sharing the planet - Judy Imamudeen

#PYP “Sharing the Planet” by Design

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

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:

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.)

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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:

Sharing with living things
Pollution
Resources
Earth Cycles
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.

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. After 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.

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.

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Post Mortem Reflection: Autopsy of a Failed PYP Unit (Sharing the Planet)

By Judy Imamudeen | November 27, 2017 | Comments 6 comments

It doesn’t matter if you have been teaching for 8 months or 18 years, you will experience a bombed lesson from time to time. But a bombed unit-well, that I have yet to experience until now. And it has been the most frustrating 6 weeks of my life, as I have worked relentlessly to cultivate their conceptual understanding. Most teachers don’t share their failures, they only blog or tweet about all the “cool learning” that’s going on but I think it’s equally important to reveal and reflect on our failings. So in an effort to be vulnerable, I humbly submit that this unit has yet to meet its central idea and only narrowly developed its lines of inquiry. And I can’t stop asking why.

Our actions can make a difference to the environment we share.

how we use resources (function)
the impact of people’s actions on the environment (causation)
choices we make to care for our environment (responsibility)

I hold some very strong beliefs when it comes to creating curriculum in the PYP, one of which is having a solid central idea that a teacher can anchor the learning in. If you pulled out the keywords–what would they be? I chose to focus on “actions”, “environment” and “share”. Other key ideas were from the lines of inquiry: resources, impact, and choices. The assessment is really quite simple–we document student action that has occurred over the unit. And herein lies the problem: student action. Students are not taking action because they don’t have enough conceptual understanding to appreciate a need to act. They literally do not see pollution-even if a coke bottle flew out of the sky and bonked them on the head, they wouldn’t notice. Oh, and if that same coke bottle then got buried in the ground, one of the students said it would sprout a Coke Tree. No, I’m not lying–this was an actual prediction during one of our engagements.

At first, this put me in a panic and I went in the wrong direction. I thought, oh my gosh, this future generation, they are either absolutely oblivious or litter and pollution (particularly in Asia) are so endemic that it’s like wallpaper and thus hardly take notice. So we began inquiring into endangered animals and the impact on habitats. We worked through key vocabulary and food chains. The kids put together wonderful ChatterPix presentations which summarized their library research on the animals. But during another provocation when I showed a picture of a turtle that had been deformed due to garbage in the water, I had 3 kids tell me that it looked like that because it was farting, clearly articulating (with a straight face) that gas can make you bloated and you feel bubbles are in your belly. I could see his thinking but I felt deeply concerned and it was at this point that our unit started to take a turn for the worse.

One of the Segel pictures that the students examined. They thought they were just “having a picnic at the beach.”

So then, to make a stronger link about humans and how we use resources, we explored the work of Gregg Segal, which started as a provocation but since the students made no connection between the garbage and the people who were lying in it, we examined our “home” garbage and collected our classroom garbage, including snacks, for a week to analyze. I had also gotten one of our Secondary Art and Design teachers who is an avid photographer on board to help us orchestrate an attempt to do a photoshoot with our students in this garbage. It was going to be awesome, right?! –They were finally going to “get it” so we can move into learning about the 3 R’s–Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Nope–the day before the photoshoot, our cleaners emptied our bins. Deflated, we decided that we would “follow the garbage”, trying to pull together this idea of how individual and collective choices can add up to make a difference in the burden that ecosystems might have to shoulder. So we went down to our school’s dump area and examined our rubbish. Next, we made a day of it and went down to the Vientiane Landfill. Although they were absolutely disgusted by it, they had seemed unchanged. This week we are going to meet people whose “choices” to care for our environment are having a positive impact on our Vientiane community. We are still hopeful that a handful of them will be moved into action but I know now that it’s a foolhardy job to try to assess them on this central idea. We will have to create unit grades based on their academic skills in language and math that have been developed alongside these conceptual understandings.

The moral of the learning debacle boils down to these things:

Doing a bunch of “cool stuff” is not as important to properly pre-assessing basic knowledge and skills. Sometimes we get so preoccupied with launching a unit with instant student engagement, that we forgo necessary assessment which can be documented and examined. I think in heavy science-based units, it’s important to probe into common misconceptions and vocabulary that may be misunderstood. I did some of it, but I missed some big ideas–simple stuff like living vs. non-living because I had assumed it had been “covered” in previous years.
Furthermore, provocations that reveal severe inadequacies in student knowledge means that the unit probably needed to be scrubbed and rewritten immediately instead of trudging through the painful experience of trying to get students to arrive at mastery and develop knowledge that is beyond their experience or developmental appropriateness is asinine.
And the third thing is that the sequence of units matters A LOT. In our case, we were asking that students take their knowledge and apply it by taking action. We should have had a How The World Works Unit beforehand that developed the key information and scientific principles to really appreciate the need to act. Our unit implied that kids should “reduce, reuse, recycle” without understanding why it’s important to do so.
Also, a unit whose central idea demands that students assimilate knowledge and then adapt it to behaviors needs to reconcile with the developmental stage that they are at. Most of the students are at the cognitive stage in which they are transitioning from concrete to abstract thinking and operational thought. This unit would have been better served when most, if not all the kids, were 7 years old because cognitively they would have understood the concept of conservation. This was a second term unit. It was too early in the school year to introduce these ideas.
And of course, the old PYP coordinator in me wondered why I didn’t go back into last year’s POI to see what scientific ideas that they had been exploring when I first saw warning signs. Although I had interviewed past teachers who did the unit, I should have dug deeper into the curriculum that my current classes had been working on in the past years. I needed to research my learners more. I would have seen the gaps and been able to re-route the unit sooner instead of “following the garbage”.

So, I would suggest that educators ask themselves a couple of important questions before embarking on units of inquiry in which student action should be the hallmark of successful learning outcomes:

What previous knowledge and skills should we look for? What was their most recent learning (last grade level’s POI)? What conceptual understandings will students need to understand in order to really apply knowledge? (Go deep on Box #3 on the PYP planner)
What misconceptions do you predict students may come with? How will we know if they have them?
What is the age of the majority of the students? Will they have access cognitively to the concepts and related concepts in the units?
What action is already taking place? What can we expect young children to be doing, feeling and thinking?

I can see now that words like “action” and “choices” are too subjective to be put into a central idea for this Sharing the Planet Theme. They are great in the lines of inquiry, but if you take the stance that you assess the central idea in your summative and formative assessments, then you are setting students up for failure. Although student action is the proof that real learning has occurred, this unit would have been better served with related concepts in the central idea. (Here is a great blog that demonstrates how units can be analyzed in this way.) With that in mind, I would suggest rewriting the unit to look like this, with the related concepts in bold:

Human interaction with living things can have consequences on the environment.

Although this unit is going to be seared into my mind and will haunt me all year, I will remember the lessons learned here when it comes to analyzing my grade level’s units of inquiry. Perhaps this will also help you to reflect and consider how your units are structured and be more critical in your understanding of your learners.

So I ask you, dear reader, what other suggestions would you make regarding this failure? What takeaways did you get from this? Please comment below.

Judy Imamudeen

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Taking Action: The Challenge of the Central Idea in the Primary Years Program (PYP)

By Judy Imamudeen | October 22, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

The Sharing the Planet theme is usually one of the most difficult to teach because the topics are so heavy and there’s quite a lot of knowledge base that needs to be developed as we inquire into the rights and responsibilities in the struggle to share finite resources with other people and living things. Think of all the science concepts, vocabulary, and skills that need to get unpacked during our inquiry. In this next unit, whose central idea is: Our actions can make a difference to the environment we share, one of the key assessment pieces will be student action. This is definitely a unit in which students must take what they know and run with it. And, I must find the ways and means to make even the smallest contribution incredibly meaningful and encourage student agency. So there are 3 main challenges, as I see it, that I must overcome as I embark upon this unit.

#1: Assessing Student Action

You cannot recognize that action has taken place unless you document it in some way. I am coming up with a pre and post assessment that captures 10 key behaviors that are the basis of student action, incorporating the different aspects of “action” that are found in this image.

actionposter (1) — Image from https://pypatspicewood.wordpress.com/2015/09/28/promoting-and-celebrating-student-action/

This list of behaviors represents my “first thinking” when it comes to possible expected behaviors that might emerge as a result of their learning. If you had other ideas or suggestions, I am keen to hear them–Please comment below!

#2: Personal and Authentic Inquiry

Of course, as in every inquiry, I have to balance what we have designed as “learning outcomes” with what the students want to learn about and the ways in which they want to express their learning. What I Want Them to Learn vs. What They Want to Learn always shows up in every unit. Since I do a lot of team teaching, I feel a bit compelled to stay on track with the structure of our timetable instead of allowing students the opportunity to go deeper into what they care about. I rarely stray for the weekly planner. We have a block of “personal inquiry” time but that often gets minimalized as we use it to catch up on classroom work. As I think about this upcoming unit, I want to work on honoring this personal inquiry time more and structuring our timetable to ensure that students can explore and experiment with the ideas that are meaningful to them. I am curious about how they might schedule their learning just as I had done with my daughter in my post Homework vs. Deep Work. I believe that when we honor students and permit them the time to make their own discoveries, the learning gained is magnified. I am going to really challenge myself and our team to add more student voice and choice into our structuring our day.

#3: True Learning=A Change (in all of US)

I have often complained about how units like this often create a temporary shift in our behaviors but then we forget and revert to the “status quo”. How can we cultivate sustainable habits and make a lasting change? This is something that I really want to explore during this unit.

There’s this great quote from Stephen Convey based on Zen wisdom:

“to learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.”

Sometimes, because I am a teacher, there is an understanding and expectation that I really “know” what I am teaching. When I reflect on my personal action, am I really modeling how my actions can make a difference to the environment we share. What have I done for the planet lately, you know what I mean? During this unit, I plan to be side by side with my students and finding ways that I can make a bigger dent and a lighter footprint on our planet. I’ve already lined up some learning materials that may challenge my thinking about living things. For example, I want to challenge my thinking and am beginning to read, The Hidden Life of Trees and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I trying to think about how I might challenge my lifestyle of convenience and comfort by making different choices like a meatless Monday or turning on the air conditioner less. Or how about getting off my screen more and sitting outside in nature? As my students compile their lists of actions and survey what they can do to make a difference, I will need to evaluate myself right along with them. This is what makes being an IB educator so special because I learn right along with my students, as my understanding and appreciation of the content are deepened throughout the unit. Perhaps my own personal exploration and modeling will help create everlasting change and cultivate student action.

What do you think? How might students shift into higher gears of action and be the change we hope to see in our future world? What strategies and ideas have worked well for you?

Judy Imamudeen

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Why Design Thinking is the Secret Ingredient to Student Agency

By Judy Imamudeen | May 11, 2017 | Comments 3 comments

Not that long ago, the International Baccalaureate (IB) issued a reflective “cheat sheet” of how schools can examine learner agency in the Primary Years Programme (PYP). Some of the key indicators include exploring the frequency and depth that learners are…

Actively engaged in various stages of learning, including thinking about, planning, modifying and creating
Actively involved in discussion, questioning and by being self-directed in their creating (as opposed to passive receiving)
Apply their understanding of concepts through the construction of their projects/play
Make connections to the real world by taking past experiences into their play worlds
Have an active voice and stake in the classroom/community
Face challenges and are given the freedom to independently overcome these or fail through trial and error or experimentation
Are risk-takers
Express their theories of the world and these are honored in the environment
Reflect on their actions and self-regulate.

When I superimposed this framework over my classroom, I scrutinized my own practices and the culture in my classroom. Who was doing the leading in the classroom? Was I giving them freedom to learn and the space to lead?

These were the questions that played in the “background music” of my mind as I went into the planning of our last unit for the year. I know that this time of year can be a convenient time to take things easy and maintain the status quo of the established routines of the classroom, but I decided that I wanted to squeeze more out of the year by introducing design thinking into our classroom. I felt that this would be the secret ingredient to learner agency as design thinking organically gives them choice and voice, provided that I do not micromanage their learning.

My current unit is from the theme, Sharing the Planet whose central idea is: We grow and use plants in many ways. The central idea is accessible and easy for the 3-5 years old grasp and the lines of inquiry are straightforward: Growth of a plant (change); ways that plant parts are used in human life (connection); care of plants (responsibility). I’m still mid-unit, but I can share the process so far.

From there, I introduced the design thinking process, which I’ve obviously had to simplify for the Early Years. I stole ideas from American STEM schools like the Benjamin Banneker School as a model for my class. To begin with, I wanted the students to choose what they wanted to grow. When we began the unit, I asked parents to go out shopping or bring in plant seeds that the students personally chose. (If I had chosen the seeds, I would normally have picked beans or radishes–something that is very easy to grow and would sprout quickly.) Of course, that’s not what the kids picked. They brought in a variety of flowers and vegetables such as broccoli and bak choy. In this small change to my “normal”, I had already shifted the dynamic significantly to cultivate greater agency, enthusiasm, and depth of the inquiry–it all started with the seeds.

design and science The design-thinking process language I am using is:

Understand
Focus
Imagine
Prototype
Try

Understand: What do we need to know about plants? And who are the “users” of plants? (the “we” in our central idea)

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These were the first series of questions that the students wondered about and began our jumping off point for our project: To design a garden for an end user. In the beginning, the students weren’t really thinking about a “user”, but through daily questioning prompts in our morning meetings and investigating what lived inside the homes provided by plants, students began to grasp the concept of the relationship between plants and animals. I decided to also create some compost with the students so that they may appreciate the symbiosis of plants with one another and how humans can support the growth of plants by turning our rubbish into food. We used food scraps from the school kitchen like egg shells and banana peels and blended it into our dirt. We then used this enriched soil to plant our seeds in recycled toilet paper tubes, which would later transplant into the gardens we created.

Focus: How is the care of our specific plant different from each other and what considerations will we need when building our gardens?

At this point, 2 groups had emerged: the vegetables and the flowers, and the students decided that the end users would be different. 1 group was going to focus on people (vegetables) and the other group wanted to focus on butterflies (flowers). If we were successful, then the end users would appreciate our gardens by eating the vegetables and getting nectar from the flowers.

Before we could build the gardens, we had to consider the needs of those plants–no plants meant no happy end users! So the students had to research the basic requirements of their particular plant and this was definitely guided as we Googled and perused through books. Not a great deal of independence here, but the understandings of this greatly influenced the ideas of their garden design’s first renderings.

Imagine: Where might we put this garden and what would the structure of this garden look like?

So now we began to examine different types of gardens. We visited the wetlands park to and will go to a working farm. The students have made their first sketches of their gardens. What really surprised me was the thoughtful considerations the students made. They absolutely thought about the level of sunshine that the plants would need, and they put those details into those drawings. For example, the “pink flower” group wants to make a heart-shaped garden near a tree, but not under a tree. While the “purple flower” group wants to be near the vegetables because that garden needs to be in a sunny area.

FullSizeRender 87 We will have a morning meeting to think about their designs and come up with questions for the farmers. (Going back to the “understand and focus” part of the process) After the farm visit this week, the students will review their designs to see if they feel they are on the right track.

Next week, they will create models of their designs out of cardboard and have the students put these prototypes in the area of our school where they think the plants will grow best. That will be the “try” part of the process before they actually go and build the real model and officially plant the plants. I will have to update their progress on this project later, as I reckon they will make changes in their designs

But I can say that so much of this unit’s inquiry has been given over to the students, as design thinking has allowed this project to be more personalized and focused on what they think is important. It’s sort of an odd feeling, especially as an early childhood teacher, to move out of their way and just be the “helper” in fulfilling their imaginings. I look forward to posting the end results later in a future blog post.

To be continued….

And I am curious how other teachers or schools have used design thinking to shift into a more student-centered culture and approach to the learner. What am I missing? What ideas might you have to extend my approach?

Judy Imamudeen

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So What? Now What?

By Judy Imamudeen | March 29, 2017 | Comments 2 comments

I’ve been engaged in the Innovator’s Mindset MOOC lately (#IMMOOC) and the topic came up: engagement vs. empowerment. George Couros asks a compelling question: If you had to choose between compliant, engaged, or empowered, which word would you want to define your students?

If engagement is the ceiling–the highest bar–we may be missing the point. Think about it: Would you rather hear about changing the world, or do you want the opportunity to do so?

As someone who teaches at an IB school, I know it is our ultimate goal to get students to move beyond the content and into action. As a PYP coordinator, it is largely my role to ensure that we have horizontal and vertical alignment of curriculum that is significant, relevant, engaging and challenging to ensure that the IB’s mission is being pursued. (below is a snippet of the IB’s Mission statement)

….develop the individual talents of young people and teach them to relate the experience of the classroom to the realities of the world outside. Beyond intellectual rigour and high academic standards, strong emphasis is placed on the ideals of international understanding and responsible citizenship, to the end that IB students may become critical and compassionate thinkers, lifelong learners and informed participants in local and world affairs, conscious of the shared humanity that binds all people together while respecting the variety of cultures and attitudes that makes for the richness of life.

I think we’ve done a terrific job at cultivating a school Programme Of Inquiry that is really engaging but I wonder if it really empowers students. For example, as I walk onto the playground, I see plastic water bottles left carelessly from recess or lunch break. I think about how in every Sharing the Planet unit, students are reminded that we are stewards of the Earth. We’ve collected trash and measured it, made art with it, wrote about it, had assemblies and school announcements to raise awareness about it and YET, I see students walk by these water bottles and not pick them up to put them into the recycling bin. All those great units with all the fantastic projects that go along with it!–and I say to them: SO WHAT???! If students don’t feel compelled to change, then somehow we have failed to really educate them.

Those ideas of George Couros really burn in my mind: If engagement is the ceiling–the highest bar–we may be missing the point. Yep, clearly, we have evidence of that here because we must be missing the point if, after all that great learning, kids still leave rubbish and neglect to pick it up in our own schoolyard.

So NOW what?

It has got me thinking: all these student “actions” were probably teacher generated and not student ideas. If an idea belongs to you, then there is an incentive to develop it and sustain it. I think that is true even for children. They haven’t bought into the concept that our human action matters and they are ones who can make the difference; the idea of responsible citizenship.

I know I’m not the only educator who suffers from this disconnect at their school. In our next staff meeting, I’m bringing this topic so we can inquire into how we can move kids into action, that comes from THEM and not US. I wonder if others had this problem and what they did to overcome it. How did they move from engaged to empowered? If you have a success story, please share it with me–I’m all ears!