Tag: Enhanced PYP

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?

 

#EnhancedPYP: An Inquiry into the Hokey-Pokey

#EnhancedPYP: An Inquiry into the Hokey-Pokey

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Whenever you move to a new school,  you inherit a space that once was someone else’s classroom or office. And as you begin to inhabit this space, you have to rummage through all the “old stuff” that once belonged to another. Some of the remanents of my predecessor were binders full of old Programmes of Inquiries and Unit of Inquiry planners. It was felt like the “PYP Through the Ages” as I combed through the documents.

One of the PYP planners had the title (remember when we used to have titles for our unit planners?): Let’s Do The Hokey-Pokey. I never thought the Hokey-Pokey was that deep. I just about peed my pants reading that. Oh, man, so glad we don’t do that anymore!!

But it’s not just that shift away from titles as topics that has got me thinking about the Primary Year’s Programme’s (PYP) evolution.  What are the “trends” taking place in education in general, and what really needs to be “enhanced” in our schools?

Do we need flexible seating, as much as we need flexible thinking? How can we “enhance” that?what kids remember.png

I don’t think we need Slide Staircases in our hallways and trampolines in every classroom to inspire creativity. I think kids come naturally equipped with curiosity and imagination. Let’s not forget what is behind this trend–that our learners are unique and that there are optimal conditions for them to thrive. It’s about the kids, not the cushions. Let’s enhance our relationships as much as we enhance our school design.

 

Do we need better technology or the more skillful use of it?  How do we enhance that?tech quotes

I don’t think we need to have virtual reality headsets and 3D printers to prepare our students for their tech-infused futures. Yes, we must replace outdated iPads that we can’t update anymore with new ones. We want tech that improves instruction, not impedes it. However, let’s remember what tech does for our learning–we can go further faster in our research skills and do some amazing innovative projects when tech gets involved.  Nevertheless, the trend with more technology in our classrooms is about enhancing student-directed learning and represents democracy in learning. Let’s enhance the student’s voice, choice, and ownership.

What really needs a facelift? It’s educators and our approaches to learning.

I share these 2 examples because I see a lot of schools are making superficial changes in their schools. Or schools that are being built from the ground up with some fantastic designs. The enhancements are not about the fresh paint and fancy bells and whistles. It’s about a shift in our practice. I know that doesn’t look as sexy on marketing brochures but it’s the truth.

And what has started with deleting the word, Title, on our PYP Unit planners is now evolving into something much bigger, much grander than these “school makeovers”. What is truly changing is the US, as we widen this definition to increase agency.

Now put your right foot in….and shake it all about
do the hokey pokey
And Turn ourselves around
That’s what it’s all about

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”.

 

 

What’s the Best that Could Happen? Using a Trans-Articulation Approach to Designing a Mission-Driven Programme of Inquiry (#PYP)

What’s the Best that Could Happen? Using a Trans-Articulation Approach to Designing a Mission-Driven Programme of Inquiry (#PYP)

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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 our Programme of Inquiry. 

Last week, I meant to work on my Google Training series, but instead, I got the notion about how to rethink our Program of Inquiry with Future Thinking.  Inspired, I started sketching out possible approaches. Eventually, I created a Google Doc and started thinking about how I might map out the Programme of Inquiry (POI) based on the big WHY of a school’s mission. That became my starting line.

Excuse Me While I Make a Point

Pardon my digression.

Have you noticed that a lot of schools are really vague and general about their Mission?  I think the standard practice of trying to distill our mission into marketing taglines makes it harder to define our success as a school. For example: Inspire. Challenge. Empower. 

Inspired to do what? Challenging doing what? Empowering to do what? In my mind, these taglines create a state of “vanilla”, in which your school is, at best, average, instead of being a unique community of learning. I think this vagueness provides an incomplete map of why our school is so vital to the overall landscape of education.  Not just in our city, but in the world. We need to think bigger than our school bubble.

Back to the “Start”

Since I was present at our school’s recent Visioning session, I am aware of all the lovely conversations with staff, parents and students about “What’s the Best that Could Happen?” for our 5-year plan. Sustainability was a major theme that came out of those discussions and is a part of our strategic plans. Thus, I feel that our curriculum’s goal should be driven by what a school wants to become–the future they hope to build in 5 years.

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The 5-year plan now becomes a living document, as our curriculum can actualize the potential within our community. Sustainability, as a collective desire of the stakeholders, is going to be the “Rome” to which all roads lead to. In fact, it’s not a road, it’s a 4-lane highway, in which the Sustainability Compass comprises the lanes in which our curriculum will drive: Nature, Economy, Society and Well-being. What’s cool about this is that it’s been mapped against the UN’s Sustainability Goals which helps to promote them.

Sign Post #1: Guiding Conceptual Themes

Before looking at the POI, I want you to notice in the POI that I have included a grade level “Guiding Concept” that came from out of the Enhanced PYP discussions. Although I think of this as the tool for coherency and alignment, I love how Lisa Verkerk refers to it as the “red thread” that weaves units together. That’s a beautiful metaphor that describes how grade-level units have an overall conceptual theme that navigates the direction of each transdisciplinary theme’s inquiry. In this way, it makes it easier to map out the sequencing of units, because you consider which unit needs to come first in its understanding and then decide which one is the hardest, to help you to designate the order by conceptual understanding.

Sign Post #2: Layout

Sarah Osborne introduced me to another way of setting up the POI which has helped me to observe patterns of articulation of the descriptors within a transdisciplinary theme. When you just tilt this document on its side, sort of speaking, you get a whole new perspective on your Programme of Inquiry. Gaps begin to glare.

Although this is not a complete POI, once completed, it is a thing of beauty to see how coherent and infused it is deep conceptual understanding.

Sign Post #3: Central Ideas

I have a lot of strong opinions about central ideas which you may already be aware of if you read the blog post: Central Ideas: The Good, The Bad and The Messy. How the Primary Years Program Can Rethink and Define Them. However, I have to thank 25-year Reggio veteran Marianne Valentine  for helping me to consider how very broad central ideas are important for play-based learning as it opens up for more personalized inquiry and evolving your role as a teacher into a researcher. So, with that in mind, I have some central ideas that are succinct for a reason. Although I cringe when I read central ideas that sound more like slogans (ex: Ideas revel possibilities), they can be powerful tools in allowing certain units to go into a variety of directions and have their place in a POI.

Sign Post #4: Solution-Focused

I am really inspired by the work of Glenn Hayres, Jen Friske and Lynn Cuccaro with their diligence in writing units of inquiry that are solution-focused in directing a POI to create problem-solvers as students. I love this intention and I think it amplifies agency when we not only bring the world’s problems to the children’s attention but empower them into action. No doom and gloom. We can cope with hope. (Cheesy, I know, but couldn’t resist.)

However, this is a skillful endeavor, and I am still working on developing this skill. But I like a challenge and enjoy giving it a try.

Before you peek at the document, I have another POI that is following this approach. Very much a draft! And the one below that is another POI I created as a warm-up for the Enhancements. It’s an “old” way of thinking about a POI, but I go back to it to steal ideas and reference it to see if this purpose-driven POI is really any different from past ones I have created.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mQRFkpM8Z8V2KwRqvnFX294sm5dWY8g7dIkenP0oeck/edit?usp=sharing

 

This is a work in progress, clearly. I still have some “Future Building” to work on. But I am sharing this raw POI skeleton so you can start thinking about how your school can use these features in creating a POI template that is motivated with bigger ambitions than covering content in order to prepare students for MYP. One thing I have yet to do is to collaborate–something that is really necessary with designing a POI. You need lots of perspectives and ideas to tap into the genius and experience of others. Not necessarily with the whole staff, but definitely with the right people, can be exciting and fun.

Looking Back at the Map

Because I believe that our written curriculum is a major contributing factor to the ethos and culture within a school, I feel that a well-articulated POI is foundational for dynamic learning and teaching within a school. When this is fully fleshed out, I will have to filter this POI through that the school’s bigger “Why” and whether it will support our school’s goals. We always have to be challenging our POI. Furthermore, on paper this POI is in theory. When these units are taught, that is the really telling sign and the one that matters–What learning came out of this? What was its impact? We’d have to reflect and modify when necessary.

 

My hope is that your heart is leaping out of your chest with the possibility of how awesome your school can become when you have a written curriculum that is mission-driven and coherent. I wish for all of our schools to ask themselves What’s the Best that Can Happen?

In my mind, silence is accepting the status quo. Please challenge and extend my thinking in the comments below.

 

Future Thinking: Evolving as a Part of Enhancing A #PYP Programme of Inquiry

Future Thinking: Evolving as a Part of Enhancing A #PYP Programme of Inquiry

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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 Materials that can be accessed in the MyIB section of the main page for those samples in PYP resources). During that time, our teams sat down and began to create POIs that were structurally synergistic, organized so that there was more conceptual coherence and personalized to the uniqueness of that school reality and age group. In the blog post, #PYP: What is a Successful Programme of Inquiry?, I articulated the intention that was foundational in creating those sample POIs, but I’m starting to consider this definition of “success” as my “first thinking” when I consider what it might mean to “enhance” something.

Probably all you English scholars know that the word “enhance” is a transitive verb, meaning that this verb is relational and influential. enhanced pypI find it an interesting word choice by the IB in its re-branding effort. So their call to “enhance” our Primary Years Programme has got me lingering on what it is that we want to elevate in the learning experience.  Visually, “Agency” has now become the symbolic heart of the PYP’s graphic. I think many educators are painting a picture of what that can look like in our classrooms; the blog called IB Educator Voices contains a multitude of examples of teachers pivoting towards an agentic pedagogical approach. Currently, I am enamored with Rick Hanson’s definition of agency from his book, Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength and Happiness , which I’d like to share with you:

Agency is the ability to look for ways to cause an effect. It’s a sense of internal freedom when you make something happen.

Hmm…..when I consider that interpretation, my eyes begin to widen its focus upon the outer ring’s message of this enhanced PYP graphic: “Building For the Future”.  Should we not, as PYP educators, be contemplating what sort of future we wish to build? We often undermine our influence of the big picture of how society and culture are developed over time through our educational paradigms. Educators have played a big role in creating the Millennial-generation, and we are helping to create the next generation of global citizens. We shouldn’t take these things lightly, and in fact, I think we should be much more intentional with our power and ability to transform our human experience and life on Earth. We should look for ways to cause an effect….because we have the freedom to make something happen. For example, it seems obvious to me that the intelligent and thoughtful people at the United Nation’s know this, which is why they have created a call to action with the #TeachSDGs movement. Our schools should be seriously considering how we might achieve those 17 goals by 2030, because this is certainly one way to shape our schools’ POIs which is in alignment with the PYP curricular framework and values of the IB.

A Second Thought

As I reflect back to that Hague experience, I feel that this initial approach to considering what it means to “enhance” the design of the POI is still ongoing. If you look carefully at those Sample POIs, you would notice that they don’t really deviate much from each other. Because at the end of the day, whether we were using national curricular standards or the IB’s Scope and Sequence, the challenges with using either the standards-based vs. concept-based curriculum results in more similarities than exceptions when creating the units of inquiries. I think this a testimony to the strength of the PYP framework and transdisciplinary learning with how translatable it is to a variety of educational settings.  However, when I read books like Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly and  How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil, I begin to wonder if our current POIs are teaching towards the past or preparing for the imminent reality of our students. Are we, as schools, engaged in future-building, with meaningful and forward-thinking POIs, or clinging onto industrial-age ideas.

I’m not sure how familiar you are with those books, so I’d like to share a quote that persistently plagues me from Homo Deus:

As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubject reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history. In the 21st century, fiction might thereby become the most potent force on Earth…hence, if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that make meaning in our world……Fiction isn’t bad. It’s vital. Without commonly accepted stories about money, states or coorporations, no complex human society can function. We can’t play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can’t enjoy the benefits of the markets and courts without simliar make-believe stories. But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality.

Yuval Noah Harari, from Home Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.

I’ve been marinating in those words for over a year. Curious about what could be the “story” we are telling ourselves now about our future and how we can use it as a “tool”. I know that some feel that the book Future Shock is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. But what if we could choose another direction, one in which we meet the disruption that advancing technology will bring with creativity, grace, and intention. I believe wholeheartedly in that possibility, which is why I’ve been working on developing online courses for well-being in the digital age. I feel strongly that we should not resist technology but instead embrace it and use it to promote greater health and improve our relationships. That is the empowering “story” I wish to tell.

And today, I woke up, feeling alive, wanting to create a POI that was bathed in an over-reaching goal of developing well-being because I think that is the “fiction” I’d like to cultivate in the intersubjective (socially agreed upon) future reality of students. Here are the main 6 concepts that I feel need to be unpacked and gone into depth over the course of a student’s PYP experience within our 6 transdisciplinary themes.

  1. Sustainability (Production and Consumption):  because we need to shift from scarcity to ingenuity.
  2. Entrepreneurship: because we need to shift from profit-orientated goals to positive contributions in society.
  3. Computational Thinking: because we have to understand the algorithms of life and how we can co-evolve with exponential machine learning.
  4. Digital Citizenship: because online relationships and media are influencing us and our society. We need to navigate this reality skillfully.
  5. Social Emotional Learning: because attention and emotional awareness is vital to our health and is the new currency in our economy.
  6. Imagination (and Poetry): because creativity is the by-product of imagination, and we need to find more beautiful ways to express it.

I’ve started to create potential POIs that take these main concepts and build them out so that the overall force of the programme is one that develops well-bing: resilience, awareness, positive outlook and generosity. It’s really hard to translate these ideas into words without a fully fleshed out sample POI to show as a model but hopefully, the spirit of this quest has been communicated and I will have something completed soon that I can show as an example.

An Invitation

Now, whether you agree with me or not about what concepts need to be on a future-orientated whole-school POI isn’t the point but I do hope to open up a debate. I know in schools that are moving towards personalized learning culture, very broad and general central ideas are highly valued so that there is a lot of flexibility in the direction of a student’s inquiry. In my own experience, I am grappling with casting such a wide net with central ideas in the curriculum, uncertain if the overall outcome behooves the students and is manageable for teachers. But the purpose of this post is not to incite discussion around central ideas, but instead to provoke a re-examination of “the big picture” of your current school’s POI and reflect upon the future that you want to create through the curriculum.  Especially in schools that have authorized programmes, we need to be really challenging ourselves, moving beyond horizontal and vertical articulation. Perhaps this is my new working definition of the Enhanced PYP. I’m calling it “trans-articulation”. It’s less about ticking boxes and more about growing the future today, evolving consciously and actively within our curriculum approach.

As always, I hope you share your reflections, wonderings and concerns in the comments below.

 

The PYP Planner: A Shift in Our Approach to Planning Inquiry (#enhancedPYP )

The PYP Planner: A Shift in Our Approach to Planning Inquiry (#enhancedPYP )

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Quick Quiz: What is the first “box” in the PYP planner? Did these things come to mind?:

What is our purpose?   To inquire into the following:

  • Transdisciplinary theme:    
  • Central idea :  

summative assessment task(s):

What are the possible ways of assessing students’ understanding of the central idea? What evidence, including student-initiated actions, will we look for?

Now with the enhancements in the Primary Years Programme (PYP), we can redesign our planner which has to lead to an overhaul of our collaborative planning. If you notice in the Box #1, aside from clarifying our theme and central idea, we would start planning our summative. However, we haven’t done any assessment of student’s prior knowledge, and I often found that determining the summative assessment before we have even launched a unit of inquiry (UOI) has always led to more teacher direction in our units, as if we are nudging and, sometimes pushing the students toward our end goal–The Summative Task. Think about it, when we plan in this way, we are already dictating the terms of what we want the students to Know, Understand, and Do (aka: KUD) before we have even gotten them to SHOW US what they already know, understand and do. A bit presumptive of us, really, eh?

Needless to say, since the reigns are off, and schools get to design PYP planners in the Enhanced PYP, there’s been a shift in how we approach planning. And the new “Box 1” (figuratively) is about planning our provocation FIRST so we can let the students reveal to us what they know and lead the direction of the UOI, rather then us marching them towards the summative. It may seem trivial, but when you consider how AGENCY is the new core of our curriculum, we need to be approaching our units in different ways.

Let me provide a context, looking at our Math Stand Alone:

Patterns and sequences occur in everyday situations.
-Patterns can be found in numbers.
-Types of number patterns
-Patterns can be created and extended.

Key concepts: Connection, Form, Reflection

Related concepts: pattern, sequences, collections/groups

As a team, including our Math Leader of Learning (Olwen Millgate), we sat down and discussed the many different ways that we could plan a provocation around this central idea. At the end of the day, we determined that the most open-ended, the better, so that students could exercise as much creativity and skills as possible. We would just be the “researchers” in the classroom, observing and noting what the students came up with when given the challenge–Create as many patterns using one or more of the materials provided. 

As teacher researchers, we divided up the students so that we could take notes, making sure that all students were given the time and attention to “show what they know” about patterns. Here is the simple observational sheet that was created for this provocation: (Free to use)

We gave the students a variety of math tools to work with:

  1. counters
  2. ten frames
  3. unifix cubes
  4. Cuisenaire Rods
  5. beads
  6. pattern blocks
  7. peg boards
  8. tanagrams
  9. popsickle sticks
  10. white board and markers
  11. stampers and paper
  12. dominos
  13. magnetic letters and boards

As you can see, they had a plethora of options, and the students engaged freely, making their own choices and creations. Some students preferred to work by themselves while other collaborated–another aspect that we noted along with capturing their conversations. Here are just a few of those creations:

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There was a very loud and animated group at the Unifix cube station–which surprised us all by how excited they got about building “tall patterns”, with a lot of debate about whether they were just snapping cubes together or generating a true pattern. Although to outsiders, it may have felt chaotic, there were fantastic conjectures going on, which we saved a few examples to use for future provocations. (The Guiding Question: Is this a pattern? Why or Why Not?)

Later, our team met to discuss what we observed and we were able to sift through our documentation. We unpacked the provocation, and shared our photos and notes, describing some of the interactions that we had with them. Then we went to our curriculum and examined the phase the students might be achieving at in their conceptual understandings. Our central idea comes from the PYP Maths Scope and Sequence in Phase 1, so we needed to challenge it —is this the phase they are actually in or are we seeing evidence of Phase 2 understanding? We decided to stick with our central idea and lines of inquiry because we felt like we saw and heard evidence that most of our learners were on the tail end of this phase, applying their understanding of pattern.

After this conversation, we went on to determine what our next steps could be. Most of the patterns were ABABAB–do we encourage them to make ABCABCABC or other more sophisticated patterns? At the end of our deliberations, we decided that rushing them might create conceptual gaps so we wanted to stick with their ABABAB, but create a series of opportunities to look at how we could manipulate only 2 variables to generate a variety of patterns. What can we do with only 2 attributes?–This became the guiding question for our upcoming provocations.

So here we are, in Week 2 of this unit and we still haven’t nailed down our summative task. Gasp, right? But, on Friday, after this week’s follow up provocations, we can safely appreciate our learners, where they are and where we can take them during the remaining weeks of the unit. I find that thrilling. We will create our conceptual math rubric, using this generic one as our guide:

math standalone 2

Hopefully, you can see that we are thinking about planning not as boxes but phases in our inquiry. We are using this “tuning in” period to dictate the terms of our how we will ultimately assess students. And we are spending more time researching and planning our provocations so that they can make the children’s thinking visible and expose their understanding of the math concepts. I believe that as this approach to planning evolves, our attitudes toward our students also evolve when we are observing how they are competent and creative when expressing their ideas.

I’m wondering how other schools have begun to consider the impact of planning on agency and how it will look in the Enhanced PYP. The planner has always been a tool for us to shape our collaboration and thinking about how best to meet our students’ needs in the inquiry. I think it will be fun to see how schools begin to shift as they reflect deeply on the importance of it–it’s more than just an exercise in paperwork, it is an artifact of learning.

So what’s your “Box #1”?

#IMMOOC: Are We Preparing Students to Fly Closer to the Sun?

#IMMOOC: Are We Preparing Students to Fly Closer to the Sun?

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Do you ever think we will go back in time? Let me explain.

I was listening to a Seth Godin’s podcast (I See You) about the danger of creating “average” humans, and he takes out some big punches at educational systems. Retelling the myth of Icarus, we come to understand why our culture derides people who dare to fly closer to the sun, and how our schools have become factory-like.

As a highly dedicated educator, naturally, I take this to heart. It makes me question so much of what we do and what we believe about education, especially since our current paradigm is rooted in the industrial model, churning out “average” students who grow up to do ‘average” jobs. There’s a lot of people out there who think the job market will go back to the 1600s: 0% unemployment rate. But that’s because jobs have been parceled out to robots and artificial intelligence, like Watson. Your knowledge and skill, harvested through Big Data, will become obsolete just like these jobs of the past.When I hear futurists speak, their versions of the next 30 years seems so outrageous; detailing how we will need to learn how to co-evolve with artificial intelligence.  But then again, when I look in the rearview mirror of the last 30 years, actually I think it’s not science fiction, it’s going to be science fact, especially when we look at technology’s exponential growth with Moore’s Law and the work  of Alvin Toffler,  who looks more like a prophet rather than a writer, with his book Future Shock that predicted the challenges which we are facing today.

When I consider the value of an International Baccalaureate (IB) education, I want to feel confident that we are ahead of the curve when it comes to preparing for the upcoming challenges.  Because we put a high value on concepts over content, students develop perspective, thinking skills, and problem-solving, rather than the memorization of facts and following procedures. We strive for students to develop “agency”, demonstrating that they can work more independently as learners. Furthermore, when we think about the “enhanced PYP”, schools must be looking critically into how we do this better in our Programmes of Inquiry and the culture of student learning.

enhanced pyp

We all have AGENCY, the capacity to act intentionally. Recognising and supporting agency in the enhanced PYP will create a culture of mutual respect, acknowledging the rights and responsibilities of students, schools and the wider learning community, enabling students to take ownership of their learning and teachers of their teaching. –from Preparing for the Enhanced PYP

It is my hope that this agency goes beyond the 4 walls of the classroom. Those students see a problem in the community and have the courage and audacity to say this is MY PROBLEM TO SOLVE- Not wait until they are given permission and pushed by adults, but strive to take immediate action.

What we can do, what we can encourage and value in our school is to take these teaspoons of change: small but significant ideas, attitudes, and actions that have a positive impact on people and the planet. I think a large part of this is to lead by example. As the models that students emulate, especially in the PYP, we must be reflecting on how our choices can make a difference. Are we moving toward a sustainable future–do we contribute to the “pollution or the solution”, as D’arcy Lunn might query?  Are we Luddites or innovators with our use of technology? Are we consumers or creators–what sort of art are we making? The future belongs to all of us, and as educators, we have a say in where it is going.

If we want our students to be leaders of the change, not victims of circumstances, as new technology invades our everyday lives and a new economy emerges, then giving them the courage and resilience to “fly closer to the sun” starts with challenging ourselves as educators to do the same. Not to sound cliche with the quoting Gandhi, but we need to “be the change that we want to see in the world”.  As educators, we are on the front lines of this change and are deeply connected to the trajectory of the future. The moment we recognize this, we can become co-creators in the future we want to live in. Business and governments don’t have to dictate what and how we need to teach. We create the future every day with developing the hearts and minds of our students.

Let that settle in a bit.

I think it’s time to stop being “average” and put on some wings.

Whatcha’ think?

#PYP : 5 Things You Should See in a Successful Unit of Inquiry

#PYP : 5 Things You Should See in a Successful Unit of Inquiry

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Sometimes I wonder why we spend so much time discussing and deliberating Central Ideas and the nit-picky debates over the conceptual understandings. Why not just copy the sample Programme Of Inquiry that is inside the Making the PYP Happen document or other go-to places to find tried and true units of inquiry? We would be done and dusted, right?  But then we would lose the magic of the PYP–the ability to shape our curriculum based on the students’ interests and culture of our schools! That’s the challenge of every school–Who are WE and what defines our community of learning?

Well, as we wrap up our current How the World Works unit, we are reflecting on how much time and energy we put into creating our Central Idea. As teachers, we brainstormed ideas based on scientific concepts that the students need developing and cross-referenced science standards from a variety of sources (like national and independent curriculums other than the PYP Scope and Sequence for Science). We then pitched the ideas to the students with a general interest survey using a Design Thinking approach and then did some pre-packing of the Central Idea. We knew after all of that effort that we had a solid unit of inquiry ahead. What we ended up with was:

Understanding light and sound can transform experience

  • How animals hear sound and see light
  • Transformation of Energy
  • Ways we use the scientific process

Although our central idea was ironically very similar to a unit at NIS, the lines of inquiry and adding the word “transform” made it unique to our students because of what we had been learning about in performing arts and visual art classes. We really wanted to make a strong link to go beyond this being a “science unit” and make it transdisciplinary. This sort of intention really showed in the learning.

In the Enhanced PYP,   there is a shift in developing learner agency, and I can appreciate how it might build upon the idea of Action as we reflect our the design of our school’s Programmes of Inquiry.We spent a few lessons on gauging student interest and “pre-packing” the Central Idea of our unit before we even launched it to capture student voice and choice involved.

So really it shouldn’t be a surprise that when we examined whether students were really engaged and invested in their learning, we found several tell-tale signs. This was some of the evidence we saw:

  1. Students challenging each other’s ideas, particularly when they were generating their scientific questions and hypothesis.
  2. Students bringing in outside resources that added to the conceptual understanding of the unit.
  3. Parents reporting that students are reading and researching the concepts at home.
  4. Students wanting to extend their learning, either at home or at school.
  5. Students asking deep questions and a compulsion to test out their conjectures.

These are just 5 things that we observed throughout the unit. I hope others can add to the list because I think identifying what success of a unit is an important component of every school’s Programme of Inquiry. We need to take a look at our Central Ideas and begin to wonder who is this unit for? And will student action naturally and authentically develop? And when you think about it, the word inquiry means “a search for knowledge” and “a request for truth” so student initiative isn’t really the high bar we should expect in learning, but truly the bare minimum of a successfully designed unit. If we touch a nerve and truly spark interest, then a commitment and motivation to learning should ensue. If I was to be truly critical of whether or not we nailed student agency in this unit, I would say that tuning in and shaping units around their needs and interests were only the tip of the iceberg and we need to challenge our team a bit more to develop this feature in our community of learning.

However, I hope sharing this experience will help ignite some deeper thinking and reflection about designing units of inquiry. If you have any more “symptoms” of a successful unit, please share below. The more conversation we can have around this, the stronger our school programmes will become because we put our learners first. Please add your perspective in the comments below.

#PYP “Pre-packing” vs. “Unpacking” the Central Idea: Design Thinking Based Approach to Writing Units of Inquiry.

#PYP “Pre-packing” vs. “Unpacking” the Central Idea: Design Thinking Based Approach to Writing Units of Inquiry.

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Anyone who teaches the Primary Years Program knows preciously what I mean by the word unpack. But just for clarity sake, let me explain:

Unpack (verb): to explain and define the key conceptual understandings and “big words” used in a central idea and lines of inquiry, usually as a part of “tuning into” a new unit of inquiry.

Depending on the unit of inquiry, teachers can choose to go a more traditional path to explain the big words or they can create provocations that awaken the meanings. I suppose it depends on how much weight you want to give to these keywords or how long you want to dwell on them. Each unit is sort of unique in that way.

In an earlier post (#PYP The Sound and Light of Using Design Thinking To Write a Unit of Inquiry), I explained the experiment and struggle of using design thinking to construct a unit of inquiry. This past week, we presented two different “prototypes” of a central idea for a How The World Works unit that we are creating for our Grade 1 students. Here are the prototypes:

Version 1.1: Understanding energy can lead to discoveries and help us predict its behavior.

Version 1.2 Exploring light and sound can lead to discoveries and open up new possibilities.

When we presented these central ideas, we discussed them one by one and asked them what words they connected to and what did it make them think about. This was a very revealing exercise! The first reaction to the central ideas:

“Wow, that is long and hard sounding”

Second of all, only a handful of our 34 kids had much to say about the scientific concepts in either central idea, showing a deep need to develop real content knowledge.  Third of all, our English language learners preferred “light and sound” over “energy”, which was something that we needed to put a high emphasis on since we have a large group of them. Last insight was that they made the connection with the words exploring and discoveries to “finding out”, which then evolved into the idea of a “science experiment lab”–these words got an uproar of excitement in the group. They began seeing themselves as scientists, creating all sorts of investigations.

At that point, we voted on whether we would explore “energy” in general or if they wanted to just focus on “light and sound”.  The latter was the most popular with both our ELLs and our girls (which made me go, “hmmm….”) in high numbers for the vote.

So then I tried to capture the ideas that the students resonated with, while still honoring the nature of this transdisciplinary theme, and wordsmithed some new ones. Our grade level team discussed and debated them, which is an important aspect of using design thinking.

Central Idea, Version 1.3: Experimenting with light and sound can lead to discoveries and innovation.  

Team comment summary:

” I think it’s 1 dimensional, with the word experiment in it because there are many ways to explore light and sound that isn’t through experiments. “; 

“This sounds like an upper-grade unit because they can do more research into the innovation part”;

“Yeah, we’d have to unpack the word innovation and they don’t have much context for that concept yet”. 

Central Idea, Version 1.4: How living things hear sounds and see light impacts their experience of their world.

Team comments summary:

“Kids this age love animals, so I think they would really enjoy the learning.”; 

“Yeah, this is very Grade 1 friendly and we need to develop the concept of living vs. non-living”;

“Oh, and we could discuss sonar with underwater animals and how bats use echolocation. They’d love that!”;

“Would this have any scientific thinking and process skills though? They really wanted to do experiments and I think we’d lose the ‘science lab’ aspect if we made this the central idea. I mean, we could do experiments showing how living things experience light and sound differently but then it would just be proving scientific facts vs. exploring with our own original ones. In our original UOI, it was all about scientific thinking so maybe it covers a different TD indicator and this one definitely feels like an inquiry into the natural laws. But maybe we could write this into a line of inquiry”.

Central Idea, Version 1.4: Human understanding of sound and light can transform their experience.

Team comments summary: 

” This invites more inquiry-how many ways do humans experience light and sight?” 

“Yeah, when I think about this, I think about how humans first harnessed fire and this sort of discovery led to so many more advancements, as people tried to turn night into day.”

“Oh, totally– this has more of a transdisciplinary approach because we not only have the science bit with natural vs. artificial light but then you have social impact of candlelight to electricity.” 

“But if we only focus on humans, then this unit might not be as interesting as the one with animals. The concepts within electrical energy would be better for older kids. Our 1st graders would appreciate more the context of how animals and plants have senses that detect light and sound in different ways.”

” Good point-How about we just drop the word ‘human’ so we can keep it open for other living things and see where this unit takes us?”

Nods in agreement……..

So here is the new prototype that we are going with for our UOI:

Central Idea (v. 1.5): Understanding sound and light can transform experience.   

Lines of inquiry        

  • How living things hear sound and see light (perspective)      
  • Transformation of energy (change)
  • Ways we use the scientific process (reflection)

       Related Concepts:  Energy, Impact, and Transformation

Attitude: Enthusiasm, Creativity, Curiosity                              LP: Reflective, Thinker, Inquirer

Although this process may have taken longer than we would have liked, it was important to reflect on the needs of our students as well as appreciating what fascinates them and promotes curiosity. When I think about how the PYP has been reviewed, I think this exercise in Design Thinking honors the new emphasis on Learner Agency. In the new IB documentation, it states:

Your understanding of the learner is the foundation of all learning and teaching and will influence how you support student agency, and how the learning community considers children’s rights, responsibilities and identities.

Agency is present when students partner with teachers and members of the learning community to take charge of what, where, why, with whom and when they learn. This provides opportunities to demonstrate and reflect on knowledge, approaches to learning and attributes of the learner profile.

–The Learner in the Enhanced PYP–

Even though I think this is our first iteration at developing learner agency through “pre-packing” the Central Idea with student thoughts and viewpoints, I still believe that we have honored the core of the PYP programme and moreover have really carefully considered our learners over pulling units of inquiry out of the archives to see which one might “fit”. For our team, we have a higher level of excitement going into this unit (and maybe a little trepidation), knowing that we can’t wait to surprise and inspire them with the provocations and challenges that this Central Idea will bring.

How does your team approach honoring student voice and choice? Have you ever “pre-packed” a unit of inquiry (other than Exhibition or PYPX)?

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