Tag: year-long unit of inquiry

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.

In for the Long Haul: The #PYP Year-Long Who We Are Unit of Inquiry

In for the Long Haul: The #PYP Year-Long Who We Are Unit of Inquiry

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Today we are making Unicorn Cupcakes. I wonder if my friend Amelia is as excited and nervous as I am about it. She’s going to be leading the activity and already has 5 friends who she is going to work on the project.  Last time our friend, Martin, researched “potions” and after reading several science experiment books, decided on recreating a volcanic eruption. He created a sign-up sheet and enlisted several friends to help him with the project.

You see, on Friday afternoons, students have time carved out to work on personal learning projects in our Grade 1 class, which we generically call our “personal inquiry time” others may call it “genius hour” or “golden time”. In the beginning, it was a generic exploration, and we just let the children play, but now we want to refocus this time a bit more so that we move from an interest into a passion, developing true skills and knowledge.

Despite this unit of inquiry being sprinkled over the course of our calendar year, as a team, we have decided to devote time consistently to this Who We Are Unit, whose central idea is: Our choices and actions as individuals determine who we become as a community. In particular, we are exploring the line of inquiry, ourselves as learners (reflection) during this allocated time.

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We believe that not only will we develop a culture of curiosity and wonder, but also really get to know the hearts and minds of our students.  I am also interested in documenting how we are creating a “powerful learning environment” that I think is beautifully captured in the following quote:

When I think of a powerful learning environment, it has a number of different aspects to it. One is that, when you walk into it, there is a sense of engagement and excitement and purposeful learning. I think that there is attention given to, not only the content, but what is often referred to as the four Cs–communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. 

Mary Beth Banios, quoted from Launching Innovation in Schools course.

Undoubtedly I will use this blog to demonstrate progress and innovation in this area. I feel that we are on the path already. Of course, I also feel that this is our first step developing agency, the new buzzword that is now central to the “Enhanced PYP”.

So what do we know about “Agency”? Although I love reading blog posts that demonstrate innovative approaches to it, I always proceed with caution because I know that meaningful and personalized learning requires structure and organization. In our context, we are dabbling with students pursuing interests; it is not anarchy nor is it obedience. It’s the power to act with initiative, and we are looking for ways to support them in their efforts.

In Personalized Learning in a PLC at Work: Student Agency Through the Four Critical Questions by Timothy Stuart and Sascha Heckmann, the myth is debunked that not all progressive personalized learning initiatives result in student learning.  “Learning progressive schools” need to combine effective structures with a clear direction of the essential student learning outcomes. As a teacher who is promoting open-ended inquiry during our precious class time, I wholeheartedly agree with their recipe to build in an organized approach to our learning.

Structures of Inquiry 

Timothy Stuart and Sacha Heckman advocate for using 4 questions in a PLC to drive a more personalized approach to inquiry.

The 4 Questions: (Worded in the perspective of a student)

  1. What do I want to know, understand and be able to do? (What is my learning goal?)
  2. How will I demonstrate that I have learned it?
  3. What will I do when I am stuck? (How will I get out the learning pit?)
  4. What will I do when I have already learned? (What will be my next learning challenge?)

We are beginning to introduce this structure, however, right now we are considering how we can not only help students plan their learning but how we can effectively document and assess it–and whose job is it to do so?

The Learning Outcomes

Perhaps since I’ve spent the bulk of my career in the Early Years, “proving” that kids are learning isn’t a hard pill to swallow. Since we are a bit off the map, we are using suggestions to release control gradually when students can confidently and competently articulate their learning. Stuart and Heckmann propose a teacher-led learning approach in which teachers determine what disciplinary skills that will need to be mastered, answering the first 3 critical questions of a PLC, and leave the 4th question to the students to answer.  In a nutshell, this is the advice:

When targeting essential disciplanary outcomes, the collaborative teacher team is responsible for the path and pace of learning.

Because we are dabbling with this, determining specifics with “what do we want all students to know and be able to do?” becomes a bit of a challenge since it’s not anchored in developing content knowledge. Plus, since this is a Who We Are unit, it’s hard to peg content-specific goals to it anyhow.

That said, I believe deeply about the need to have “skin in the game”, and intend to co-create success criteria along with students, assessing the development of Approaches To Learning (ATLs). Our school has slightly revised the popular Approaches to Learning document which will be helpful in describing how students are developing these sub-skills within the year-long Who We Are. There are some of these areas in which our students will have no experience or understanding of–they are in first grade after all!  But I believe that if we create a focus on some key areas and develop goals around them, this can be quite potent.

So, we’re in for the long haul now, excited by the possibilities and power of a year-long unit of inquiry. Perhaps if other schools are considering doing an extended unit of inquiry, this post might have inspired and given you some food for thought. I sure hope so because, in my mind, this can be foundational for developing a life-long approach to learning.

 

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