Where do good ideas come from? From a lot of bad ones, I think. We have to experiment and be willing to get “messy” in order to challenge ourselves. We have to be vulnerable. And, so I am sharing a very rough draft of some new thinking that I am exploring when it comes to …
Not everyone wakes up on a Sunday morning and sketches out ideas for a Programme of Inquiry (POI), but I’ve been reflecting for a while on my experience from last spring when I went to the IB’s headquarters in the Hague to help design sample POIs for the Enhanced PYP initiative (see the Teacher Support …
As a Primary Years Programme educator, we often refer to ourselves as “practitioners” not teachers. That’s an interesting choice of words, isn’t it? Does it make you wonder what it is that we practice? As it is the beginning of a new year, we have an opportunity to reflect on the accomplishments of last year …
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 …
When you hear the innovative what does that mean to you as an educator? I think for a long time we thought if we superimposed the business model upon schools, analyzing and improving our school’s mission, operations, outcomes, and personnel, we’d produce high-performance metrics and fiscal efficiency. Gains in test scores and budget expectations would be innovation in …
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 …
Do you believe in coincidence? Sometimes I feel like the universe is conspiring on my behalf as if some unseen force can hear my silent thoughts rattling around in my head, and finding ways to provide me with answers or at least some nudges towards a better version of Me. This epiphany is compliments of …
It’s Sunday morning and as I soap up greasy dishes, I hear Susan Engel say on the Heinemann Podcast: One of the things that I think that our schools have unwittingly done is ignored all the processes that kids use at home and try to replace those with a set of formal procedures that aren’t always …
I’m a parent. So I am biased. In my experience, parents are children’s 1st and longest lasting teacher. And not all the lessons they teach kids are “great ones”. We know that. But we also know that they are doing their best with the knowledge and strategies they have. More importantly, by and large, parents …
I’ve been doing a little light reading and exploring the new PYP: From principles into practice digital resource in the PYP resource center. This led me to nose around the Programme standards and practices documentation to see if anything had dramatically changed. I was surprised at how much it had changed in wording, not just swapping section letters for …
