The Journey to Develop an Enhanced #PYP Programme of Inquiry

As a curriculum coordinator, deciding where to begin with the Enhancements has not been easy. I have read through all of the Programme Resouce Materials on the IB’s website and stared at this new re-branding symbol in the hope of greater clarity.  When I gaze at the word Agency, I recognize that it isn’t a small word–it’s full of big ideas and demands a significant amount of energy and change in our schools’ culture. Agency, in my mind, has become the driving and sole mission of the PYP Enhancements. But there isn’t a guide book on this topic–A sense of “Start Here”! I feel as if we are defining this collectively as we inquire into Agency in our PYP schools.

So, you can’t simply direct staff to change their paradigms overnight.  One of two clever provocations during a staff meeting isn’t going to cut it. It’s a process and will take time to evolve our thinking. I recognize that I am deeply and personally involved in the changing of mindset as well. I do not sit outside of others. I too am a caterpillar incubating in its cocoon. I am completely in the midst of transforming what school is to what school could be. This is as much a personal as well as professional journey that we all are engaged in.

So, as a pedagogical leader, I have decided to start with our “What”–our written curriculum. It feels like our map on our journey. We need to have the “right” map in our hands before we go about transforming our school. With that in mind, our school has embarked upon enhancing our school’s Programme of Inquiry and in the first phase of change. To be clear, it’s not about rephrasing central ideas– if we are going to do this, we need to do this with our students. The students need to be involved in this process. They need to have a say in WHAT we learn so teachers can start developing new strategies into HOW they learn it.

We are breaking with the traditional approach that we, as educators, get to decide what is important to learn. The students are our “standards” and they will guide and decide our “learning outcomes” through means of direct input into our POI.  Agency into the WHAT we learn at school feels like the first step in figuring out the HOW we can put kids in the center of our pedagogy.

So we have embarked on a “listening campaign” that involves the students first and foremost, but we intend to mine for the gold in our community–What are the values and concerns that our families hold? What are the cultural forces in our community and the resources that we can tap into? This is also a component of our Listening Campaign.

Teachers have formed teams that will help organize and collect the information we need to start re-envisioning our POI. There are 4 focus groups that will capture the elements of student agency, transdisciplinary learning, international-mindedness, and the Learning Community. Throughout the coming months, we will be doing a school-wide inquiry into the following areas which will influence how the POI will be enhanced:

Student Voices

Our current thinking is that we will have students in Grades 1-5 reflect on the units of inquiry from the grade level below, their current grade level, and the grade level above in order to gauge their level of interest. In order to do this, we will conduct a special school assembly that will explain how we will do this.

Outside of classroom discussions, we intend to have these grade-level POIs posted and give students the chance to have discussions and rate the units. For the ease of data collection, we will use stickers to have them “mark” how they feel about the learning within a unit of inquiry. Here are the stickers: Along with critiquing the current Programme of Inquiry, we will provide opportunities to make suggestions and express how they enjoy “showing what they know” as well as improving current units. In this way, we have more insight and feedback into the current units of inquiry.

Student Hearts

There is a myth in our world that children lack depth. I believe that we are hardwired to care and empathy is a skill that can be developed naturally in our learning communities. As an educator, it simply isn’t true that kids are completely selfish and self-absorbed. Yes, their worlds are small, but it’s obvious when you teach young children that you can see how learning about issues impacts them.

With that in mind, teaching the United Nations’ Sustainability Goals is something that needs to be embedded in our Programme of Inquiry. Currently, it is not a trend, let alone an expectation to do so in our schools. There is a smattering of educators who take it upon themselves to discuss and include the goals in their units. I find this to be a missed opportunity. The Sustainability Goals are for our current generation of students, as it aims to achieve these goals by 2030–that’s only a decade away!

So, in order to draw awareness of these issues, we want to tap into the hearts of our students and call their attention to these goals. We have decided to create a school-wide week of provocations (March 23-27th ) since there are lots of international holidays that tie into the goals then. We would send out announcements to families about our intended activities and then use our Art Fair as an opportunity to reflect on the Goals and see what inspired them. That school event is in high attendance so it could be a great chance to get the parents educated a bit too.

We would use these reflections from this week to inform our curriculum, considering which SDGS really sparked a natural interest and could gain overall support from our community. You see, in my mind, it’s not enough to just “expose” kids to the UN’s SDGs, but we would want them to take action to actually work on them. Garnering their interest and using it as a springboard for continued efforts toward achieving these goals would help cultivate the change agents that they would need to become in order to make their goals a true reality.

Community Values

Every school has a unique composition of its members, from parents to teachers to other community members. In short, we want to determine the strength of our Learning Community by tapping into its main shared values. This will help us to determine our main mission and focus of our Programme of Inquiry. It’s easy for our Learning Community to rally behind its school’s pillars when its member believes in it and want to support it. This is the essence of what we want to do and who we want to become: grounded in our values and driven by our larger mission. 

So, we have designed an activity that we will promote during the Art Fair that will help us collect data about the values that our families. They will, in short, share their top 5 values and help us to appreciate why they are important to them. We will use these values as a component of strengthening our Programme of Inquiry, particularly in developing stronger bonds between home, school, and our local community. We hope to have more coherence and collaboration with the “big L” of the Learning Community as a result of including this information in our decision-making process.

Resources

This is a tremendous effort underway to create a database of people and places that we can have access to which will enrich our learning. We are lucky to have a wide swath of professionals in our parent community who are willing to come in and share their knowledge and experience with our children. So, this database will include families just as much as it will include other community members who can benefit and expand the experience of learning in our school. We will also include information for planning field trips to streamline the vetting process and help teachers design more authentic and meaningful experiences outside of classroom learning.

One of the important aspects of curating these resources is that it must be organized in such a way that it makes it easy to filter information and locate the resources we have. So, this group is not only researching and collecting this information but also determining what is the best way to sift through it.

Whole Learning Community Listening

Needless to say, this isn’t a little endeavor, but a larger desire to listen to the WHOLE community. To get everyone on board and engaged. We want our students to be truly inspired and ignited into action. We want to tap into their interests, their concerns, and their families’ values, so we can truly have agency that is authentic and relevant to them.

Needless to say, this journey into creating a truly “enhanced” POI is an experiment–an inquiry in and of itself. At our school, we say “it takes a village” to educate a child, and we believe that this listening campaign can help us capitalize on “our village” and inspire the generation of students we have in our school today.  Once we have collected this data, we will use it to revise our current Programme of Inquiry to reflect the students, the families and our community at large.

 

**Please feel free to comment and add questions that will spark ideas and help us to further refine our process. How is your school ‘enhancing’ the Programme of Inquiry?