transdisciplanary skills - Judy Imamudeen

#InquiryMaths: Mathematical Thinking meets #Social Leadership using #Seesaw

By Judy Imamudeen | May 22, 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Social media is viewed as “entertainment” by many. However, many people use social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter to find their news -2/3rd to be exact. As I ponder this, I have to recognize what a powerful influence this is over our culture. Social media as entertainment may be what IS, however, it doesn’t have to be what WILL BE for our children’s future. I believe we can change that. I think we can educate students to view it as an avenue to have true intellectual discourse and human connection. In Social LEADia, Jennifer Casa-Todd suggests that digital citizenship should evolve into using the internet and social media to improve the lives, well-being, and circumstances of others and I don’t think we have to wait until students are old enough to have social media accounts to begin to develop this mindset. So we have begun to test out this idea during our current unit of inquiry:

Language communicates messages and builds relationships

Different forms of media (form)
The way we choose to communicate will affect relationships. (reflection)
How we can interpret and respond (causation)

During this unit, we have been using Seesaw as our social media ‘training wheels’ to explore what it means to consume content and respond to it by examining how we share our mathematical ideas through posts. Our team had realized that students were posting different ideas of problem-solving and we wanted them to examine alternatives to their thinking. We could show the students these clips as a whole class and do number talks around them but we felt that allowing students the choice to select the ideas would help them gain independence.

So we started by explaining how you could find these great mathematical ideas in their journals.

Since we wanted the students to construct meaning, we didn’t tell them what they should post as comments, we just explained how you could show your response to listening to them. Those first comments became the fodder for discussion–Were “hearts” and emojis really helpful for growing ourselves as learners? And they also talked about how we presented our learning online. One student expressed a chronic sentiment: “Sometimes I can’t hear them speaking. I think people should listen to themselves before they post. ” As a teacher, I loved this observation which really has improved their presentation skills overall. As a result, students have naturally begun to articulate how they really wanted to engage better online.

Through the Activities feature, students can peruse and select math ideas that they would like to view instead of just going to their friends’ journals. This has also helped to spread mathematical thinking around. I can see students nudge one another and say “Hey did you so-and-so’s idea? Go check it out!’

Aside from developing “friendly feedback and helpful comments“, we have been inquiring into how we can interpret and respond to these comments. My partner created a few “starters” for them to get them thinking about the need to be polite whether you agree or disagree with the person:

Thanks. I hadn’t thought of that.
Wow, that made me think that I can now…
Thanks but I disagree because….

Although we scatter these sentence starters around, it has been lovely to see them create their own messages, showing us that they have transferred the meaning and personalized it. Now we are at the stage in which we are encouraging and educating parents about how to make helpful comments and responses. It’s a bit hard to get them to “unlearn” some of the social media habits that we have as adults, so we get parent comments like “Love you boo-boo. Great work!” I hope that the students challenge their parents and ask them what they connected to in their post.

Since this is my first attempt at teaching younger students these skills, I am excited at how we can improve their communication skills through the use social media next time. However, I feel immensely proud of how serious they have taken their learning and their need to connect with their peer’s ideas. I feel confident that if we approach social media from this perspective, we can indeed shape and transform what social media can be like in the future.

I’m wondering how others have used Seesaw to develop these skills and what strategies they found successful. Please share in the comments below so we can all learn from each other. (:

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

#PYP The Null Curriculum? Why PYP Schools Need to Examine Science in the Program of Inquiry

By Judy Imamudeen | March 9, 2018 | Comments 5 comments

Let me be clear, I am biased. I wholeheartedly agree with the Nobel-Prize winning quantum scientist, Richard Feynman, ” The world looks so different after learning science.” In my mind, this is the greatest argument for scrutinizing our Programme of Inquiry to ensure that are developing scientific literacy. Scientific inquiry naturally challenges and changes you.

I have been trying to track down the memory of where I first heard a PYP educational leader say that out of our 6 Transdisciplinary Themes, there are some units that should be Social Studies focused (Where We Are in Place and Time and How We Organize Ourselves), another that should be Arts focused (How We Express Ourselves), 2 that are Science focused (How the World Works and Sharing the Planet) and the Who We Are theme can bridge multiple disciplines. Of course, it’s very easy to read the transdisciplinary theme descriptors and arrive at these conclusions, but this whole notion of a theme as the “arts” and the “social studies” unit is incongruent with the whole notion of what IS supposed to transdisciplinary learning. But whenever I look at a school’s Programme of Inquiry (POI), this sort of thinking seems to leave its fingerprints everywhere in their curriculum design. Look at your own POI, right now. I double dog dare you! You’ll see exactly what I am talking about.

I’d like to challenge this discrete packaging of developing knowledge by themes. Furthermore, I’d like to use this term, the Null Curriculum, ironically, to explore what it means to our POI.

The Null Curriculum: the options students are not afforded, the perspectives they may never know about, much less be able to use, the concepts and skills that are not part of their intellectual repertoire. -Elliot Eisner-

For those who don’t know, Elliot Eisner, a curriculum thought leader and art education advocate, coined this term null curriculum, in which he often stated that art appreciation is an important and often neglected aspect of our school’s implicit curriculum. However, this term is transferable to other subject matter. When we relegate science and its thinking skills to only a couple of TD themes, we are minimalizing its importance, making it null; especially since it is not a “special” (visual art, music/performing arts, additional languages and PE) that IB schools offer a couple times a week. Therefore, Science, as a subject, only gets to be spotlighted and explored for 6-12 weeks a year, for maybe 3 hours a week during the time in which we are not teaching math, literacy or the special subjects.

Did you just do the math? 36 hours or 3 days of Science learning a year. Ouch. That’s not a lot dedicated time to an area of learning that we know is emerging as a necessary element of our students’ lives. We know that technology is changing the dynamics of our society and STEM (Science, Technology, and Math) is becoming a focal point for innovation in many schools (which many schools have expanded STEM to STEAM to include art as an essential component) So shouldn’t we be examining our POIs to make sure we are in synch with emerging trends and provide a balanced curriculum?

Here’s what troubles me the most, science, in my mind is the binding agent of all the other disciplines. It is an inherently transdisciplinary inquiry. That’s because science explores the “magic” that remains invisible until we apply scientific habits of thinking. It starts off with What Does It All Mean, Man?-sort of thinking; our curiosity and our imagination are naturally provoked and we are driven to make discoveries which only lead to further questions and a revealing of new possibilities. Science, in my mind, is a big game of What If? which can be applied to all manner of subjects and cultivate deeper thinking.

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When the Arts and Science Get Married: Changing How the World Works to How We Express Ourselves

I’d like to pull out some central ideas and challenge how you can put more science into other themes. How We Express Ourselves is probably not the first one you would have picked so I’d like to start there. Here’s the overview of the theme.

How We Express Ourselves: an inquiry into…the ways in which we discover and express ideas, feelings, nature, culture, beliefs, and values; the ways in which we reflect on, extend and enjoy our creativity; our appreciation of the aesthetic.

Now, I’m going to hit close to home and share the How the World Works unit that we did with our 1st graders:

Understanding sound and light can transform experience.

Put this central idea in that theme descriptor above. Think about how students could have applied their knowledge of light and sound if we had inquired through this theme. We could have developed perspective-taking and thinking about an audience. We could have explored acoustics and how light enhances a performance. We could have used design thinking. It would have been messy learning. We, students and teachers, included, would have gone into the learning pit, and we would have had fun, we would have been challenged. It would have an impact and lasting memory on all of us. It would have been exhilarating and excruciating at the same time. Really the only constraints of this collaboration would be the depth of our lines of inquiry.

What about this central idea from another school’s How the World Works Unit?

Materials can be categorized, manipulated and changed.

The same sort of collaboration would have been possible. If we extended the central to include more concepts, I think there would be a richer learning experience. For example:

Materials can be categorized, manipulated and changed for a purpose.

Materials can be categorized, manipulated and changed for communicating a message.

The second central idea makes me wonder how we might explore art curation or how manufacturers and designers consider the impact of plastic on our world. What about Addis shoes made out of plastic?-Can you think of how you can teach students material science and apply it to innovation, making treasure out of trash? We just did this concept of transformation with musical instruments to make a sound garden at our school. (This unplanned collaboration came out of a Sharing the Planet unit) This is only one idea of a hundred possibilities. I’m not even scratching the surface. What ideas float up in your mind?

Here’s another central idea:

People are inspired to create by observing the natural world.

If you pull out a piece of paper and start mind mapping the possibilities of this central idea, it would be hard to write only 3 lines of inquiry for it. My mind goes to weather, jumps to landforms, then airplane design or bridge building then wonders how we could capture movement and change in our drawings or dancing. I think about culture, whether it is folktale creation stories or costumes. There all sorts of connections that can be made. I am only limited by my imagination.

I’d like to share one more thought about the marriage of art and science in our curriculum. Have a think about what Eisner is postulating:

eeisner — From *Reimagining Schools: The Selected Works of Elliot W. Eisner*

Did you read that last line? Connoisseurs of…the world. When you marry science to all the other areas of learning, you get all sorts of delightful experiences. You apply skills. You apply knowledge. So stop thinking that How We Express Ourselves is the Arts unit! It goes beyond those boundaries of that discipline, from passive to active learning, when you combine it with science.

I’m going to revisit this idea of putting science into other themes. I just really want to challenge this notion of what disciplines are emphasized during a unit of inquiry. I want us PYP educators to really be true to the transdisciplinary nature of our framework’s design–not because we are blindly following Making the PYP Happen, but because the future world in which our students will live demand that they can transfer knowledge and skills between disciplines. Technology is blurring the lines between subject areas and we need to prepare students for the shifting nature of what we will call “progress”.

Perhaps you have any other thoughts that you would like to add to this discussion of curriculum. Please share! It helps all of us grow!

Judy Imamudeen

judyimamudeen.com

Homework Vs. Deep Work

By Judy Imamudeen | April 15, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

We had an open house this week, and as I sat down to answer parent questions about our Primary Years Programme, I opened up my Powerpoint, prepared to refer to my laundry list of all the ways the International Baccalaureate is wonderful. But then questions came and my presentation took care of itself. I began to get a clear picture of how truly different we are and how rigid so many schools are in China. One mother pined for her 3rd-grade son’s happiness and felt awful that she had to battle him daily to do 2 hours or more of homework a night. Having 2 hours or more of homework?–a parent’s free time also gets demolished as I’m sure they have to sit there with their student to complete the worksheets. You can imagine that both parties suffer burnout and do not enjoy these nightly sessions. So parents feel equally imprisoned by the idea of doing homework, as what they see as a necessary evil.

Yet, this is endemic of living in Asia–so many of the countries here, with their large populations and competitive job markets, staunchly value education as the only means to have a decent life. School is life for young people, and it is also very normal that children, beginning in Kindergarten, get tutors or attend “academy”–a night school that teachers next year’s math or other content knowledge.

Ever since this meeting, my mind is wandering, thinking about my own child. I love my little person and I want her to come home eager to tell me her tales of school that day. I don’t want to berate her about doing homework. So earlier this year, I had her think about creating a homework schedule, which obviously has a fair amount of parent input (my daughter never would put in IXL willingly). You can see the final schedule in this post, which amusingly you can notice that the weekend is “Hannah’s to do list”–meaning that mom and dad leave her to her own devices.

However, I am starting to rethink this concept of homework, which is essentially practicing what the skills that they are in the midst of learning that week. I do think this is important and of value, but I’d also like to cultivate her interests, which lately has been coding and Minecrafting. I’m a big fan of Cal Newport and his treatise on Deep Work which can be summarized here (although I recommend you read the book since there are more nuggets inside).

In particular, Cal recommends that one “drains the shallows” and create focused, uninterrupted attention on developing a skill, working on a project or task that is challenging and demands ideation to promote innovation in your area of interest. When looking over one’s schedule, it is vital to quantify the depth of every activity–is it moving you towards a goal or achievement? Is it really helping you to cultivate depth of knowledge and expertise? Once you evaluate your schedule, then you recreate it and reallocate your time to doing this “deep work”. The end goal of these accumulated hours is to bring into fruition new and better ways of doing something, solving a problem or producing a product which will have an overall greater benefit on humanity.

With this idea in mind, I asked my daughter if she had to get rid of something on her schedule, what would it be, draining the shallows, sort of speaking. She told me that she’d get rid of the writing on Tuesday. When I probed to know why she told me that she didn’t like writing, she told me that she likes to draw and she never gets to do that in her writing prompts. She’s in 1st grade, the year when drawings are replaced with words to convey ideas, but I could appreciate her struggle with the transition. (Through this conversation, I gleaned some insights and it gave me an idea for next year to try when I teach 1st grade, as I motivate students into using better word choice rather than pictures to describe their ideas.) I told her to redo her schedule and she readily replaced writing with coding. As you look at her schedule below, it was obvious to me that her interests are emerging.

Although I’d like her schedule to be refined to maybe 1 or 2 focused items a day, it is a first step towards managing one’s time and developing readiness for “deep work”.
It got me thinking if all students were to be asked to do this task–creating their own after school schedule, what would it be? How could we instill within our students a desire to pursue their interests?–to redirect their attention to work that is meaningful to them. This idea of time management is one of the Transdisciplinary Skills or Approaches to Learning (ATL) that we seek to create in our IB learners. So as much as I want students to practice skills that they are in the midst of developing, I also want them hungry to learn so that they independently and organically augment their abilities. This is a key distinction of learning in the IB. So, I am just wondering if we were to tweak the idea of homework and teach parents to be partners in their student’s passions if that would make for more fulfilled families, overall. Perhaps introducing this concept of “deep work”, reframing homework in a new light, could not only shift the dynamics of home learning but could also inspire greater student selected inquiries into their passions.

I’m definitely interested in anyone else’s experiences with transforming homework into a joy rather than a drudgery. Please connect with me @judyimamudeen or leave comments below.