Tag: planning units of inquiry

Press Start, Pause or Stop? 3 Ways We Can Approach Launching a Unit of Inquiry

Press Start, Pause or Stop? 3 Ways We Can Approach Launching a Unit of Inquiry

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Bewildered by my outburst, my sleeping dog popped up her head and twitched her ears when I giggled out a “hmmm”.  But I couldn’t help it. I was so immersed in a recording of the Town Hall discussion with fellow Google Trainers. They asked a question about concept testing that made me make a connection with a recent topic that we had been discussing during our grade level meetings, the cycle of learning and teaching.

What was the question they use during their iterative process of concept design?

“What would you expect to happen ...?”

Their research shows that this puts algorithmic thinking into motion, generating potential scenarios that could be incredibly powerful in articulating the effect of our decisions.

What if we applied this same question as we approach a launching a unit of inquiry? I think this could be and effective way to start a familiar unit of inquiry, creating the impetus we may need in order to contemplate and debate alternative approaches with greatest impact for our learning and teaching.

Entry points in The Cycle of Learning and Teaching.

Where do you begin with learning? Do you launch a unit with TEACHING, picking up your PYP planner from last year and “copy and paste” what you did last time? Do your reflect on your past PYP planner and adjust the learning expectations or reinvent the unit with PLANNING provocations and activities to launch new concepts? Or do you pick up your PYP planner and think about how you might ASSESS the learners to figure out what direction you might need to go to support strong concept development and bringing out the best in the Learner Profile and Atls?

I would argue that there is no “right answer” to this because every unit of inquiry is unique and we have to look holistically at the grade level Programme of Inquiry (POI) and the whole school Programme of Inquiry (POI). It might also depend on if the UOI is a single subject or if it is transdisciplinary. That said, I do think that teachers need to sit down and re-read the planner from last year to reflect on what is relevant and meaningful to their current learners. They need to unpack the central idea and lines of inquiry before determining where they are going to jump into this cycle of learning and teaching.

Decisions, Decisions!

Press Start: Teach 

There are some very valid reasons why we might just start teaching. Time may play a significant factor, especially when we know this unit will introduce never explored content in the school-wider programme of inquiry. Also, if there is a project that the students will work on during the unit and the goals of the unit are more about the process of learning so we have to focus on teaching into the Atls such as the self-management or social skills that will be developed throughout the unit. For example, collaboration or time-management may need to be developed right from the word Go so that groups can effectively do research together. A great example of that is during the PYP Exhibition. Teachers might need to start teaching into stress management or technology skills in order to ensure that students can work independently and effectively.

Teachers who are also single-subject specialists may also jump into the cycle of learning and teaching here, particularly if they have younger students who they feel can safely assume that they have no prior knowledge of the concepts. For example, a music teacher who wants to teach the concept of melody to their kindergarten students or a language acquisition teacher who works with newcomers to a language.

However, we really want to think critically about this approach because research suggests that we need to value our learners more than teaching our content, so we need to carefully consider our students when planning and assessing.

Press Pause: Plan

It is good practice to review previous planners for a familiar unit. As you re-read the planner, it’s important to read the reflections first before digging into the resources, learning activities and assessments that you created in the past. I know that this part of the planner often gets neglected, but it really can be critical to understanding how and why you might make changes to a unit, especially if there are new members of a team who may not be as familiar with a unit. It is especially for this reason why you would want to start with planning. Not everyone interprets units the same way, especially when a central idea is broad. So team members need to “unpack” the unit’s concepts and think about how it could be approached differently, particularly when considering the students you have in your class. I’ve written about the importance of this before in this blog post.I think this is the most common way that teams approach the learning and teaching cycle–Teachers getting together and discussing what might be possible during this unit.

However, you can share the central idea with students and unpack it with them in order to co-construct the unit. The questions and ideas that emerged during those discussions with students then become the fodder to re-write aspects of unit in order to develop more student interest and agency. Sometimes that means we go back are re-write lines of inquiry, change learner profiles or switch our Atls. And sometimes it means that the content shifts. It really depends on what happens during the “unpacking” with students.

For example, consider this unit:

Central Idea: 

Circumstances impact opportunity and the ability to achieve.

Lines of Inquiry:

  1. The attributes of empathy(form)
  2. How opportunity is enabled (causation)
  3. The measurement of achievement (perspective)

A team of 4th grade teachers were going to approach this as a “copy and paste” type of unit, in which the focus has typically been on the role of social class in creating barriers or opportunities to success in life. However, when they unpacked it with students, it became clear that they were fascinated with disabilities and inclusion. It required the team to get back to the drawing board and re-design the unit with student interests in mind. Although the key concepts might stay the same, the related concepts shift from Poverty, Social Class, and Opportunity to Diversity, Innovation and Inclusion because students were keen to learn about how disabilities and neurodivergence lead to developing new technology to help people feel capable and involved in their lives.

When teachers respond to students like this, learning is more dynamic and student action can organically evolve from their enthusiasm. I’m sure you can see how responding like this can change the trajectory of a unit.

Press Stop: Assess

Before putting the car into drive, some teachers choose to stop and assess before beginning a unit. Pre-assessment is always a good idea, but since the pandemic, this approach seems like the most sensible for many units. We just aren’t sure where the conceptual and skill gaps may be, so we may need to do some formal assessments to see where students knowledge base lies. Once we have an idea of what students know, understand and can do, teachers can sit down with the data and then examine what concepts and skills make sense before launching a unit. Again, they may need to adjust content, change Atls and/or learning expectations.

“What would you expect to happen ...?”

I think predicting and reflection are 2 key superpowers that a PYP teacher needs when we consider how we can build strong units. As I continue to mull over this question, I think this question can be an important tool to help shake up unit planning and instigate critical thinking in our approaches. Whether it is asked 2 weeks before a unit of inquiry begins or as a strategy to provoke reflective thinking, this question can help us explore new ways that we could approach the unit.

What do you think? Are there other questions that we need to consider when determining the why and how we jump into the cycle of learning and teaching?

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.

#PYP “Sharing the Planet” by Design

#PYP “Sharing the Planet” by Design

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

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

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

design thinking.jpeg

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

IMG_8322.jpg

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

Screen Shot 2018-12-13 at 6.15.08 AM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lines of inquiry

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

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

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

 

#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: What is a Provocation?

#PYP: What is a Provocation?

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I love the International Baccalaureate but the jargon really can get you jumbled up, especially when you are new to the program. In the PYP, we use a lot of terminologies that others would just call “best practice”.  However, there is a word that pops up quite a lot: provocation.

Now someone might call it the “hook”, something that draws student’s attention into a lesson. But when I say “hook”, I don’t mean an attention grabber like a joke or cute anecdote or a routine of some sort that gets students on task. No, that’s not a provocation!   A provocation is a thoughtfully constructed activity to get students excited and engaged, but a really powerful provocation creates cognitive dissonance that throws kids into the Learning Pit (of inquiry).  Students should be examining their beliefs and ideas as a result of the provocation.

Here is a list of questions that were shared by Chad Walsh which can help filter activities and perhaps refine them in order to transform them into provocations:

  • Is the provocation likely to leave a lasting impression?
  • Is there a degree of complexity?
  • Might the provocation invite debate?
  • Might the provocation begin a conversation?
  • Might the provocation extend thinking?
  • Might the provocation reveal prior knowledge?
  • Is the provocation likely to uncover misconceptions?
  • Does the provocation transfer the ‘energy’ in the room from the teacher to the students?
  • Does the provocation have multiple entry points?
  • Can the provocation be revisited throughout the unit?
  • Might the provocation lead learners into a zone of confusion and discomfort?
  • Does the provocation relate to real life/their world?
  • Is the provocation inconspicuous and a little mysterious?
  • Might the provocation lead learners to broader concepts that tend to carry more relevance and universalitMight the provocation be best during the inquiry, rather than at the beginning?
  • Does this provocation elicit feelings?

That is a very extensive list, isn’t it?

Well, let me share a  few examples of provocations:

How We Organize Itself, The Central Idea: Governments make decisions that impact the broader community.

Students come to class that morning and are treated according to the government system that is being highlighted. (Example, Totalitarian) This goes on for a week and each day students have to reflect on what it was like to be a citizen of this type of government.

Where We Are In Place and Time, The Central Idea: Personal histories help us to reflect on who we are and where we’ve come from.

The “mystery box” (which I think originated from the work of Kath Murdoch): inside a box (or a suitcase, in this example) there is a bunch of seemingly unrelated items that students have to guess what the unit might be about. This is a “tuning in” activity. And since this is a central idea about personal histories, it might include a family photo, an old toy, some cultural artifacts or relics of things we enjoy doing, a clock, a map.

Math Stand Alone, The Central Idea: Mathematical problems can be solved in a variety of ways 

The  “sealed solution“: there are 5 envelopes that have the sum of two numbers “sealed” inside them. Students have to use the digits 0-9 only once to create those sums. What could be the sums inside?

Hopefully, this is helping you to discern what a provocation might be. Even if you are an experienced PYP teacher, reflecting and refining our provocations is something that is critical to developing our student’s learning and sparking curiosity.  A well-designed provocation will not only make it to the family dinner table conversation that night but will have a longer shelf life in a child’s mind and ultimately develops important conceptual understandings.

What have been some of your favorite provocations? What questions or engagements have led to deeper learning? Please share in the comments below so we can all benefit from your experience! (Thanks!)

#PYP The Sound and Light of Using Design Thinking To Write a Unit of Inquiry

#PYP The Sound and Light of Using Design Thinking To Write a Unit of Inquiry

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I’ve opened a can of worms. After our last Sharing the Planet unit, I felt exasperated and wanted to shift some units around so we could develop more conceptual understandings in science. We have 3 units left since it’s the end of the term, so the choices were: Where We Are in Place and Time, How We Express Ourselves, and How The World Works. We thought that How The World Works would be the best fit for meeting those goals. The Central Idea was: Thinking scientifically helps us to make sense of the world. A lively debate ensued between my co-teaching partner and I–is this the unit that students need?? What other options might we have? So we decided to dig up “old units” to evaluate what was “best fit” for our students–the old vs. the “new” UOI. This didn’t feel very satisfying either. We had to write a new unit.

 

ben franklinSince we had a planning retreat we started wordsmithing some new central ideas so we could “get down to business” when our team is all together but then I experienced a perfect storm of inspiration after reading “Agency” and the UOI and Being a PYP Teacher: Collaborate with Your Students.These perspectives got me thinking that I really need to ignite student interest by tuning into what scientific concepts fascinate them and putting them at the forefront of our planning of this upcoming unit.   I find that design thinking is a creative and effective way to problem solve, so I thought I would take the opportunity to apply this process to crafting a Central Idea because student interest would take center stage naturally.

So even before we had our planning retreat, I created a poll using Plickers to have students express what their level of curiosity around 5 scientific concepts that would be new to students and are developmentally appropriate:

  1. The purpose of physical structures of animals and plants (adaption).
  2. The properties of materials and states of matter.
  3. Growth and care of living things.
  4. Natural Cycles of the Earth and Weather.
  5. Light and Sound Energy.

We discussed what each one of these “big ideas” might entail as we explored it during a unit of inquiry. Students made comments and asked questions about what sort of things we’d be learning about. After the poll, the students had to put these concepts into a list of learning priorities that I represented visually, just to make sure I captured their interests accurately.

 

learning priorities
The English language learner-friendly rating system

 

design slideI was very surprised that light and sound came in first place with 12 students indicating it as their first choice, with materials and matter coming in 2nd with 8 students picking it as their main interest.  Armed with these results, I felt confident enough that this basic knowledge of our 1st graders was enough to begin using Design Thinking to draft a unit. Although there are different approaches to Design Thinking, I decided to go with the d.school’s model.

Empathize: We began with thinking about how we perceive our students and discussing what we know about them as learners.  I shared the survey results and we considered how this unit could develop scientific thinking and experimentation.

Define: Then we began discussing the challenge of writing a transdisciplinary unit around light and sound that complemented a nearly equal student interest in materials and matter. This landed conversation us smack dab

Ideation: There are different ways to ideate but I chose to explore ‘prototyping’ as our framework for creating a unit of inquiry. We worked on our own and then collectively to come up with a “prototype” of what this unit could inquire into. Because we hadn’t designated a transdisciplinary theme indicator (ie: the natural world and its laws; the interaction between the natural world (physical and biological) and human societies; how humans use their understanding of scientific principles; the impact of scientific and technological advances on society and on the environment.), this broadened our swath of possibility.

“Ideation is the mode of the design process in which you concentrate on idea generation. Mentally it represents a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes. Ideation provides both the fuel and also the source material for building prototypes and getting innovative solutions into the hands of your users.”
– d.school, An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE

As we explored related concepts in various domains, we collated what could be “driving” transdisciplinary ideas in a How the World Works unit in order to “build” a central idea around. What emerged from the ideation process was the conceptual understandings of :

  1. transformation
  2. energy
  3. data
  4. communication
  5. process
  6. classification
  7. movement
  8. diversity
  9. discovery
  10. behavior
  11. properties

Prototype: After deliberating and scribbling out all the perspectives that could make this a powerful learning experience, we settled on the central idea:

Understanding energy helps us predict behavior and can lead to new discoveries. 

  • Types of energy (Form)
  • Transformation of energy (Change)
  • Ways of knowing (Reflection)

Energy=science (light and sound)

Predict= math/science skills

Behavior=PSPE (personal social and physical education)

Discovery=Social Studies

We started digging into the curriculum documents, thinking that we had “nailed it”. But one of our team members sort of sat there blankly as we started choosing the conceptual understandings and learning outcomes. Our PYP coordinator said, “now aren’t you excited to teach this?” And she clearly articulated that she had no idea what this unit was about, which stung a bit because we had sat there discussing ideas for so long. Then she added that the “kids wanted to learn about sound and light and do experiments and we’ve written a unit about energy”.  We’d spent an hour on writing this so there was justification–“light and sound are forms of energy” in which she retorted, “But if I am a teacher who hadn’t been involved in this planning, I would have no idea how I might approach this.” She was right. She was right on both accounts. We had designed a prototype which hadn’t met the needs of the “users”–the students AND the teachers.  She echoed a feeling I’ve written about before in Central Ideas: The Good, The Bad and The Messy. How the Primary Years Program Can Rethink and Define Them. We’d been too clever, too adult and created something close to gobbly gook. We needed to go back to developing a central idea based on honoring the students’ curiosities.

After our meeting, we homeroom teachers continued this discussion and spent an hour debating if “sound and light” were topics vs. concepts. (Good lord, you know you’re a PYP teacher when you care so much about nuances.), examining curriculum documents.  We created a refined version that would require less “unpacking”:

Exploring how light and sound works can lead to discoveries and open up new possibilities.

  • Light and sound as forms of energy (form)
  • Transformation of energy (change)
  • The use scientific thinking in everyday life. (reflection)

Because I have never considered so thoughtfully the interests of our students, it is hard to say if this central idea meets the prototype criteria from d.school’s Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE:

  • the most likely to delight
  • the rational choice
  • the most unexpected

Nevertheless, I am going to push these versions of the UOI through to the students and move onto the next step of the process.

Test: On Monday, we will present both prototypes of the unit to the students and observe their reactions and collect their responses. Hopefully, this will provide greater clarity of how this unit could be shaped. I reckon that we will continue to refine this unit and engage in more pedagogical conversations.

So, this is what might be considered “first thinking” when it comes to “designing” a unit vs. “writing” a unit of inquiry. I feel very grateful to be a school that allows us to challenge how we approach our curriculum. Sometimes people in leadership can be more focused on efficiency vs. innovation in planning and implementation of our curriculum, desiring to tick off boxes rather than dig deep into what and, more importantly, WHO we teach.

“To create meaningful innovations, you need to know your users and care about their lives.” , d.school’s Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE

There is an award-winning designer, Onur Cobanli, who says that “great design comes from interaction, conflict, argument, competition, and debate”.  As a team, we are definitely in the throes of some of this. But I’m wondering if anyone has any suggestions or comments that might help enhance our approach.

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