:

Identity, Relationships, Beliefs, Responsibility, Community–are some concepts that might show up in a UOI

Okay…..so let’s start with some potential Central ideas:

Knowing about who we are as learners can help us to set goals, develop independence and build a strong culture of support. 

Healthy communities develop a strong culture of cooperation, goal-setting, and compassion in order to achieve their objectives.

People’s curiosity and desire to learn can create opportunities for personal growth and build relationships in a community.

Challenges provide individuals and communities opportunities to reflect, problem-solve and develop resilience. 

Discovering who we are can help us to define who we want to become, as individuals and as a community. 

Alright, that’s enough brainstorming for now. There are many possible trajectories in the Who We Are theme.

As I consider the viability of this, we want something that provides breadth so that we focus on the LEARNER, not just on the subject matter. And, although this UOI could be used as a placeholder on our schedules for reading intervention time, we could also use it for math intervention or opportunities to EXTEND their learning. We must be careful to balance deficiencies with assets, spotlighting what makes them unique and helping them to develop self-awareness of who they are. I really need to sit down with teachers to hear their ideas and come into alignment so we can really put something solid on paper. Then grade-level teams can add their polish and shine to any of these potential central ideas and create their own lines of inquiry.

How long?

Once we nail down the Central idea, the next step is to determine the length of the unit. And how might we schedule this? We wouldn’t do it as a typical 6-week UOI!  This will need to be a year-long UOI because we would need a substantial amount of time to work with students.

Lets’s say you take a week to launch it and then provide 1 day a week for intervention (31 weeks on our school calendar) roughly would make this a 5 1/2-6 week UOI. Hmm…that could work, And then different grade levels can use different days of the week to make it easier for our reading interventionist to do “pull out”.  Although once we analyze our student data, we might need more time in certain grade levels, so, although this might be a whole school UOI, the approach might look different. We might need a steady blast of 4 weeks long in Grade 2, for example, and then pull it back to one day a week. So knowing our learners and being flexible will be the key. Even if we do this as a whole school, we don’t have to have the same timelines for each grade level. Could be messy but we have to think about what students need.

Considerations..

The final thing that I wonder about is if we did this as a whole school UOI and scheduled it accordingly, then could we do a multi-grade collaboration, in which teachers could have students move more fluidly between classrooms in order to engage in different kinds of learning? Oh, that could be cool if teachers were open to sharing students. hmm…lots of possibilities, although this would need to be post-pandemic when folks can venture out of their “pods”.

Definitely some food for thought.

I’m excited about providing more support to learners as they develop into strong readers and writers, but I want to make sure we don’t subtract from other areas of the curriculum. I want to honor that we are a PYP school first and foremost, and we embed additional support strutures because we believe in learners’ capacity to grow into flourishing human beings.

As I shared in the post, Should Fear be the Basis of Decision-making in Schools? , I want to do things not because we worry about learning gaps, but we have hope for the future and wish to create a new way forward in education. Although the whole concept of “intervention” is based on looking at what the student is missing, I wish to shift this approach in order to find some new truths in evaluating data.

This is the first draft of my thinking, but as we work together in our learning community, I see a lot of possibilities to cultivate a different ethos around this topic.

Any ideas or suggestions? I’m all ears! Please share.

In for the Long Haul: The #PYP Year-Long Who We Are Unit of Inquiry

In for the Long Haul: The #PYP Year-Long Who We Are Unit of Inquiry

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Today we are making Unicorn Cupcakes. I wonder if my friend Amelia is as excited and nervous as I am about it. She’s going to be leading the activity and already has 5 friends who she is going to work on the project.  Last time our friend, Martin, researched “potions” and after reading several science experiment books, decided on recreating a volcanic eruption. He created a sign-up sheet and enlisted several friends to help him with the project.

You see, on Friday afternoons, students have time carved out to work on personal learning projects in our Grade 1 class, which we generically call our “personal inquiry time” others may call it “genius hour” or “golden time”. In the beginning, it was a generic exploration, and we just let the children play, but now we want to refocus this time a bit more so that we move from an interest into a passion, developing true skills and knowledge.

Despite this unit of inquiry being sprinkled over the course of our calendar year, as a team, we have decided to devote time consistently to this Who We Are Unit, whose central idea is: Our choices and actions as individuals determine who we become as a community. In particular, we are exploring the line of inquiry, ourselves as learners (reflection) during this allocated time.

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We believe that not only will we develop a culture of curiosity and wonder, but also really get to know the hearts and minds of our students.  I am also interested in documenting how we are creating a “powerful learning environment” that I think is beautifully captured in the following quote:

When I think of a powerful learning environment, it has a number of different aspects to it. One is that, when you walk into it, there is a sense of engagement and excitement and purposeful learning. I think that there is attention given to, not only the content, but what is often referred to as the four Cs–communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. 

Mary Beth Banios, quoted from Launching Innovation in Schools course.

Undoubtedly I will use this blog to demonstrate progress and innovation in this area. I feel that we are on the path already. Of course, I also feel that this is our first step developing agency, the new buzzword that is now central to the “Enhanced PYP”.

So what do we know about “Agency”? Although I love reading blog posts that demonstrate innovative approaches to it, I always proceed with caution because I know that meaningful and personalized learning requires structure and organization. In our context, we are dabbling with students pursuing interests; it is not anarchy nor is it obedience. It’s the power to act with initiative, and we are looking for ways to support them in their efforts.

In Personalized Learning in a PLC at Work: Student Agency Through the Four Critical Questions by Timothy Stuart and Sascha Heckmann, the myth is debunked that not all progressive personalized learning initiatives result in student learning.  “Learning progressive schools” need to combine effective structures with a clear direction of the essential student learning outcomes. As a teacher who is promoting open-ended inquiry during our precious class time, I wholeheartedly agree with their recipe to build in an organized approach to our learning.

Structures of Inquiry 

Timothy Stuart and Sacha Heckman advocate for using 4 questions in a PLC to drive a more personalized approach to inquiry.

The 4 Questions: (Worded in the perspective of a student)

  1. What do I want to know, understand and be able to do? (What is my learning goal?)
  2. How will I demonstrate that I have learned it?
  3. What will I do when I am stuck? (How will I get out the learning pit?)
  4. What will I do when I have already learned? (What will be my next learning challenge?)

We are beginning to introduce this structure, however, right now we are considering how we can not only help students plan their learning but how we can effectively document and assess it–and whose job is it to do so?

The Learning Outcomes

Perhaps since I’ve spent the bulk of my career in the Early Years, “proving” that kids are learning isn’t a hard pill to swallow. Since we are a bit off the map, we are using suggestions to release control gradually when students can confidently and competently articulate their learning. Stuart and Heckmann propose a teacher-led learning approach in which teachers determine what disciplinary skills that will need to be mastered, answering the first 3 critical questions of a PLC, and leave the 4th question to the students to answer.  In a nutshell, this is the advice:

When targeting essential disciplanary outcomes, the collaborative teacher team is responsible for the path and pace of learning.

Because we are dabbling with this, determining specifics with “what do we want all students to know and be able to do?” becomes a bit of a challenge since it’s not anchored in developing content knowledge. Plus, since this is a Who We Are unit, it’s hard to peg content-specific goals to it anyhow.

That said, I believe deeply about the need to have “skin in the game”, and intend to co-create success criteria along with students, assessing the development of Approaches To Learning (ATLs). Our school has slightly revised the popular Approaches to Learning document which will be helpful in describing how students are developing these sub-skills within the year-long Who We Are. There are some of these areas in which our students will have no experience or understanding of–they are in first grade after all!  But I believe that if we create a focus on some key areas and develop goals around them, this can be quite potent.

So, we’re in for the long haul now, excited by the possibilities and power of a year-long unit of inquiry. Perhaps if other schools are considering doing an extended unit of inquiry, this post might have inspired and given you some food for thought. I sure hope so because, in my mind, this can be foundational for developing a life-long approach to learning.

 

#PYP Déjà vu or Jamais Vu? Approaching Familiar Units of Inquiry in Unfamiliar Ways

#PYP Déjà vu or Jamais Vu? Approaching Familiar Units of Inquiry in Unfamiliar Ways

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Picking up the strand of LED lights, I felt overwhelmed at the Chinese Hardware Market, I had this disorienting feeling that I’ve been here before, discussing the color of lights in broken Mandarin. As I walked out with 2 meters of lights, I felt like I was in a dream world, realizing that this whole experience was a  déjà vu.

But having the luxury of teaching a unit of inquiry year after year creates the same experience.  You read over last year’s planner, reliving the experience and ready to proceed in the same way. Easy, right?  Then you can tick that off your To-Do list and move onto other things like setting up your classroom or having meetings. But this year, I can’t do that. I’ve promised myself to take myself and the students “where the streets have no name” and that means that I have to approach units of inquiry from a stance of jamais vu, selectively having amnesia about what provocations and activities we used in this unit.

So why on Earth would I toss aside all the thoughtful planning of the past? Because it’s the past. And we’ve grown professionally a whole year since our team originally designed that unit. Yes, we may be re-inventing the wheel a bit, but our experience and knowledge require us to develop more dynamic and empowering units of inquiry. We know more pedagogically. Moreover, we have a whole new group of students, with new interests and questions. We need to readjust our sails because we are going on a whole new adventure.

So when we examined our current Who We Are unit (Our choices and actions define who we become as a community), we decided to use “the end”, with a water-downed version of our summative task, a “learning fair”, to begin our current unit. It made sense that they needed more practice making learning choices so they could cultivate their self-identity and self-management skills. Now we can use this data to reflect and refine how we might use this jumping off point to have them become leaders in their own learning.

5_album_photo_image
Making choices helps us to appreciate how they see themselves as learners.

I think using the end as the beginning is an approach that we may use again in future units because it provides the context for all the skills and knowledge that we would have “front-loaded” on the students in past units. For example, last year we did several lessons on Kelso’s choices and How Full is Your Bucket?  before we gave them the agency to make learning choices. How silly, right? It’ll be so much better having the context of conflict as a provocation to really engage in deeper conversations. If we bring these resources into the unit, it would because the students needed it, not because we wanted it, because it was on LAST year’s planner.  In fact, coming from this angle has really helped us to see how capable and eager our students are to be in control of their learning. Maybe we don’t have to waste time on the previous year “staple activities”.

As we embark on another year of learning, I intend to embrace the jamais vu, putting old planning aside and coming at familiar units from unfamiliar approaches. And I wonder what insight the children we give me about how I can amplify learning and empower them. This is what I look forward to so much: I grow as they grow. How fun is that?

#IMMOOC, Season 4: Does it Matter?- Giving Students Choice (My Personal Inquiry into Empowering Students Begins)

#IMMOOC, Season 4: Does it Matter?- Giving Students Choice (My Personal Inquiry into Empowering Students Begins)

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400 minutes a day is roughly what most students spend in school. After 180 school days, my 1st graders will have spent 72,000 minutes in our learning community (given that they are not absent) and move onto 2nd grade.What will they have learned? Who will they be at the end of that time? Will our team really have developed inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect? (From the IB Mission Statement)

That is an incredibly hard question to answer. I know that we work hard to forge new territory and challenge our learners to become self-reliant, reflective and kind. Sometimes it is easy- a simple provocation might provide the nudge, but most of the time, cultivating the awareness and motivation to do what is hard takes a lot of different approaches. In IB-Speak, we call it being principled however others may call it grit–it’s doing what’s right or the best thing to do even if it is hard, boring or uncomfortable, especially when NO ONE is watching you.

To develop “leaders of tomorrow”, we need to develop them as leaders of today.

-George Curous-  #EmpowerBook

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately-am I empowering students to make good choices or am I handicapping them by making the choices for them?  As a first grade teacher, this is sure easy to do–to “boss” those little ones around and “help” them make those choices for them.  Painful as it is to admit, that certainly happens.

As I begin this season of IMMOOC,  I really want to shine a light into those dark places of my practice. I want to examine whether or not I am consistently and compassionately developing our learners to be challenged and independent in their learning.

So I am excited to be reading the book Empower to take a more critical look at how I approach student learning and develop greater student agency in the classroom. Perhaps you might be keen to join? If so, you can sign up and join a whole load of us educators who really want to make an impact and create these leaders of today.

 

Creating A Community of Mindful Learners

Creating A Community of Mindful Learners

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Sometimes you teach what you know well, and sometimes you teach what you want to know better. Mindfulness is definitely a skill that is under development and I am learning right along with the students.  As a digital immigrant, my life has transitioned from simple face-to-face interactions and long conversations on the telephone to pop-up notifications and the buzzing dings that demand my attention. For me, mindfulness is not about meditation, it is about awareness; of inhabiting my body and my mind in a healthy and mature way.  As I think about the precious learners in our class, I think about their futures and how they might handle stress and relationships in this digital age that is ever evolving at such a rapid pace, a pace that makes it difficult to manage at times. That is why I wholeheartedly agree that mindfulness is not something you teach kids to “calm them down” but to teach them how to do as part of their daily habits, which I think of as mental hygiene.

Because I feel so strongly that this is a life skill, I have been more consistent in cultivating a practice in our classroom. It all started as experimentation and a curiosity into a line of inquiry (how we learn best) when we began our Who We Are unit, but then, due to the illness and fluctuation in our teaching team, the routine seemed important and necessary to send “well wishes” to people struggling with health issues. I feel quite fortunate because, at my school, I am not seen as the “kooky hippie”, but a fellow practitioner of mindfulness and receive support in teaching lessons. Members of our counseling team come to class 2 times a week to provide support lessons based on the work of the Mindful Schools program.And what I find most interesting was, in our recent student surveys, students put learning about their brain (which is something that I do as a component of the practice) as one of their favorite activities. So clearly, they are curious about how the mind works and want to develop this awareness of themselves and others. In our recent One World Day assembly, classes were invited to present ideas related to the United Nations’ Global Goals. We reflected on the goal of health and well-being and I interviewed a few of our students about mindfulness and who are the people they have compassion for, which I refer to as “well wishes”.  It was a supremely sweet and telling moment when I did this, as I learned a lot about what my students value and care about. You can see the video here in this post.

We also demonstrated a bit of our practice with the audience, as the ringing of the brass bell signaled a moment to breathe and reflect on who or what we want to send well-wishes to. Then we took turns sharing our well-wishes.

One thing that is both wonderful and terrible about mindfulness is that it is never “learned”. You can’t have book knowledge about this topic. It is a practice, a skill, a habit which is ongoing and evolving. I do believe that the residual effects of this practice may not be seen immediately, but I feel hopeful that this intention to have a culture of mindfulness will have a lasting impact. Becoming more mindful, creating space between thoughts, developing focus and awareness, and cultivating compassion for others and oneself is, I believe, something that all our students, young or old, can benefit from and need in order to cope with the transitions and challenges that their future holds.

Perhaps you too have been curious about implementing this sort of habit into your classroom. I strongly encourage you! And if others would like to share their experience in the comments below, I welcome your ideas and suggestions.

May you be happy.
May you be peaceful.
May you be safe.
May you be healthy.
May you be love.
And my students love to throw in…
May you be smart.
Designing a Classroom of Writers: An Inquiry-Based Approach To Writer’s Workshop

Designing a Classroom of Writers: An Inquiry-Based Approach To Writer’s Workshop

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I have a desire to be the teacher that I always wish I had and to have a classroom whose energy and enthusiasm for learning is palpable. I don’t care if my students remember me when they are older but I certainly wish that who they became as writers might be because of me.

This week was the first full week of school and like many classrooms, the early days of learning are full of cultivating our learning culture and assessing children. However, since we are a PYP (Primary Years Programme) school, we are also trying to determine what they know about our central idea Our choices and actions as individuals define who we become as a community while looking through our lines of inquiry:

  • Ourselves as learners (reflection)
  • How our mindset impacts our behavior (change)

So this week, as we inquired why people write, students examined old exemplars of writing. And when I say old, I mean REALLY old, as in ancient, such as these.

ancient

We did the See, Think, Wonder Visible Thinking routine, and the students came up with lots of wonderful ideas like “words are like codes that have secret messages”, “old humans had different things that they wrote about”, “writing looks different today”. Then their questions began to emerge, with the most poignant being  “what message do they want to tell us”. From there, we decided to create a “message” about something that is important to them. They could write about anything, which would help me assess a bit into the line of inquiry-who we are as learners, and most importantly, who we are as writers. What ideas do they have? Would they use pictures AND words to express their ideas? What words would they use?

So with no other prompt, they began to “write”. All of them drew pictures, none of them wrote words beyond their name on top of the paper. I thought this was very interesting and it was great data. At that point, I decided to stop the class, and have them share their pictures with a buddy. While they partnered up, the partner who drew the picture was silent while the other described what they thought the picture was about. Then they switched roles. When we did a whole group reflection, the students began to articulate what they needed to add to their picture so that its message was clearer: more details in the picture, more color, and add WORDS! Then they set off to work on their writing and the words started to come onto the page naturally. This showed me that they were beginning to understand the purpose of words in our writing and motivated them to use labels and captions.

During our next lesson, students explored books with the learning intention of determining what the author was trying to tell us–what was their message. When the students came back and shared, the purpose of writing began to come into focus: to entertain or to inform us about a certain topic. Then I gave them back their original sample of writing, I asked them if they were “done” with this idea of if they needed more paper to explain what happened before and after the page that I had in my hand. All of them agreed that they had more work to do, and within 30 minutes, their books began to emerge. Students ideas for book making began to spill out and they started to think about their purpose of writing: “When I am done with this book, I want to write about mermaids”, “Next time Batman is going to fight another bad guy.”, “I want to do a different kind of I-Spy book”.  Later students asked when it was writing time and if they could take their books out on break so they could share them with a friend. But my happiest moment of this week came when a student who felt overwhelmed and exasperated about reading came to me and asked if he could do more writing during our classroom ‘personal inquiry time”. I couldn’t help but beam with my joy–Yes!, I thought, they will become genuine writers!

I firmly believe that when students get the “why” of writing and the “how” will come naturally because they are motivated to do the heavy lifting in their learning. So as we work through this unit of inquiry, I intend to find mentor texts to help support them and to “tune into” their voice so they develop their skills as writers.

I am wondering what others have done that has sparked a love of writing. What strategies and provocations have you used that got students motivated and energized about their work? Please share because it elevates teaching, not just in my classroom, but in other’s who read this blog. Sharing is caring! (:

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