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:

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”?