planning - Judy Imamudeen

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

By Judy Imamudeen | August 12, 2018 | Comments 1 comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judy Imamudeen

Developing learners as leaders is my joy! I am committed and passionate International Baccaluearate (IB) educator who loves cracking jokes, jumping on trampolines and reading books. When I’m not playing Minecraft with my daughter, I work on empowering others in order to create a future that works for everyone.

judyimamudeen.com

9 Reasons Why You Need to Teach Digital Citizenship

By Judy Imamudeen | April 5, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Nowadays everyone is on a mobile device of some sort–kids included. Thanks to technology, we are more connected than ever. Oh bless, isn’t it wonderful?! But as keen as schools are to use technology, the concept of digital citizenship is often left untouched. It’s almost as if by virtue of using technology that acquiring the habits of digital citizenship just happens like osmosis or something. Well, I’d like to challenge that because I don’t think social habits can be learned by proxy; I think they have to be ingrained in us so that we are acculturated to act appropriately, in our physical world or in the online world. Here is some food for thought, the 9 reasons why you should explicitly teach digital citizenship:

Students spend an enormous amount of their waking hours on their devices. Shouldn’t that time be well spent?
Digital technology is progressing at an exponential rate, therefore the norms of its use are always expanding. We need to evolve with it.
Digital citizenship is more relevant and meaningful than learning the dates of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Lewis and Clark, yes that’s interesting but not as germane to the future that our students will live in.
Speaking of the future, your students now have to concern themselves with leaving a digital footprint-don’t you think they should know what that is?
If you don’t address their digital activities, then it will waste precious learning time on dealing with behavior that happened online (and not necessarily DURING class time). Moreover, we now have to worry about cyber-bullying. As adults, we have a responsibility to cut that off at the pass by addressing it early on in their digital lives and not as an afterthought when a student attempts suicide.
Because sharing without citing is NOT caring, it’s stealing. Kids need to understand and develop empathy for the content creator that they might otherwise plagiarize.
Safety is more than not talking to strangers at the park, but also online. Kids need to learn how to develop boundaries and stay safe in the virtual world as well.
Moreover, about boundaries, the impact of screen time is yet to really be known. What is a healthy balance? Kids need to appreciate putting limits on this and cultivating a life offline as well.
Young people need to understand what is internet security and how do they keep their passcodes and identity safe from hackers. Kids are even more vulnerable than adults, so it’s our duty to protect them through educating them.

As a BYOiPad school, sometimes it’s easy to assume that just because we use this technology daily means that the students always use it in the highest ways for their learning. Even though we are an International Baccalaureate school, we fall into the same trap as many other schools do and take teaching digital citizenship for granted. As educators, I think we are still evolving in our understanding, not just in how we can use it as a tool but how we can personalize the learning and make it more dynamic. But thinking of awesome ways to use technology is only one dimension of learning, we need to broaden the scope of its impact, not just on the learning but the learner.

What is Digital Citizenship? Here it is, in a nutshell.

I have weekly collaborative meetings with my intermediate teachers, however mostly in 1:1 situations and I’ve been considering how these isolated conversations are helpful but that we need to have a larger scale meeting in which we discuss our use of the iPads and how we develop digital citizenship with our students. In particular, is developing the key skills that they need in their digital life enough in the context of occasional class meetings or embedded in some of the technology or literacy lessons really enough? And are we failing to address their needs due to our own shortcomings as digital citizens because it’s hard to teach what we ourselves don’t know? As Sarah Brown Wessling says, “The change begins in a culture happens when everyone is elevated to the status of a learner.” I think recognizing that we are all learners here, having the capacity to admit that we don’t know everything about everything, especially when it comes to technology and digital citizenship is the first step.

As a result of these conversations, my 3rd-grade teacher admitted that it’s necessary to have a unit of inquiry that addresses some of these issues. 3rd grade is when we begin the BYOiPad policy. We have created a unit under the transdisciplanary theme of Where We Are in Place in Time that he will teach this year so that we have time to reflect and revise for next year. Here is the Central Idea and the lines of inquiry:

The use of mobile technology has changed the way we work and play.

Lines of Inquiry:

How digital technology works (function)
Changes in society and culture (change)
Digital citizenship (responsibility)

I’m excited that he was open to taking a risk and willing to explore the topic of digital citizenship. I know that this inquiry will only be the beginning and not the end of the students’ learning and I am looking forward to seeing what emerges from the perspective of the students.

If other schools and teachers have attempted to delve into this topic in their classrooms, I’d love to learn more about how you approached it. Please share ideas in the comments below. We are all learners here and your experience teaches me as well as other readers of this post.

Thank you for your contribution to education!

How to Spell Transdisciplanary Learning in the Early Years

By Judy Imamudeen | October 8, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

Seriously, how long will I have to write transdisciplanary before my spell check program acknowledges that it’s a real word. No matter how many times I ask it to “add it to the dictionary”, it still gives me the red line. Doesn’t my computer know I am a PYP teacher. What nerve, I tell you! lol

As any Early Years teacher knows, there can be a fine line between topic and concept.

Look at my next unit:

People can help our communities by working in different ways.

People play different roles in a community. (responsibility)
How helpers impact a community. (connection)
How tools help people to do their jobs. (function)

What comes to your mind?–Community Helpers, right? –A bunch of lovely centers/corners. We can have police, fire fighters, nurses, doctors, construction workers, etc…..Lots of role play- Fun Early Years unit, right?

Not to me. I find this unit a challenge because now I am asking myself how can I steer this inquiry away from being a topic to developing those concepts of our roles and responsibilities in a community. I’m thinking about what approaches I can use to embed multiple disciplines so that students can explore and create in contexts that are authentic for them. Preschool STEAM– Of course!

STEAM, in case you don’t know is an acronym that stands for:

S. cience

T. echnology

E.ngineering

A.rt

M. ath

Aha, I can hear you say how can ” doing nifty projects” make it transdisciplanary? Fair retort. Point taken. So I’ve decided to up the ante and instead of centers or corners during this unit, we will have PROBLEMS. In the beginning, I will have to provide them through literature links and set up these provocations with my main teacher question: HOW COULD SOMEONE IN THE COMMUNITY HELP HIM/HER? Later, however, I expect students to generate them.

As I am in the planning stages of this unit, I will have to report back with our progress, but my head is spinning with so many ideas. I can’t wait to see what the students come up with!