Supporting PYP Newbies: An Inquiry into the PYP

It’s the first week of orientation. It’s a cohort of 30 new faculty in the Junior School. Some are brand new to the PYP. Others have vast PYP experience. And I – as the brand new PYP Coordinator (a fellow newbie!) – am gifted a three-hour session to support them.

I decide to set up a Google Classroom for us to make it easy to share resources, but also to take advantage of interactive elements that will let me engage and support my new colleagues in a more personal way.

I start the session with 3 main goals. I have always loved the idea of, “no secret teacher business” and have found a similar concept of, “no secret leader business”, to be quite powerful. I want them to know what I am doing, how I am hoping to do it, and most importantly why I am doing it in that specific way.

Then we do a little activity called “Stand Up If…” where anyone in the room to whom the statement applies stands up, looks around, and then sits back down. This helps people find connections with others in the room, but also differences. It also super helpful to me as the facilitator to quickly and easily get to know my learners at the start of the session.

I quickly discovered about 40% of people in the room had PYP experience and about 60% were brand new to the program. Which I think is great! It gives both groups a community who are in a similar place in their PYP journey, but it also provides opportunities to cross-connect and learn from and support one another.

Then we moved on to “Tuning In” to what they may already know and understand about the PYP. I broke down the program into some of the central principles; so that people new to the PYP might be able to notice and name principles and practices they are familiar with from other systems of education, their national approach to education, or their teacher training.

I used a four-phased continuum where they could self-assess where they think they are.

And it was great to see that everyone in the room – whether new to the PYP or not – was able to find components of the Primary Years Program they had some familiarly with.

From there we were able to set up an “I can help with…” wall where everyone signed up for areas of the PYP they felt they could help their peers with.

It was amazing to so many names!

Next we talked a lot about picking one area of the PYP they would like to learn more about and the notion that inquiring into the PYP would be a year-long (life-long?) journey and today was merely about taking a step down that path. We settled on the mantra, “You don’t need to learn everything today, but you need to learn something”; and what that something was, was entirely in their hands.

So everyone selected an area of PYP that they would like to focus on for the remainder of the session and they found their “inquiry buddies” – people who had chosen the same area to learn about.

To support their personalized inquiry into the PYP I prepared a curated PYP library that was organized by principles, but also differentiated in terms of content. For people just starting out I linked the Principles into Practice documents and pointed them to the pages that would help them build a strong foundation. For people looking to dive a little deeper, I collected some additional resources from MyIB, Nano PD and other well-known and trusted blogs and podcasts. I also created a section for people who really wanted to explore beyond and engage with some of the research, philosophy, or elaboration on the central principles of the PYP.

From there… they were off! They had 40 minutes to decide how they wanted to collaborate with their “inquiry buddies”, what resources they wanted to focus and how they were going to document their learning.

Some choose to read IB documents.

Some chose to take a jigsaw approach and divvy up the resources and then feed back to each other.

Some chose to move to learning environments they found more conducive to their learning preferences.

After the 40 minutes were up, I brought everyone back together to facilitate a group synthesis. We used the 4 Cs Visible Thinking Routine, which helped everyone dive a little bit deeper into the thinking behind what they had read, watched, discussed or listened to.

After that, we moved on to a Design Sprint. Participants had ten minutes to put together a 2-3 minute presentation to teach their peers what they had learned about the area of the PYP the explored.

And it was amazing!

The inquiry group modeled an inquiry approach using a hand-fan as a provocation and then supporting everyone to come up with questions and a plan to explore their questions.

The concepts group shared sample Lines of Inquiry and had everyone guess which PYP Key Concepts were the lens for those Lines of Inquiry.

The transdisciplinary group made a mock-UOI and everyone had to identify where there was opportunity within the unit to integrate science, social studies, math, literacy, PSPE and the arts.

The ATL group had everyone reflect on which of the 5 ATL Skill categories they had used within this session.

It was PYP magic at its best!

Then it was time to reflect. Originally I had planned a Chalk Talk to support everyone to notice and name how they experienced the principles of the PYP in their own learning… but we ran out of time! So we briefly did a individual reflection.

I also wanted to provide an opportunity for everyone to reflect on how they are feeling as a PYP educator. So I used the Blob Tree as the reflection tool, and collected their private, individual responses via a Google Form

Finally I made transparent the plan for their ongoing support; so that they knew this was not a “one and done” PD session, but rather an ongoing journey of lots of support along they way.

Then it was time for lunch! And we were all hungry…. there is nothing like walking in a learner’s shoes for three hours to build empathy for what our students do each and every day!

The Aftermath

For me it has always been important to make the time after a personalized session like this to engage with, analyze and respond to their evidence of learning. For this particular session I did that in four ways.

1. I went through each and every person’s self-assessment and coded it. This allows me to see both individual data of where each person is on their PYP journey, but it also allows me to see trends across areas of the PYP. This is helpful to allow me to responsively plan support for small groups, teams, and the cohort as a whole that targets areas that they have identified wanting more support.

2. I went through all the Blob Tree reflections and read them thoroughly. This helps me keep my finger on the pulse of who feeling like they are flying high and who I may want to check in with to offer some additional TLC. I also wanted to ensure they each knew that I took the time to read their reflection – and I am a HUGE believer in the power of writing notes – so I decided to write a short message to each person responding to what they shared in their reflection

3. I also wanted to follow up with a few individuals to further personalize my support for them. This could have been because they mentioned a specific area they wanted to focus on, or appeared to need a little bit more challenge, or could benefit from a specific resource. So I sent a few follow-up Google Classroom posts with some optional suggestions and resources to these individuals.

4. I took the information from the “I can help with…” wall and transcribed it onto a digital document that I can share with everyone. That way the peer helper structure we established isn’t just for that session, but can become an ongoing part of everyone’s learning.

Overall, I was happy with how the session went. I am so blessed to have a group of 30 educators who see themselves as learners and dug right into inquiring, exploring, debating, sharing and reflecting. I’m looking forward to continuing this journey with each and every one of them throughout this year and beyond!

How do you support your PYP newbies?

What strategies, tools and advice would you share?

How do you personalize learning for the adult-learners you support?

Pedagogy 101 For PYP Parents

All week long I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a request that one of our parents made during our virtual “Parent Coffee”. Throughout this Distance Learning adventure, our Parent Coffees have provided space for the voices, opinions, perspectives and needs of our Primary School parent community. Each time, I leave with a page full of notes which lead to reflection, action and adjustments. But this time was different. This time my thinking was provoked – in a larger, more substantial way.

She was talking about how, inevitably, parents have taken on a bigger role in their children’s learning, and in most cases are now sharing in some of the roles and responsibilities that normally are fulfilled by teachers in face-to-face school. And as such, requested some help. Help that goes beyond what their children need to focus on and where to find resources and activities. Help more specifically focused on how to support their children in their learning; the pedagogical tips and tricks, us educators have in our back pocket when we are helping learners.

I’m sure parents at any school are likely overwhelmed at the prospect of taking more responsibility supporting their children’s learning. Now factor in what it must feel like to be a parent at a PYP school that is built on inquiry-based, concept-driven, agency supportive approaches to education. Wanting to help their child… but not being sure exactly how to do so.

We have to remember that most parents are not educators. They don’t have multiple degrees in education. They haven’t read endless books and blog posts. They don’t have resumes full of PD workshops. Understandably so, it’s our career – not theirs.

So how can we help? How can we share what we’ve learned through all those degrees, books and blogs, courses and workshops into something manageable and helpful that we can transfer over to them?

Here is my attempt. A pedagogy distilled. Condensed. Simplified.

Dedicated not only the wonderful parents at my school, but to all PYP parents around the world partnering with us during these difficult times to support their children.

1. Take an inquiry stance

Meet a question with a question. Often our first instinct when a child asks us a question is to provide an answer. But this approach can prevent a golden opportunity to have learners not only learn that thing, but also learn something about how to learn. So next time your child asks you a question (“How do you spell ….?” “How do you multiply fractions?” “What are the types of energy?”), no matter what the question is, instead of supplying the answer, try responding like this:

Great question! How could you find that out? What resource could you use to discover that? How could you figure that out?

Be prepared to inquire together. Sometimes, when you meet a question with a question, you get an “I don’t know”. That is an invitation to a great teachable moment! If your child doesn’t know how to find out on their own or what resource to use, you can step in as their partner and respond like this:

No problem! Let’s figure it out together. Maybe we can try this…. Have you ever used this… Let’s see if this resource has the answer….

This way you are still supporting them to figure out what they are trying to figure out, but along the way you’ve also helped develop their skill as an independent learner – so the next time, instead of needing to ask you, they might have some ways to figure it out on their own.

Ask the magic question – “What do you notice?”. No matter what subject, what area of learning, or what age – the secret ingredient to inquiry-based learning is asking learners to think about what they notice. Whether your child is learning their letters and looking at the letter “B”, or building their multiplication fluency by looking at a multiplication table, or developing their scientific knowledge by studying a model of a cell…. that one question works every time, and can always be followed up with “what else do you notice?” to probe for further thinking.

Don’t feel you have to be an expert, just be a learner. It is okay to not know something. In fact that presents an amazing opportunity to model your own approaches to learning. Feel confident to say, “I don’t know” or, “I have no idea”. Just make sure to follow it up with, “But now I want to know, so here is how I am going to find out!” or, “Let’s figure this out together!”

2. Support conceptual understanding

Value process. As often as possible get your child thinking beyond what they did and what they learned, and more about how they learned. Some great questions include:

How did you do that? Why did you do that? What strategy did you use? How did you learn that strategy? What steps did you take?

Harness the power of the key concepts. In the PYP we have 7 Key Concepts, that are secret ingredients to help learners think more deeply and understand… ANYTHING. The beauty of these key concepts, is they work for everything! You can apply these questions to any subject or area of learning. Whether your child is trying to learn about shapes… commas…. a historic figure…. a sports skill… sentence structure…. an art technique…. a water bottle! Anything. Here are the key concept questions you can ask your child at any time about anything they are learning:

What is it like? (Form)

How does it work? (Function)

How is it connected to other things? (Connection)

How does it change? (Change)

Why is it like that? Why is it the way it is? (Causation)

What are the different points of view? (Perspective)

What are our responsibilities? (Responsibility) 

3. Prioritize Reflection

Get them thinking about their thinking. Similar to the Key Concept questions, there are two questions you can ask your child to help them think deeper, about whatever it is they are learning. Again – any subject, any topic. More specifically, they get children thinking about their thinking! Here are two magic questions to support learners deep understanding:

How do you know?

What makes you say that?

Whether they are showing you the solution to a math problem, discussing parts of a book they are reading, summarizing information, sharing their perspective on a world event… these questions have super powers!

4. Support your child’s agency 

Invite and involve their voice. Don’t be afraid the let them express themselves. Give space for them to articulate what they like and don’t like about learning, and why that is. Listen to when they are advocating for what they need as learners. Listen for what they really care about and matters to them and try to understand and find ways to support it.

Respect and support their choices. Be aware of what choices you are making for your child, that they could probably be making themselves. Choices may include when they learn, where they learn, what they learn, and how they learn. Coach them to make informed choices, by making the decision making process explicit (What choice are you making for yourself?), then follow up with a reflection about how effective that choice was and whether it’s a good choice to be made again in the future (How did that choice work out for you? How do you know? What will you choose differently next time?).

Emphasize ownership. Sometimes learning can be something that gets misrepresented as something done to learners, or around learners. This creates a false sense that they are passively drifting through the process, and have no impact on their own learning. We want learners to know it’s their learning, they own it, they impact it. It is something done by them, for them, and we are the supporting actors. Use words and phrases that build that sense of ownership over their learning:

It’s your learning.

You’re in the driver’s seat.

Your learning, your choice. 

5. Be purposeful with feedback. 

Teach to fish, don’t give a fish. As much as possible, when you give feedback to your child, think about how to give advice that will go beyond that one moment. As teachers, we often use phrases like, “teach the writer, not the writing” to help us give tips that will impact that learner in a bigger, more sustainable way. Instead of just telling them how to fix something. Here are some examples of ways you can phrase that type of feedback:

“Readers…. (often go back an re-read what they don’t understand; share their opinion about what they read; break words into small chunks to help them sound it out etc.)

“Writers…. (read their writing outloud to themselves to try and find their mistakes; use capitals to show the reader a new sentence is starting; support their opinions with facts and evidence; add details to make their writing more interesting etc.)

“Mathematicians…. (double check their solutions for accuracy; use objects and drawings to help them solve problems; use short cuts and tricks called “algorithms”; use special words etc.)

This helps phrase feedback in a way that will help them in that moment, but also help them in that area beyond that moment as well. Feedback that not only fixes mistakes but helps them grow and develop as readers, writers, mathematicians, scientists, historians, artists and athletes!

 

As PYP educators, we need to see this as more than a short-term investment. The time and energy we spend supporting parents who are looking for help in this area, will pay long-term dividends when life returns to normal and we have a coalition of parents who not only understand inquiry, concepts and agency – but have experience living it.

What other points of pedagogy could we share with our PYP parents?

How can we help them, help their children?

What tips and advice can we impart unto our parent community as they become pioneers of at-home pedagogy?

The Problem With a POI

For those of us who work at PYP schools, we are all too familiar with the “POI Review”. Some schools conduct it yearly, others every few years, some only when an evaluation visit is looming. But we all do it.

A typical approach to a POI review usually involves an analysis of horizontal articulation (balance within a grade level) and vertical articulation (balance across the grade levels). This usually consists of identifying, tallying and cross-referencing concepts, skills, sections of the TD themes etc. all in order to guarantee that there is balance in what is being taught each year.

I think if you are at a PYP school that creates a POI based around teacher-planned Units of Inquiry and then never changes that POI… then this traditional approach to vertical articulation makes sense.

But if you are at a school that is constantly reflecting upon, changing and evolving your Units of Inquiry; planning in response to learning; building units after getting to know your students; co-planning UOIs with your students; and eventually supporting your students to plan their own personalized UOIs… then a traditional approach to vertical articulation presents a few significant challenges.

I work at school that is much more the latter, than the former. So when I sat down today with a team of colleagues to analyze our vertical articulation, we ran face-first into many of these challenges.

Challenge #1 – Personalization

We noticed that as our students move through their PYP journey at our school, they become more involved in the direction their learning takes within a Unit of Inquiry. So when we got to the grade-levels with purposefully open-ended central ideas, we found it difficult to tally the concepts, knowledge and skills because we knew that different groups of students had taken their learning in different directions. It became even more challenging when we got to the grade-levels where students are planning their own personalized Units of Inquiry, because that meant all 120 students had branched off in completely different directions, multiple times throughout the year. And although there have been efforts made within those grade-levels to track the balance of their learning, we realized it became difficult to bridge those systems of articulation with the other systems of articulation that made sense for ensuring balance across teacher-planned UOIs.

So how can we build one coherent system that can track balance regardless of whether a UOI is teacher planned, co-planned or student-planned?

Challenge #2 – Constant Change

We are a school of risk takers and reflectors, which means we are in a self-perpetuated, constant cycle of re-working our Units of Inquiry: to grow and change as we grow in our understanding of teaching and learning; to grow and change as the world grows; to grow and change to attempt to better suit the needs and interests of the current cohort. What we end up with it a constantly changing POI. Which is a GREAT thing! But definitely presents a challenge when it comes to vertical articulation analysis. Because even if you can show that the current POI is vertically balanced – that specific POI is not static, and not necessarily representative of the learning for that group of students from the year before, or the year before that. So what we’re doing is ensuring balance at one point in time for students in all different grade levels, but we’re not necessarily ensuring balance for one group of students over time.

And we have to be careful not to let the tail wag the dog and stop reflecting upon and changing UOIs, just to ensure that vertical balance that we were able to tally and track at that one moment in time. It’s not static and it shouldn’t be static.

So how can we ensure vertical balance in our students’ learning in a way that grows and changes as our UOIs grow and change from year to year?

If we are re-imagining ways to approach the planning of Units of Inquiry that make up our POI; then we should probably also  be re-imagining the ways we analyze and track balance within that POI.

What if…

A POI was personalized to each student.

A POI followed the students through their PYP journey.

A POI was more focused on what was learned, instead of what was taught.

A POI wasn’t impacted every time a UOI changed.

One idea my colleague and I had was a more adaptive, personalized and emergent approach to ensuring there is balance within a students’ PYP journey.

We had an idea that stemmed from a system we use within our grade-level to help students reflect upon balance within their learning over the course of the year. We have students pause and capture the different sections of each PYP Theme they have explored so far, to help them notice their own gaps in their balance. This data is then used to stimulate conversations of where they might take their next unit.

We had the idea to take this approach and imagine what it could look like across ages and grade-levels, to create one synthesized, coherent, but personalized record of vertical articulation.

In grade-levels where teachers are planning the Units of Inquiry, teachers could hi-light the parts of the TD themes that the students explore.

Then, that same document can move up to the next grade with the students and their new teachers can update their new learning, by hilighting new elements of the TD themes that have been explored over the course of that year. Then even if the grade below them changes the unit the following year, the learning from the unit that actually took place for their current students would be tracked and documented.

Then for the grade-levels where students and teachers are co-planning Units of Inquiry, editing access could be shared with students – made simple by programs like Google Classroom that allow you to take one document that already exists and push it out to all individual students to modify.

That way students can accurately reflect the learning that took place in their unit, even if it was different from other students in their class. It would also provide great data for students and teachers to be able to work together to notice gaps in balance to inform their co-planning.

Finally, when students reach the stage of completely planning their own UOIs they would take over responsibility for tracking their balance  and using the data that represents their journey as a learner so far. Regardless of whether the learning came from a teacher-planned UOI, a co-planned UOI or a self-planned UOI. They would have ownership and access to a document that had a complete record of their learning over the full course of their PYP journey.

Obviously, this idea is very new – and very raw and undeveloped. We realize there are many complexities and nuances that would need to be thought through before launching something like this.

What about new students?

Could new students not update the knowledge they gained from their previous schools on to this record?

What about specialist-subjects?

Could specialist teachers not also add to this centralized document?

What about “repeats”?

Could we not think of a way to code parts of the TD theme that are revisited at different times in different ways?

What about concepts, skills, etc.?

Could a second slide be added for concepts? A third for skills?

What about PYP evaluations?

Could there be a way to display and explain this approach to articulation that still adheres to and satisfies their Standards and Practices?

There are also the difficult discussions about whether balance means “equal coverage” or whether pursuing a balanced POI trumps students following their own motivation… but these are important discussions for all schools and teams to be having, regardless of how they are ensuring articulation in their POI.

I’m not sure if this is the answer (I think it would be pretty interesting to try though!) but I think there must be ways for us as a PYP community to re-imagine our approaches to ensuring balance in a our students’ learning in a way that better reflects our emergent, organic, adaptive and co-constructed approaches to planning.

What are your “what ifs” for the POI review process?

What challenges do you see with horizontal and vertical articulation?

How else could we evolve our approaches to tracking and ensuring balance?

Student-Planned UOIs

Currently, our grade level has 84 different Units of Inquiry happening simultaneously – a different one for each student. All connecting to different transdisciplinary themes, exploring different key concepts, developing different ATL skills, strengthening different attitudes, developing different attributes of the Learner Profile and lasting for different lengths of time.

It is PYPx?

Nope… it’s just a “normal” week in Studio 5!

How did we get here? What was our “why”? Our “how? Our “what”? And where do we go from here? Stick with me for this lengthy blog post and I will try to capture and share our journey through supporting our students to plan, execute, and report on, their own Units of Inquiry.

Why?

So often as PYP educators, we start with the UOI and then work hard to figure out how to wrap each student around the unit we have planned. We use provocations, tuning in activities and student-generated questions to help students find “their connection” to the UOI. And although UOIs are broad and conceptual with lots of space for inquiry within, at the end of the day we are still trying to get students to find their connection to our units.

 

The more and more my team and I began to understand and value student agency, the more and more we began to wonder:

Why do all of our students need to be inquiring into the same UOI all at once, for the exact same length of time?

Aren’t all of these teacher-made decisions when planning a UOI pulling us away from our goal of respecting and supporting students’ agency as learners?

Do all of our students even need to be inquiring into the same TD theme at the same time?

Dissatisfied with our previous attempt to reconcile agency and teacher-planned Units of Inquiry, we decided to be risk-takers and take action. Instead of trying to wrap each student around a UOI, we decided to try and wrap a UOI around each student.

Our goal was to help students plan their own Units of Inquiry based around their own passions, interests and curiosities, while at the same time protecting and maintaining the role each of the 5 essential elements of the PYP played within a UOI.

How?

If we were going to expect our students to plan their own units based around things they were intrinsically motivated to learn about, we knew we had to empower students to understand motivation and more specifically, understand their own motivation. So with the help of Dan Pink’s research and resources we began an inquiry into motivation.

Next, we wanted to help students be able to choose something they were truly motivated to learn. We knew that jumping straight into “What’s one thing you are intrinsically motivated to learn” was unlikely to get us where we wanted to be, so instead we crafted some questions to hopefully help students uncover things in their lives that already showed evidence of intrinsic motivation.

Students filled one in about themselves:

Their parents also filled one in about their child:

Then students used both “planners” to select one “purpose”. We chose the word “purpose”… well, purposefully! We knew that eventually we wanted to have students plan their unit using a modified PYP Bubble Planner, and we wanted to keep the essence of that planner as much as possible. And since box 1, question 1 on the Bubble Planner is “What is our purpose?” we knew that eventually the student Bubble Planner would ask “What is your purpose?” Another reason we chose purpose is because we wanted to steer clear of the word passion. Earlier on in the year, our Head of School provoked our thinking with the article “7 Habits Instead of Passion” which posits that ‘follow your passion’ can be dangerous advice. Ever since then we as a team have been very careful not to de-rail our student planned UOIs by focusing on “passion”.

We also discussed the concept of purpose with students –  with the help of this “continuum of purpose” compliments of @sylviaduckworth.

Knowing that this was the first time many (if not all) students had planned their own UOI around their own purpose, we knew there would be a range of the types of “purposes” that fuelled these units – many which we guessed correctly would start in the “self-awareness” and “discovery” stages.

Once students had nailed down their first “purpose” they met with a learning advisor to plan their first personalized Unit of Inquiry. Since this approach was new for my team, we all decided to use a different planner –  but all of which were based off of the PYP Bubble Planner, and connected to Dan Pink’s 3 magic ingredients of motivation. As the experts on the PYP, we helped students to “wrap the PYP” around their purpose by identifying how their purpose connected to each of the 5 elements.

As can be seen from these examples, students selected their purpose, decided how long they would need to achieve their purpose, chose how best they would document their learning, what their evidence of mastery would be, and what specifically would need to be “learned about” and “developed” throughout their unit. Careful time and consideration was also given to supporting students to brainstorm resources for their learning, both within the school and beyond.

Next students were supported in creating their own timelines, tailored to the amount of time they estimated they needed to achieve their purpose.

Then students were off an running!

Along the way, students had regular check-ins with their learning advisors to discuss their progress, challenges, adjustments to timelines, needs for resources etc. We also organized an adult-database that collated teacher and parent professions, hobbies and interests and showed students how to make use of the database to contact experts connected to their purpose.

We also put together a procedure for students to organize their own field trips out into the community.

Students also received support, guidance and encouragement from their parents who were invited for “learning conversations”. Parents were brought into the fold about the “why, how and what” behind student-planned UOIs and were coached in how to stimulate conversation about their child’s learning, while showing respect for their child’s agency over their learning.

We even had students who had “virtual conversations” with their parents via Skype and FaceTime!

Most impressively though was the way students supported themselves and one another. It was not uncommon to see students curate their own learning resources and materials (microscopes, scales, glue, wood, cameras, safety glasses etc.)

And reach out to one another for advice, expertise and support.

Students were also great at knowing when they needed an adult’s help and sought out assistance, supervision or feedback – regardless of whether it was “their teacher”.

It’s also been great to see that opportunities for sharing learning have been organic, authentic, purposeful and student-initiated. Most of the time it’s the simple “you gotta see this!” or “check this out!” moments.

But occasionally there have been some bigger, more planned moments where students have “taken their learning public”.

Whether it’s asking to perform a song around the campfire during a school camping trip

(photo cred @puglifevn)

Or signing up to sell a product at our school’s weekly market

Or putting together a student-led workshop, to more formally teach other students what they have learned.

(photo cred @puglifevn)

What?

So what exactly did these student-planned UOIs explore? Anything and everything under the sun!

Robot hands and flying shoes

Digital design

Special effects movie make-up

Entomology

(photo cred @puglifevn)

Film production

Doll house construction

Mosquito repelant and anti-itch serum

Digital music mash-ups

Cooking

Photography

basketball skills

(photo cred @puglifevn)

font design

Miniature Models

A scale replica of the KL race track

Not to mention… taking care of young children, building mini arcade games, coaching swimming, writing poetry, shoe “flipping” (buying bulk at a low cost and selling individually at a profit), app development, singing covers of pop songs, shoe design, dress making, stand-up comedy and the list goes on…

Looking over this list, I can’t help but think of this quote from John Taylor Gatto:

So, where do we go from here?

Currently students are at a fork in the road, where they have the option to “pivot or persevere”. Students who have achieved their purpose or have noticed their intrinsic motivation has dropped (or perhaps was never there to begin with) can choose to move on to a new purpose. Students who feel their intrinsic motivation is going strong and would like to continue to pursue their first purpose can choose to stick with it.

Either way, students will reflect on and report their learning at this check-point. “Pivot-ers” will write a summative evaluation of their learning that will be shared to parents and “Persevere-ers” will write an in-progress, update of their learning so far, which will also be shared with their parents. Both templates are built around the 5 essential elements of the PYP.

Finalized comments, such as the one below, will be shared with parents as the official UOI Evaluation of Learning (report card) via Mangebac.

Then the cycle starts again, and those wishing to explore a new purpose will be supported to develop a second Unit of Inquiry, while those continuing with their first purpose will be supported to continue to act on their plan. No need to limit learning to a pre-determined, 6 week block.

Another consideration at this stage in the game is documentation. If students plan their own UOIs, then what happens to the POI? I say….If a Unit of Inquiry can be personalized, why can’t a Program of Inquiry also be personalized!?

My vision would be a long-term tracking, ever growing and evolving document that captures students’ personalized learning throughout their PYP journey. If we as teachers, follow the process of “start with each child and wrap the PYP around them” then each year we could note what TD themes have been explored, which understanding of concepts of have been deepened, which skills developed, which attitudes strengthened and what action has been taken.

As a homeroom teacher, I am envisioning a type of Google Sheet, where each student in my class would have a tab and thought the year I would use their bubble planner and their EOL to retroactively document the 5 EEs of the PYP. This would allow me to help support and guide them to find balance as well as vertical and horizontal articulation within their own personalized POI over the course of the year.

And what about the PYP Exhibition? Isn’t that supposed to be the one time when students have the chance to plan their own unit? And I guess our retort to that is – Why would we sacrifice our students’ agency across 5 other units, just to protect the  specialness of having students design their own unit once? We would much rather approach PYPX as an opportunity for students to reflect upon who they have become as learners and people, and what they have discovered about themselves – their motivation, their purpose, their success – a true culminating PYP experience.

If we refer back to the purpose of PYPX from the Exhibition Guidelines document, we feel confident that we are doing right by our students, not only having them experience these features once, for a pre-determined 6 week period, but at different times and in different ways all throughout their final year in the PYP.

Final Thoughts…

Now my team and I are at a place where we feel much more comfortable about “Agency and the UOI”. It’s not perfect by any means – we are still learning, growing, failing, arguing, reflecting and tweaking. We know (and are glad) that there will be many iterations to our approach, our process and the templates that we use. But in the meantime we feel a much greater sense of ease that we have managed to respect and support our students’ agency, while still honouring the essence and expectations of the PYP.

I think that if we as a PYP community are going to talk the talk of agency, then we also need to be prepared to walk the walk of agency. And that is likely going to look and feel different from what we’ve always done and what we’re comfortable with… but isn’t stepping out of our comfort zone, where we keep telling our students that the magic happens?

Assessment – Caught between two worlds

I have been an educator for 8 years and throughout those years I have learned (and tried) to be more discerning and to question educational practices. My goal – common to many 21st C educators – is to move away from “doing school” and more towards facilitating true learning.

I started my career in the Ontario system of education which provided me with a great foundation. Then I became an IB educator which really pushed and challenged my thinking about teaching and learning. The more my understanding grew and changed, the more I realized that although some of the practices I picked up as a teacher in Ontario could be transposed into my new practice as a PYP teacher, other practices no longer seemed to fit.

And then there are the practices that I’m still not sure about. Sometimes I feel caught between both worlds and have trouble figuring out which “best practices” from non-IB systems support true learning and which merely help students get better at “doing school”.

Many of these conundrums for me center around assessment specifically….

Namely success criteria, exemplars and bump it up walls. 

When I started my teaching career in Ontario I used all three of these things. They helped my students “do well” on summatives. They increased “achievement” in my class. They provided students with a clear pathway to “success” on the rubric. But now I question – were they really helping my students learn? Or were they merely helping my students get better at “doing school”?

I’m not sure, but before I move back into the classroom I sure would like to figure it out!

Should these practices be packed in our “international educator suitcases” when we leave home to be brought with us and transposed into our PYP practice?

 Do these practices truly support learning, or do they just help students “do school” really, really well? 

I’d love to hear your thoughts… 

Concept-Based Unit Mapping

Back in the fall, all of our teachers participated in an Inquiry workshop. Every teaching team seemed to walk away with two common goals:

1. More purposeful and effective collaboration between teachers

We have a huge teaching staff and we have tried many models of collaboration in the past. Most of which have presented logistical obstacles or ended up not being as effective as we had hoped. So the general practice at our school ends of being that the homeroom teachers sit down together and plan the unit of inquiry and the single-subject teachers pop into the meetings for a few minutes at sit at the back of the room and listen… and maybe present a few ideas that they had planned to share.

2. More purposeful and meaningful connections for the students between disciplines

The PYP is meant to be a transdisciplinary program, but as we reflected on our program we realized that for most of the year, each subject is working towards their own central idea. Which means our students can be working towards 6 different central ideas in one day!

 

We discussed these goals with our workshop presenter and he suggested using a Concept-Based Unit Map as a way to address both of these areas of concern.

What is a Concept-Based Unit Map?

A Concept-Based Unit Map is a planning tool that allows teachers to plan for and document both macro concepts (broad concepts that can be applied across all subjects) and micro concepts (subject specific concepts).

Great examples of Concept-Based Unit Maps can be found in Lynn Erickson’s Stirring the Head, Heart and Soul.

Why is a Concept-Based Unit Map helpful?

It allows all teachers to share the common focus of one central idea through concept-based connections, while still honoring their individual disciplines and curriculum standards. It also allows teachers to work on it in stages, so all teachers from one grade level do not to be in the same room at the same time.

So our Grade 4 team gave it a try and here is what happened.

First, our homeroom teachers planned and recorded their central idea and the macro (key) concepts for the unit.

Then our homeroom teachers mapped out the micro concepts for language, math, social studies and science. The goal here is to pick out the related, discipline-specific concepts that allow teachers to delve into the specific curriculum expectations for that subject through that conceptual lens. Since this is the first time we have planned this way, I provided the teachers with a reference sheet that has a collection of subject-specific concepts to pull from. The list is a work in progress that I have been building and is by no means, a comprehensive list of every concept for each discipline…. but it was a great starting point.

Then, when the homeroom teachers were finished with it, the single-subject teachers took turns working on it and mapping out the micro concepts for their disciplines. Once it is complete, the plan is to post it in our Multipurpose Room (where we hold weekly staff meetings) for all to see (to hopefully engender further connections and collaboration).

Here is what we noticed about this process:

Benefits

• Logistically is was manageable, as each teaching team was able to work on the map during their planning time
• It forced all of us to focus more on planning with the concepts in mind
• It made it much easier to make meaningful transdisciplinary connections (ex. It was a lot easier to have every subject working towards the concept of “position” from their discipline’s perspective [PE – position of players in a basketball game, Art – position and placement of focal points in visual arts, Math – position of shapes on a coordinate plane] than to try and force a topical connection [PE – plays a game about explorers, Art – paints a picture of explorers, Math – solves a word problem about explorers])
• It easily allowed teachers within the same grade and across grades to become more aware of what was going on in each class
• It sparked authentic conversations between teachers to further collaborate on a common task or project for the unit

Challenges

• Each team (homeroom, PE, Art, etc.) worked on the map in isolation so initially there was no dialogue between teams
• It’s on paper and our school uses Atlas Rubicon as a collaborative unit mapping program

Now we are going to use this map and continually refer to it throughout the teaching of the unit and then reflect on this process to see if it was effective in meeting our two goals of improving collaboration at a very big school, and making more meaningful connections between disciplines for our students.

We would love to hear your feedback about this process or any other tools that have been helpful in facilitating collaboration and concept-based learning at your school!