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This is part of a series of inquiry-based provocations for essential elements of the PYP and the Learner Profile. For more, click here.
This week's provocation centers around what it means to be an inquirer.

Resource #1: Raccoon & the Light via The Kid Should See This

Resource #2: A Mini, Magnetic, All-Terrain Robot via The Kid Should See This
Resource #3: SOAR by Alyce Tzue
Resource #4: Going Fishing Stop Motion by Guldies via The Kid Should See This

Resource #5: Claymates by Dev Petty

Resource #6: Beyond the Pond by Joseph Kuefler
Provocation Questions:

What is the connection between being an inquirer and asking questions?

What are some of the obstacles we face in being inquirers?

What is the connection between being an inquirer and creativity?

Why is being an inquirer important for our individual lives and careers?

Why is being an inquirer important for our societies?

What does it mean to be an inquirer?

What is our responsibility to be inquirers?

How can you know you are being an inquirer through the learning process?

featured image: DeathToTheStockPhoto

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This is part of a series of inquiry-based provocations for essential elements of the PYP and the Learner Profile. For more, click here. This week's provocation centers around what it means to be an inquirer.

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Reading comprehension

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ReadWorks | Award-Winning, EdTech Nonprofit Organization

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ReadWorks is an edtech nonprofit organization that is committed to helping to solve America’s reading comprehension crisis.

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Recently in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook, the conversation turned to the best math websites for teaching and learning math. What a treasure trove! We've gathered all the links and included a short description of each math website, along with a grade level recommendation and the cost, if any. Our list covers grades K-12 and is full of resources, games, freebies, and innovative programs.

Here are the best math websites, according to teachers.

Best Math Websites: Comprehensive Math Programs
These websites provide standards-based math curricula, practice activities and games, assessment tools and instructive insights, and professional development.
From McGraw-Hill, a web-based assessment and learning system that uses adaptive questioning to determine students' needs. It also instructs students on topics they are most ready to learn. Grades: 3-12; cost: $

Along with textbooks, Art of Problem Solving has a stable of robust online resources, including videos, math problems from math contests, and online classes. Also features after-school enrichment resources. Grades: 2-12; c ost: $

This National Science Foundation-funded program helps students strengthen math skills, inspires a growth mindset, and encourages critical thinking. Students will learn to solve problems and explain their thinking using mathematician George Polya's four-step approach. Grades: K-12; c ost: Free trial

We love the friendly competition and game-based content offered by First in Math. Kids gain skills practice and fluency as they play games targeted toward fact proficiency, automaticity, and logical thinking. Grades: K-8; c ost: Free trial with subsequent paid content

Istation makes personalized learning easy with computer-adaptive instruction, assessments, personalized data profiles, and teacher resources. Includes d igital lessons and face-to-face teaching strategies. Grades: PreK-8; cost: $

Woot Math offers adaptive practice for teaching rational numbers and related topics, such as fractions, decimals, and ratios. Grades: 3-7; c ost: Free tier for teachers; additional features available for extra cost

Best Math Websites: Interactive Tools to Use in Instruction
These sites offer engaging videos and tools to use in your daily math instruction.
You know it; your kids love it. Why not use it to teach math? Engage your students with this game-based classroom-response system played by the whole class in real time. Multiple-choice questions are projected on the screen, then students answer with their smartphone, tablet, or computer. Grades K-12; cost: Free 30-day trial; $ subscription

Run by the University of Regina in Canada, this site offers free resources for math teachers and their students, including a database where users can search for the answers to math questions. Their Mathematics with a Human Face page includes information about careers in mathematics as well as profiles of mathematicians. Grades: K-12; c ost: Free

Teachers know that one of the best ways to make sure learning sticks is through song. Numberock features ad-free music videos of songs about math topics, like fractions, money, and integers, produced by an Emmy Award-winning studio. Numberock also has anchor charts, worksheets, comics, games, and more. Grades: K-5; c ost: Some videos are free; free trial

Best Math Websites:

Games and Activities for Students
Interactive websites that provide students with instruction and independent practice.
Two users play a game in which each player tries to connect four game pieces in a row (like game Connect Four). The players answer math questions to connect the pieces. Teacher chooses how much time each player has to answer, the level of difficulty, and the type of math problem. Grades: 2-8; cost: Free

Funbrain has been helping students learn key math concepts and develop crucial skills since 1997. Students can choose from a slew of games. The best part? It's all free! Grades: PreK-8; c ost: Free

Organized by grade or subject, your students can play math games and get homework help. Grades: PreK-7; c ost: Free

45. (formerly Mr. Nussbaum Math)

How would your students like to learn multiplication while shooting hoops? They can do that and more at Toy Theater, which teaches early math concepts through game-based learning. Grades: K-5; cost: Free

Best Math Websites: Resources for Teachers
Sources for teachers that provide lesson-planning resources and professional development materials.
With their interesting lesson plans and quirky questions (e.g., "Do people with small feet pay too much for shoes?"), math class will never again be boring. Grades: 6-12; c ost: $ subscription
For more ideas, check out our collection of math articles. What's on your list of best math websites? Share your ideas in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook.

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63 Awesome Websites for Teaching and Learning Math

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Recently in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook, the conversation turned to the best math websites for teaching and learning math. What a treasure trove! We've gathered all the links and included a short description of each math website, along with a grade level recommendation and the cost, if any.

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The Global Storybooks Portal is designed specifically for teachers, parents, and community members around the world. It makes 40 selected stories from the African Storybook available in major national, immigrant and refugee languages of individual countries, regions, and groups.

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Alison Yang made this amazing graphic to show how teachers can plan explicitly with the ATLs in mind by aligning the objective (learning target), skill indicator, strategy, and most importantly take an evidence-based approach to elicit student learning.

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Alison Yang made this amazing graphic to show how teachers can plan explicitly with the ATLs in mind by aligning the objective (learning target), skill indicator, strategy, and most importantly take an evidence-based approach to elicit student learning.

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Unlock Creativity with The Dot Activities in the Classroom Introducing students to The Dot activities is a fantastic way to encourage creativity, self-confidence, and a growth mindset. The Dot by Peter Reynolds tells the inspiring story of Vashti, a young

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Get all the picture book info you need to use them effectively in your classroom. I post lists on comprehension skills, values and attitudes.

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Working on ATLs

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As mentioned in an earlier pos t Mark and I have been working on ways to build a community of researchers in school. We're excited to be presenting about this at the upcoming IB Global Conference in Abu Dhabi.

Before we could begin thinking about what this might look like in the classroom, we identified a struggle many teachers were having with the ATLs. Even after reading the guidance in From Principles to Practice on the subskills that make up Research Skills, and some great work from educators such as Suzanne Kitto who shared great graphic breakdowns online, teachers still didn't feel confident that they knew which skills within these approaches to learning they were aiming to teach.

As a school that operates with students grouped by grade we decided that for us the most logical step would be to break the skills down further to show progression through PYP, transition into MYP and continued growth through to Grade 10. This would increase the implementation of the ATLs by building teacher understanding and confidence, increase student capability by helping them to understand and access the pathway to growth, and help administrators target professional development support by having a clearer picture of areas of strength and need. It also works to help us smooth the transition between programmes in a continuum school, as teachers can see where students have come from and are heading towards.

To make the document easier to read we've provided 2 separate PDFs; a PYP version and an MYP version.

PYP (Grades PreK-5th)

MYP (Grades 6-10)

As an example, here is the breakdown for our youngest learners (3-5)

We've tried to align the MYP to the PYP as best we can to help with the transition between programmes and to help students as they'll be extending their skills in similar areas each year - an approach we've had great success with in writing in the past two years.

This is just a supporting document in the process of building research skills in our community. The next steps are all about how we make sure this becomes practice, and not just a pretty looking chart!

I'm a primary school teacher working in international education. I live with my husband Mark and our 2 kids. View all posts by Emma Wheatley

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Research Skills: Working towards the IB ATLs - Journeys Through Teaching

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As mentioned in an earlier post Mark and I have been working on ways to build a community of researchers in school. We're excited to be presenting about this at the upcoming IB Global Conference in Abu Dhabi. Before we could begin thinking about what this might look like in the classroom, we identified a ...

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About: These files were previously available at the freeducation.co.uk website. They stopped their download service and their files are now available here unchanged. These 350 Teachers Report Assistant / Teachers Report Writer report comment bank files can be imported into our free online student progress report generator, School Report Writer .COM - Quick thesaurus demo...

e.g. (click green & red words)... To ↓ improve Sophia ↓ needs to read at home every day.

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RE-Unit-6F-How-do-people-express-their-faith-through-the-arts view in browser download

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French-Unit-1-Moi-All-about-me view in browser download

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French-Unit-8-Largent-de-poche-Pocket-money view in browser download

French-Unit-9-Raconte-moi-une-histoire-Tell-me-a-story view in browser download

French-Unit-10-Vive-le-sport-Our-sporting-lives view in browser download

French-Unit-11-Le-Carnaval-des-animaux-Carnival-of-the-Animals view in browser download

French-Unit-12-Quel-temps-fait-il-Whats-the-weather-like view in browser download

French-Unit-13-Bon-appetit-Enjoy-your-meal view in browser download

French-Unit-14-Je-suis-le-musicien-I-am-the-Music-Man view in browser download

French-Unit-15-En-route-pour-lecole-On-the-way-to-school view in browser download

French-Unit-16-Scene-de-plage-Beach-scene view in browser download

French-Unit-17-Les-quatre-saisons-The-four-seasons view in browser download

French-Unit-18-Les-planetes-The-planets view in browser download

French-Unit-19-Notre-ecole-Our-school view in browser download

French-Unit-20-Notre-monde-Our-world view in browser download

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French-Unit-23-Au-parc-d-attractions-At-the-theme-park view in browser download

French-Unit-24-Quoi-de-neuf-Whats-in-the-news view in browser download

German-Unit-1-Alles-uber-mich-All-about-me view in browser download

German-Unit-2-Lieder-und-Spiele-Songs-and-games view in browser download

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Spanish-Unit-1-Yo-All-about-me view in browser download

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SchoolReportWriter.COM - 40k comments - 94% teacher rating

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About: These files were previously available at the freeducation.co.uk website. They stopped their download service and their files are now available here unchanged. These 350 Teachers Report Assistant / Teachers Report Writer report comment bank files can be imported into our free online student progress report generator, School Report Writer .COM - Quick thesaurus demo...

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This post first appeared on Corwin Connect. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, making outer space the next battleground of the Cold War. It also sent a shockwave through the American public that demanded improvements in U.S. schools.... Read More ›

Source: Designing for Growth Mindset Across the Curriculum - Corwin Connect

Below are three excerpts I use in my workshops with parents and teachers. They just scratch the surface of research telling us that we underestimate the potential of students and that our beliefs have a tremendous impact on achievement. What... Read More ›

How do we turn on the brain and get it ready for the day's lesson? There are a number of strategies to help students connect what they already think or know about a topic - and help us to see... Read More ›

Originally posted on Education to Save the World:
Planning is done. You have around 3 - 5 powerful statements of conceptual relationships, a conceptual lens, questions that lead to discovery of the relationships and a list of corresponding facts and...

Originally posted on Education to Save the World:
I always understood that my relationships with students would reduce the number of discipline problems, increase motivation and ultimately learning. But - WOW - I wish I had known more about the...

Well, we haven't written in quite some time - we've been busy! We are thrilled to announce the forthcoming publication of our first two books: Tools for Teaching Conceptual Understanding. The secondary edition will be out in January and the elementary... Read More ›

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This post first appeared on Corwin Connect. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, making outer space the next battleground of the Cold War. It also sent a shockwave through the American public that demanded improvements in U.S. schools....

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PYP Transdisciplinary Themes Provocations - HonorsGradU

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But similar to how my view of the PYP key concepts has broadened over time, so too is my view of this theme. I have come to better understand that expressing ourselves is a basic human need that is woven into all we do.

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Introducing math and science through inquiry and problem-based instruction can pay off throughout elementary school, according to a massive international series of studies.

Education economists Emma Näslund-Hadley and Rosangela Bando, of the Inter-American Development Bank, and Paul Gertler of the University of California, Berkeley, conducted 10 randomized controlled experiments with more than 17,000 students in Argentina, Belize, Paraguay, and Peru, four countries working with the Inter-American Development Bank to implement inquiry-based math and science programs.

The researchers randomly assigned preschool, 3rd, and 4th grade classes to use either inquiry-based instruction or the standard math and science instruction in their schools-which generally involved teacher lectures, memorization, and practice. (While students in most countries were assigned by class, in Peru students were taught in small groups of four to seven students, and so they were assigned individually.)

The studies were laid out last week in a working paper of the National Bureau of Economic Research. The findings come as more schools in the United States and throughout the Americas explore problem- and inquiry-based programs, particularly in science and math. These are the largest-scale randomized trials on the approach, and the first to look at preschool students as well as those in elementary grades.

Difference in Practice

A typical lesson looked very different in the standard and inquiry-based classes.

"When kids did hands-on experiments in [a standard] science class, the teacher was doing the experiment in front of the class-no opportunity for hands-on learning," Näslund-Hadley said.

In a unit on ratios in Belize, for example, a teacher in a typical math class would explain the definition of a ratio and demonstrate basic problems; students then spent the rest of the period practicing problems, before being quizzed.

In the inquiry class, by contrast, the teacher compared the number of students wearing short- and long-sleeved shirts and similar examples within the classroom to start students thinking about the concept, then paired off students to come up with their own definitions of what a ratio could be. The class worked though exercises on how ratios might be used in real life, such as using colored rods of different lengths to measure their desks and look at the relationships between the unit length and the number of rods needed to measure. Then the teacher and class discussed their findings and decided on a revised definition of the ratio concept.

Inquiry- or problem-based learning has taken off in recent years in U.S. schools in the wake of Common Core State Standards and Next-Generation Science Standards, as well as in schools around the world.

The researchers compared the range of scores on standardized math and science tests in each group before starting to implement the inquiry-based instruction, and then again seven months later. They found that in the classes that used inquiry-based instruction at least four days a week for during that time, students improved significantly more in math and science than students in the regular classes. The average student in inquiry classes performed 0.14 of a standard deviation higher than the average student in a standard class in science and 0.18 of a standard deviation higher in math by the end of the school year.

Students across grades and across countries showed similar benefits from the inquiry-based classes, including the preschoolers.

"It's fascinating because when we have discussed the possibility of doing this research with governments in the region, they said, 'Oh, the children must be too young to do anything like this,' " Näslund-Hadley said, "and now they've actually noted that that is possible for younger children to think like a scientist."

"Clearly it is possible to work scientific and mathematical thinking from a very, very early age without making it ... rote memorization," she said.

At that rate of improvement, the researchers estimated the average student in inquiry-based math and science classes for four years would perform nearly two-fifths of a standard deviation better than their peers in math and more than one-fifth of a standard deviation better in science. Standard deviation is the measure of how a given set of test scores vary.

Gender Gaps and Costs

While both boys and girls improved in inquiry-based classes, the researchers found that boys improved faster, widening the gender achievement gap. Overall, boys in inquiry classrooms improved by .22 of a standard deviation over peers in math, compared to girls improving .15 of a standard deviation more than peers in standard classes. The same held in science, with boys improving .18 of a standard deviation, compared to a tenth of a standard deviation for girls.

"That was highly shocking," Näslund-Hadley said. "It's not that girls lost ground from the inquiry; they grew more than boys [in standard classes.] The bump in improved learning was so much greater for the boys.

"What we saw with respect to gender was the teachers appear to have implicit gender biases and tend to focus more on the boys in the classroom," she said. In projects that involved more group and class discussions and collaboration, that problem was exacerbated. Näslund-Hadley said the countries have since been working to provide more training before and during implementation to encourage teachers to involve students more equitably.

Still, the studies found inquiry- or problem-based instruction could prove more cost-effective than standard instruction, particularly for improving achievement for low-income students. (Average incomes in the countries range from just over $4,000 a year in Paraguay to $12,440 a year in Argentina, in U.S. dollars.)

Using the inquiry-based instruction, the researchers found the cost of increasing math test scores by a tenth of a standard deviation in a year was just over $18 per student in math and under $18 per student in science.

"It's interesting to observe that it not only works, but works in a variety of contexts. That makes the investment more worthwhile," said Bando of the Inter-American Development Bank. She noted that the bank has since been working with the governments to provide the framework and materials for the curriculums for free.

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Introducing math and science through inquiry and problem-based instruction can pay off throughout elementary school, according to a massive international series of studies.

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Short division / bus stop method division with place value counters

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75 digital tools and apps teachers can use to support formative assessment in the classroom

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We’ve compiled an extensive list of 75 digital tools that can help teachers use formative assessment to elicit evidence of student learning.

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3 Ways to Boost Students' Conceptual Thinking

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Coaching students to think in terms of concepts helps them understand how to apply their learning in the future.

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Last week in Palm Springs, I had the pleasure of coaching a 9th-grade math teacher. It was exciting to work with a math teacher who was eager to try using the station rotation model in her math classroom.

Math instruction tends to be linear with each lesson building on the one before. This can make it challenging for teachers, who are used to using whole group teacher-led lessons, to transition to blended learning models. The station rotation model poses additional challenges since teachers have a hard time conceptualizing what will happen at the stations that are not the teacher-led station. I hope this blog post will help to provide clarity about how to think about and plan a math station rotation.

When I coach math teachers using the station rotation model, I suggest that they think about the whole week instead of focusing myopically on a single lesson. Taking a week's view of lesson planning can make planning the various stations more manageable.

It also helps to think about the stations as playing a particular role in the lesson.

The teacher-led station can build linearly over the course of the week allowing the teacher to progress through the curriculum.

The online station can be used to engage students in creative application or personalized practice.

The creative application of mathematical concepts using online tools can give students a degree of agency in the lesson.

Personalized practice can allow students who are struggling to review concepts while providing students who are ready for the next challenge to move ahead.

The offline station can then be used to spiral back to review. It is ideal if this spiral review engages students in collaborative problem-solving. This way, students can use each other as resources.

Below are some of the strategies, technology tools, and math resources I use when I am designing a station rotation lesson.

If you have another strategy, technology tool, or math resource you enjoy using, please post a comment and share it!

This entry was posted in Learning. Bookmark the permalink.

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Planning a Station Rotation Lesson for Your Math Classroom

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Last week in Palm Springs, I had the pleasure of coaching a 9th-grade math teacher. It was exciting to work with a math teacher who was eager to try using the station rotation model in her math classroom. Math instruction

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Creating a mind map is an excellent way to generate and write down ideas connected to a central topic. I frequently use mind maps to generate ideas for blog posts and for workshop topics. Students can use them to generate ideas for creative writing, to plan presentations, and to record all of the factors contributing to a central event. Flowcharts help students see how a process works from start to finish. Here are ten free tools that students and teachers can use to create mind mind maps and flowcharts.

Google Slides & PowerPoint
If your students have a computer in front of them, they probably have access to either Google Slides or PowerPoint or both. Google Slides and PowerPoint have built-in tools that students can use to create flowcharts. The following videos demonstrate how students can use Google Slides and PowerPoint to create flowcharts. As you'll see in the videos, you can make the flowcharts interactive through the use of linking in PowerPoint and Google Slides.

Bubbl.us
Bubbl.us is a mind mapping and flowchart tool that I've been recommending for more than a decade. It has evolved overtime to keep up with the needs of students, teachers, and other users.Creating mind maps on Bubbl.us is an easy process of simply clicking on the center of your screen then entering the central topic of your mind map. The next step is to add "child" topics or bubbles that are connected to the central topic. Those are added by clicking the "+" that appears while holding your cursor over an existing bubble.

Padlet
Padlet offers templates for creating flowcharts and know, want, learn charts. Unfortunately, you can only make three Padlet walls before you have to either delete one to make a new one or upgrade to a paid plan. The upside to using Padlet is that it's designed for collaboration.

Text2MindMap
This is a mind mapping tool that was a commercial project for a few years before going out of business then coming back as an open-source project supported by Tobias Løfgren. The way that it works is that you type a linear outline and Text2MindMap will automatically generate a corresponding mind map. To use it simply go here, clear the existing text and replace it with your own text. Every line that you type in your outline becomes a node in the mind map. You can create a branch from a node by simply indenting a line in your outline (see my screenshot below for an example).

Post-it App for Android and iOS
The Post-it mobile apps for Android and iOS let you take a picture of physical sticky notes and then sort them on a digital canvas. By the way, you can save 10% on Post-it notes on Amazon when you use the code 10OFFCOLLEGE before October 15th.

MindMup
MindMup is a free mind mapping tool that can be used online, with Google Drive, and on your desktop. MindMup works like most mind mapping tools in that you can create a central idea and add child and sibling nodes all over a blank canvas. MindMup nodes can contain text and links. When you're ready to save your MindMup mind map you can save it to Google Drive, save it to your desktop, or publish it online. If you publish it online, you can grab an embed code for it to post it in a blog post or webpage.

Coggle
Coggle is a collaborative mind-mapping service that is very easy to use. To create a Coggle mind map just sign-in with your Google account and click the "+" icon to start your mind map. After entering the main idea of your mind map you can add branches by clicking the "+" icons that appear next to everything you type. To re-arrange elements just click on them and drag them around your screen. Coggle is a collaborative tool. You can invite others to view and edit your mind maps.

Google Drawings and Google Jamboard
Both of these free Google tools can be used to create mind maps and flowcharts. Drawings has more features than Jamboard. The upside of Jamboard is that it's probably a more intuitive tool for new users. Demonstrations of how to use both tools are embedded below.

SpiderScribe
Spider Scribe is an online mind map creation service. Spider Scribe can be used individually or be used collaboratively. What jumps out about Spider Scribe is that users can add images, maps, calendars, text notes, and uploaded text files to their mind maps. Users can connect the elements on their mind maps or let them each stand on their own. You can embed your interactive SpiderScribe mind map into your blog or website.

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Ten Free Tools for Creating Mind Maps and Flowcharts - Updated for 2019-20

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Creating a mind map is an excellent way to generate and write down ideas connected to a central topic. I frequently use mind maps to generate ideas for blog posts and for workshop topics. Students can use them to generate ideas for creative writing, to plan presentations, and to record all of the factors contributing to a central event.

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As I wrote in my Goalsetting blog post, one of our school goals this year is to increase opportunities for students to become assessment capable learners.

We have structured our PYP units a little differently this year, as the enhanced PYP is allowing for more freedom and agency to provide authentic experiences for our students. I am planning to write a blog post about that later, but for the purpose of this post I will explain a couple of things.

Our How We Express Ourselves unit is mostly year long. Before any unit begins, we are taking 2 weeks to really focus on HWEO and the communication skills that will support us with the upcoming unit. In this case, our upcoming unit (starting after our October break) is How the World Works.

We are focusing on the "Exchanging Information" sub skills of communication skills, which are listening, interpreting, and speaking.

At the beginning of the first HWEO unit we had 3-way conferences. This was a great opportunity to start looking at these skills... however, we only had 2 days because of other time constraints!

We wanted ALL 100+ students to have input to the process. Our pedagogy coach Fiona Hurtado had already gone through this process with our year group leader Paul Cheevers and his class for time management skills. So one class had experience, but the other 4 did not.

In individual classes, we played some speaking and listening games and role playing.

Then we brainstormed what each of these skills COULD look like. Good, bad, and anything in between.

Then we took all of those things and sorted them into whether this would be Guided, Independent, or Leading (we usually have Shared in between Guided and Independent, but wanted to make it more simple). Each class was a little different than the next.

At this point we had 5 different rubrics that were all FULL of too much information. On the second day, the teachers met and looked at the similarities to make one rubric for the whole studio. We aligned it across the rubric so numbers matched and students would be able to measure themselves on certain pieces of a skill.

We then made one more simplified version to outline what the important things are to measure and remember about each skill. The numbers match the rubric above.

Students used the rubric with their parents at 3-way conferences. Next week, teachers are running 9 workshops to align with each of these important things about each skill. Students will choose 2-3 workshops to attend before reassessing themselves on another speaking/listening activity.

How have you ensured students have voice and ownership over their assessments? Have you gone through a similar process?
​
Are you thinking of taking this rubric? Of course you can, but I really encourage you to go through the process with your students instead. Rubrics often hold so much information in them, so for students to be involved in making them, you are giving them a better chance to actually understand what is in it.

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​Passionate Educator and Innovation Coach. MA in Learning Design and Technology. ​ Apple Distinguished Educator 2019, Google Certified Coach, ISTE Certified Educator, Book Creator and Seesaw...

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Teacher tool kit for higher order questioning 

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Teacher tool kit for higher order questioning 

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I was recently listening to George Couros talk about Ryan Gosling in his presentation. I had seen the presentation before and loved the video he shared where a man battling cancer created these Gosling videos while in the hospital.

The story struck a chord the first time I heard it, but this time it was different because of another story I heard about Ryan Gosling from author Shane Snow. Here's what Shane shared:

Ryan Gosling grew up in Canada. His dad was a traveling salesman, so they moved a lot. The family fell apart when Ryan was young, and he ended up being raised by a working mom and his sister.

The family trouble affected him. He didn't learn to read until far later than most kids.

He brought knives to primary school and threw them at other kids, because for some reason his mom let him watch Rambo, and it was one of his favorite movies.

(Imagine a skinny six-year-old sitting cross-legged in front of a 15-inch TV day after day, watching Sly shoot explosive arrows at helicopters, while Mom works late.)

He had ADHD. He loved Marlon Brando. Kids picked on him; he had no friends.

At age 12, Ryan decided to go to a Mickey Mouse Club audition in Montreal. He was a cute kid, and they let him in.

He then moved to Orlando, where he was taken in by none other than Justin Timberlake's mom! (She became his legal guardian, so pseudo-adopted.) He learned to perform.

He learned to read. He learned to focus.

He grew up.

...and then he became Ryan Gosling.

And now, I watch every one of his movies when they come out in the theater.

Ten minutes on Wikipedia turned me from apathetic to advocate. I'm on Team Gosling, and I'm on it simply because I learned his story.
You've probably experienced this phenomenon yourself at some point in time.
It always happens in the same way:
You don't care about someone, something, or you have a preconceived notion of how you should feel about someone or something. You hear, read, or watch a story about that someone or something. You have a newfound respect, understanding, and empathy for that someone or something.
This is not some magical trick that happens to all of us. It is the science of stories, and how they impact our learning and empathy for others.

The short version of the science is this: Our brains pay special attention to stories, engaging more areas of the mind then when we hear or see facts. And when we learn a good story, our brains synthesize the neurochemical oxytocin. This helps us feel others' emotions and empathize with them.

Scientists have shown that high oxytocin levels lead us to donate more to charity, be more interested in people's well-being, and have more respect for "others" who aren't like us.

Whether it is Ryan Gosling, or a co-worker, or a student, or an enemy. When we know each other's stories, we find empathy in places we did not expect to find it.

The Science Behind Storytelling

Every night before my boys go to bed I tell them a story. Sometimes it is based on the day's events, and other times it is a story about when I was a child, but usually, it is completely made up, and they love it. They also vividly remembers the stories later on.

If I hit on a similar theme or topic in my bedtime story the next day, or next week, or even next month, they call me on it. They let me know that I talked about that before, or that this sounds like the other story I told them. They'll also relate our bedtime stories to real events that happen, and many of the same themes and topics that come up in our stories, come up in our lives.

This is not unique to my kids, instead, it is based in science and research. " A 2010 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed an intimate connection between the brain activity of speakers and listeners in conversation, demonstrating how the brain of an engaged listener "syncs up" with a speaker. By engaging students with compelling stories that impart important material, teachers reach students both emotionally and biochemically, increasing the potential for rich learning experiences."

Sherrelle Walker - a teacher, administrator, and professor of 30 years - wrote about the science behind stories:

Scientists have long known that human beings are storytelling creatures. For centuries, we have told stories to transmit information, share histories, and teach important lessons. While stories often have a profound effect on us due to emotional content, recent research also shows that our brains are actually hard-wired to seek out a coherent narrative structure in the stories we hear and tell. This structure helps us absorb the information in a story, and connect it with our own experiences in the world.

So, if you are like me, maybe this is all starting to make sense. I know that I learn best through experience and stories. If I think back on some of my best learning experiences they were often either having to do with hearing a great story or creating a new story. When I look at what articles I enjoy, they almost always teach me something through a story. That is the initial hook of many great learning experiences.

But yet, so often in our techno-focused world, we fail to take the time to actually teach through stories. I'm guilty of this, you might be too. Technology is a great tool for learning, but guess what, storytelling might be a better tool, and it builds empathy.

Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer, wrote a fantastic article on the science behind storytelling. He explains that our brains can't help but function differently when we are being told a story:

When we are being told a story, things in our brain change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too. And yet, it gets better.

When we tell stories to others that have really helped us shape our thinking and way of life, we can have the same effect on them too. The brains of the person telling a story and listening to it can synchronize, says Uri Hasson from Princeton:

"When the woman spoke English, the volunteers understood her story, and their brains synchronized. When she had activity in her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners' brains."

Anything you've experienced, you can get others to experience the same. Or at least, get their brain areas that you've activated that way, active too.

Stories provide a window and a mirror into our lives and the lives of others. And, isn't that what empathy is all about. Putting yourself in another person's position and perspective.

Empathy: The Most Important 21st Century Skill

It's 2019.

Communication is changing fast (my 10-yr old daughter and I just exchanged Snaps while I am in Minnesota and she is outside of Philadelphia in different time zones, with real-time interaction).

Collaboration has evolved to a point of instantaneous feedback loops (my colleague and I are on a shared Google Slide presentation changing and adding to slides for this week's presentation in real-time, able to modify and go back to old versions if need be. We also shared this with someone who is going to be in the presentation to get their feedback on a teacher perspective.)

Critical Thinking has become a necessity in order to not only solve big problems, but everyday issues (we know teachers learn best from other teachers, but it is increasingly harder to get teachers into each other's room due to sub shortages and other factors. We bought a 360 camera and are going to film to elementary teacher's lessons this week in order to share with other staff while they watch using VR headsets to see the entire room as if they were in the classroom on a visit.)

Creativity is a part of our everyday lives. No longer reserved for the few, we must all be creative and innovative in order to do our daily work (with all of the great work currently happening in our school districts, I'm working with a small team to create an innovative and simple way to share out the stories of teaching and learning with our community!)

Yes, those bolded terms are what we commonly refer to as "21st Century Skills", yet I'm fairly certain that these were always NEEDED skills.

Socrates was talking about these 21st century skills over 20 centuries ago.

The Socratic Method is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presumptions.

We still use this method today, and it is still effective.

Regardless of what we call them, the 21st century skills represent a type of skill that is not traditionally connected to standards and skills our students are evaluated on. Even though we know these types of skills are imperative to success in the workplace, in relationships, and in life--they are still seen often as "nice to have" instead of "need to have" for our students.

Yet, I believe one big skill is missing from this list (and maybe many more). Seth Godin recently wrote an article, " Let's Stop Calling Them Soft Skills", in which he describes five categories of skills that we all look for in colleagues, employees, and students--yet, don't seem to value over other content and standardized skills.

One of the skills he lists that I agree with is empathy.

Many confuse empathy (feeling with someone) with sympathy (feeling sorry for someone), and even researchers who study it have muddied the waters with many definitions. But the author of The Empathy Effect, Dr. Helen Riess does a good job of untangling that and explaining the many dimensions of empathy.

Empathy, she writes, involves an ability to perceive others' feelings (and to recognize our own emotions), to imagine why someone might be feeling a certain way, and to have concern for their welfare. Once empathy is activated, compassionate action is the most logical response.

The question is, can we teach empathy?

Riess (who is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston) has done the research to show it can be taught: Our neural networks are set up to interact with the neural networks of others in order to both perceive and understand their emotions and to differentiate them from our own, which makes it possible for humans to live with one another without constantly fighting or feeling taken over by someone else.

Research has shown that empathy is not simply inborn, but can actually be taught. For example, it appears that medical training can actually diminish empathy, but on the other hand, physicians can be taught to be more empathic to their patients. Interestingly, their increased empathy also increases patient satisfaction and compliance with treatment recommendations.

It seems the two most common ways to teach empathy are through modeling (being empathetic yourself and reflecting on what this looks like) and through stories (literature that mirrors our world).

Stories are often told in History and Language Arts classes, but are they used effectively? And are we ever thinking about teaching with stories in the STEM subjects? For example, John Spencer's book, Wendell the World's Worst Wizard, teaches "making" and "STEM" concepts through the story of a young wizard with no magical powers.

Think of all the ways our learners can grasp on to these concepts when they are tied together with a story.

I'd argue that one of the most innovative ways to teach may be to slow down and tell a story. Figuring out what story to tell, and how it connects, is the job of any great teacher.

If we want our students to impact the world around them, they'll need some inspiration from the stories of those that have already changed the world.
Somehow I was never told to "teach with stories" when I was starting out as a teacher, even though that is one of the best ways in which I learn. However, "story-driven learning" may be one of the most underused and oldest methods of teaching and the most effective ways to teach empathy.
In this free course, we share 10 Research-Backed Ways to Boost Learning and Performance.

You'll get access to:

10 Modules (each focused on one key area of learning research)- Work through the course module-by-module focusing on the research and the practice.

Benchmarks and Action Items - Every learning module has specific actions for you to try out.

Online Community - Join the Private FB Group and get 24/7 access to our community.

Downloads and Templates - We share many templates and downloads throughout that you can tweak and modify to make your own.

It is definitely NOT content overload. Each video is 11 minutes or less with specific ways the research can impact your practice as a teacher, coach, or leader. The course has two main objectives:

Goal #1: Understanding the Research - First, we need to see what works.

Goal #2: Putting It Into Practice - Next, we need to understand how to apply the practice to our situation.

Check out our new course, Theory to Practice: The Science of Learning. t

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Empathy: The Most Important 21st Century Skill

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I was recently listening to George Couros talk about Ryan Gosling in his presentation. I had seen the presentation before and loved the video he shared where a man battling cancer created these Gosling videos while in the hospital.

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Rubric for Becoming an Inquiry Based Teacher

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Approaches to Learning IB Document

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Inquiries that develop from the same prompt can follow very different pathways. They might last one lesson or extend over a series of lessons and might involve students in working collaboratively on one line of inquiry or individually on multiple lines. Nevertheless, the teacher should bear in mind the following seven components of mathematical inquiry when navigating a lesson.

Orientation to the prompt: questioning and noticing
The teacher invites pairs of students to make an observation or pose a question about the prompt, providing the class with stems (examples below) if appropriate.

The teacher reviews the questions and statements (perhaps 'thinking aloud') and might take the opportunity to comment on possible directions the inquiry could take. Students select a - a selection that is then justified in a class discussion.period, they might have formed a generalisation through induction.

Find more question stems to promote mathematical thinking h ere .
Establishing aims and planning actions
regulatory card
Exploration
Students might decide on a period of exploration when they aim to generate more examples or find a case that satisfies the condition in the prompt. At the end of this
Instruction
Students identify an impasse that can only be overcome with new conceptual or procedural knowledge. Their request for instruction might lead to an episode of whole-class teaching or to small-group instruction (from the teacher or a student).

Students prove a conjecture or generalisation they have made earlier in the inquiry. They reason deductively, perhaps with formal algebra or through a structural analysis of a mathematical model.or suggest new ideas and directions to the class.Explaining and proving

Presenting results
Students present their results in written or other forms. The teacher often calls on students to present their work in progress
Reflecting and evaluating

The teacher leads students in reflecting on the course of the inquiry, and in evaluating how successfully the class has resolved the questions posed at the beginning.

Resources

An Inquiry Maths lesson plan

Audrey Stafford (a teacher in Niagara Falls, New York) contacted Inquiry Maths to request a blank lesson plan template. Audrey teaches 5th grade in upper elementary and reports that inquiry teaching is becoming more popular in the US. Click h ere for a generic lesson plan with questions to help teachers prepare for inquiries and consider the resources required for different levels of inquiry .

Click here for a brief questionnaire to collect students' feedback on the differences and similarities between inquiry and other lessons.

Amelia O'Brien, a grade 6 PYP teacher at the Luanda International School (Angola), has shared herM aths Inquiry Template with Inquiry Maths. The template helps students think about concepts relevant to the prompt and plan the inquiry. In their most recent inquiry, Amelia's pupils posed generative questions that opened up new pathways for inquiry (see a reporth ere under the title 'Question-driven inquiry').

10 questions to evaluate Inquiry Maths

These questions were designed to facilitate a discussion among members of a school maths department. The team had collaborated in planning and running an inquiry in each of four year groups.

1. Did the students ask the questions and make the observations about the prompt that you expected? Give examples.
2. What did you do after the question and observation phase?
3. What types of cards did students choose to regulate the direction of the inquiry?
4. What suggestions did students make to change the prompt? Or did you direct the changes?
5. What conjectures and generalisations did the students make?
6. How did the students generalise the mathematical properties of the prompt?
7. What concepts and/or procedures did students learn about during the inquiry?
8. What was the most challenging part of the inquiry? For you? For the students?
9. What was most rewarding about the inquiry? For you? For the students?
10. Do you have any evidence that students worked more independently from you than usual?

Inquiry Maths lessons are responsive to students' questions and observations about the prompt. The seven components of mathematical inquiry are, therefore, not intended to be seen as a linear process in which each component follows on from the one before in strict order . Rather, as Kath Murdoch says in The Power of Inquiry , the parts are "phases more than they are stages, elements more than they are steps." For example, the teacher should promote questioning throughout the inquiry, not just at the beginning. In this way, students deepen their initial questions and generate more lines of inquiry.

However, the Inquiry Maths model is built on Polya's view of mathematics as a process in which deduction 'completes' induction.

Polya's description suggests mathematical inquiry is linear, advancing from inductive exploration to deductive reasoning. While this might be the general trend, the relationship between the two is not necessarily linear. Inquiries can zig-zag between induction and deduction when, for example, students use empirical tests to amend deductive arguments. Students can also use algebraic or structural reasoning from the start and extend the inquiry by changing the properties of the prompt.

Frequently asked questions
(1) Can you expect students to inquire into topics without being given content knowledge beforehand?
Yes. Inquiry lessons do not preclude the 'transfer' of knowledge. They are not discovery lessons in which students are expected to discover a concept independently. If students identify a need for new conceptual or procedural knowledge to make progress during an inquiry, the teacher should give instruction. Moreover, if students request an explanation, they are more likely to be motivated to listen and engage actively with what the teacher says.

(2) Can you expect students in bottom sets to take part in inquiry lessons?
Yes. Often students are in bottom sets because they do not have the higher order skills required to regulate learning. Inquiry Maths gives all students the opportunity to develop those skills. To introduce inquiry (to any class), a teacher would require students to pose questions or make observations about the prompt. The inquiry could then be closed down, with the teacher structuring the rest of the lesson. (For advice on the type of inquiry to run, see levels of inquiry .)

Inquiry Maths prompts are designed around concepts in the school curriculum. You might start by choosing a prompt linked to the topic in your scheme of learning. However, the prompts as presented on the website are not suitable for all classes. A prompt should be set just above the understanding of the class to promote curiosity (see this (3) What prompt should I choose to get started? p ost ). Thus, you might adapt the prompt. An example comes from a secondary school maths department that was using the

Main prompt

40% of 70 = 70% of 40

Alternatives

50% of 10 = 10% of 50

40% of 30% of 20 = 20% of 30% of 40

percentages prompt . The prompt on the website would have provided little intrigue for the highest set, but would have been too challenging for the lowest. So the teachers adapted the prompt for their own classes as shown in the table.

This question comes from Firstly, the teacher can take more responsibility for structuring the inquiry by, for example, preparing a pathway for students to follow in the first lesson and then planning subsequent lessons that respond to the students' questions and observations. Secondly, prompts can be adapted to ensure they are both (4) How can you make inquiry more accessible? Zisfein
Alex , a secondary teacher of mathematics in New York City, who felt the prompts are more suitable for advanced classrooms, rather than for general education groups . There are two ways to make the prompts more accessible familiar and unfamiliar. Familiarity gives students confidence to analyse and transform the prompt; unfamiliarity generates curiosity to understand the prompt more deeply.

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Inquiries that develop from the same prompt can follow very different pathways. They might last one lesson or extend over a series of lessons and might involve students in working collaboratively on one line of inquiry or individually on multiple lines. Nevertheless, the teacher should bear in mind the following seven components of mathematical inquiry when navigating a lesson.

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I used to be a strong advocate for creating PYP planners for stand alone maths and can still see a lot of merit in them.

But, lately I feel slightly dissatisfied because with the PYP planner format for maths stand alone because it makes a unit too teacher-driven and this makes inquiry-based maths learning difficult to achieve. For maths stand alone, unless you are willing to go the extra mile and complete all the profiles etc etc, it becomes a mammoth amount of documenting when it shouldn't be for maths.

So, I've been playing around with different ways we could create a PYP planner for maths that is perhaps more practical for teachers to use and more importantly to make maths unit more student driven and inquiry-based.

The sample below isn't completed as we are still in the midst of our enquiries.
What I like about it is that it ensures the provocations and pre-assessment wonderings give the students voice in what they will enquire into. It values the student wonderings and ensures those wonderings drive our unit.
Tapping into student curiosities is the bedrock of inquiry-based classrooms and this should also happen with mathematical learning. When the children explore what they really want to know rather than what a scope & sequence document dicates what they have to know, the learning instantly becomes authentic, inspiring and meaningful. I like to think those conceptual and skill understandings will have far more longevity in their memories too for when they revisit those maths concepts in later years.

Sample format:

Strand /Topic: 2D Shapes & Measuring Angles

(Needs to be done post-area unit due need to understand quadrilaterals can be 2 triangles)

Duration: 3 weeks approximately depending on student-initiated enquiries

Links to UOI etc: Visual Arts- Cubist art making: angles used

° Maintaining wonder wall of questions helped raise curiosity and allowed for easier student-owned investigations

° Not leading students to cut angles off triangles to find connection with straight angle and ditto for quadrilaterals with circle at own pace of discovery made it more authentic and meaningful for those students

° open enquiry into the central idea- amazing!

° doing studyladder protractor on data screen helped a lot in showing how to use a protractor for those who didn't know!

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I used to be a strong advocate for creating PYP planners for stand alone maths and can still see a lot of merit in them. But, lately I feel slightly dissatisfied because with the PYP planner format for maths stand alone because it makes a unit too teacher-driven and this makes inquiry-based maths learning difficult to achieve.

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An Integrated Inquiry-based Approach to Grammar

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English Español 한국어 日本語 Deutsch Português Français Magyar Italiano

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Inquiries that develop from the same prompt can follow very different pathways. They might last one lesson or extend over a series of lessons and might involve students in working collaboratively on one line of inquiry or individually on multiple lines. Nevertheless, the teacher should bear in mind the following seven components of mathematical inquiry when navigating a lesson.

Orientation to the prompt: questioning and noticing
The teacher invites pairs of students to make an observation or pose a question about the prompt, providing the class with stems (examples below) if appropriate.

The teacher reviews the questions and statements (perhaps 'thinking aloud') and might take the opportunity to comment on possible directions the inquiry could take. Students select a - a selection that is then justified in a class discussion.period, they might have formed a generalisation through induction.

Find more question stems to promote mathematical thinking h ere .
Establishing aims and planning actions
regulatory card
Exploration
Students might decide on a period of exploration when they aim to generate more examples or find a case that satisfies the condition in the prompt. At the end of this
Instruction
Students identify an impasse that can only be overcome with new conceptual or procedural knowledge. Their request for instruction might lead to an episode of whole-class teaching or to small-group instruction (from the teacher or a student).

Students prove a conjecture or generalisation they have made earlier in the inquiry. They reason deductively, perhaps with formal algebra or through a structural analysis of a mathematical model.or suggest new ideas and directions to the class.Explaining and proving

Presenting results
Students present their results in written or other forms. The teacher often calls on students to present their work in progress
Reflecting and evaluating

The teacher leads students in reflecting on the course of the inquiry, and in evaluating how successfully the class has resolved the questions posed at the beginning.

Resources

An Inquiry Maths lesson plan

Audrey Stafford (a teacher in Niagara Falls, New York) contacted Inquiry Maths to request a blank lesson plan template. Audrey teaches 5th grade in upper elementary and reports that inquiry teaching is becoming more popular in the US. Click h ere for a generic lesson plan with questions to help teachers prepare for inquiries and consider the resources required for different levels of inquiry .

Click here for a brief questionnaire to collect students' feedback on the differences and similarities between inquiry and other lessons.

Amelia O'Brien, a grade 6 PYP teacher at the Luanda International School (Angola), has shared herM aths Inquiry Template with Inquiry Maths. The template helps students think about concepts relevant to the prompt and plan the inquiry. In their most recent inquiry, Amelia's pupils posed generative questions that opened up new pathways for inquiry (see a reporth ere under the title 'Question-driven inquiry').

10 questions to evaluate Inquiry Maths

These questions were designed to facilitate a discussion among members of a school maths department. The team had collaborated in planning and running an inquiry in each of four year groups.

1. Did the students ask the questions and make the observations about the prompt that you expected? Give examples.
2. What did you do after the question and observation phase?
3. What types of cards did students choose to regulate the direction of the inquiry?
4. What suggestions did students make to change the prompt? Or did you direct the changes?
5. What conjectures and generalisations did the students make?
6. How did the students generalise the mathematical properties of the prompt?
7. What concepts and/or procedures did students learn about during the inquiry?
8. What was the most challenging part of the inquiry? For you? For the students?
9. What was most rewarding about the inquiry? For you? For the students?
10. Do you have any evidence that students worked more independently from you than usual?

Inquiry Maths lessons are responsive to students' questions and observations about the prompt. The seven components of mathematical inquiry are, therefore, not intended to be seen as a linear process in which each component follows on from the one before in strict order . Rather, as Kath Murdoch says in The Power of Inquiry , the parts are "phases more than they are stages, elements more than they are steps." For example, the teacher should promote questioning throughout the inquiry, not just at the beginning. In this way, students deepen their initial questions and generate more lines of inquiry.

However, the Inquiry Maths model is built on Polya's view of mathematics as a process in which deduction 'completes' induction.

Polya's description suggests mathematical inquiry is linear, advancing from inductive exploration to deductive reasoning. While this might be the general trend, the relationship between the two is not necessarily linear. Inquiries can zig-zag between induction and deduction when, for example, students use empirical tests to amend deductive arguments. Students can also use algebraic or structural reasoning from the start and extend the inquiry by changing the properties of the prompt.

Frequently asked questions
(1) Can you expect students to inquire into topics without being given content knowledge beforehand?
Yes. Inquiry lessons do not preclude the 'transfer' of knowledge. They are not discovery lessons in which students are expected to discover a concept independently. If students identify a need for new conceptual or procedural knowledge to make progress during an inquiry, the teacher should give instruction. Moreover, if students request an explanation, they are more likely to be motivated to listen and engage actively with what the teacher says.

(2) Can you expect students in bottom sets to take part in inquiry lessons?
Yes. Often students are in bottom sets because they do not have the higher order skills required to regulate learning. Inquiry Maths gives all students the opportunity to develop those skills. To introduce inquiry (to any class), a teacher would require students to pose questions or make observations about the prompt. The inquiry could then be closed down, with the teacher structuring the rest of the lesson. (For advice on the type of inquiry to run, see levels of inquiry .)

Inquiry Maths prompts are designed around concepts in the school curriculum. You might start by choosing a prompt linked to the topic in your scheme of learning. However, the prompts as presented on the website are not suitable for all classes. A prompt should be set just above the understanding of the class to promote curiosity (see this (3) What prompt should I choose to get started? p ost ). Thus, you might adapt the prompt. An example comes from a secondary school maths department that was using the

Main prompt

40% of 70 = 70% of 40

Alternatives

50% of 10 = 10% of 50

40% of 30% of 20 = 20% of 30% of 40

percentages prompt . The prompt on the website would have provided little intrigue for the highest set, but would have been too challenging for the lowest. So the teachers adapted the prompt for their own classes as shown in the table.

This question comes from Firstly, the teacher can take more responsibility for structuring the inquiry by, for example, preparing a pathway for students to follow in the first lesson and then planning subsequent lessons that respond to the students' questions and observations. Secondly, prompts can be adapted to ensure they are both (4) How can you make inquiry more accessible? Zisfein
Alex , a secondary teacher of mathematics in New York City, who felt the prompts are more suitable for advanced classrooms, rather than for general education groups . There are two ways to make the prompts more accessible familiar and unfamiliar. Familiarity gives students confidence to analyse and transform the prompt; unfamiliarity generates curiosity to understand the prompt more deeply.

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Inquiries that develop from the same prompt can follow very different pathways. They might last one lesson or extend over a series of lessons and might involve students in working collaboratively on one line of inquiry or individually on multiple lines. Nevertheless, the teacher should bear in mind the following seven components of mathematical inquiry when navigating a lesson.

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conceptual understanding | SharingPYP Blog

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In looking for a way to deepen student understanding of concepts, while still maintaining fidelity to the single subjects, this article shows the work of the PE department to create conceptual connections while focusing on knowledge, skill and conceptual understandings pertaining to physical education (PE) and beyond.

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(This post contains affiliate links. If you click on a link and purchase the item, I will receive a commission at no extra cost to you.)
**Updated for 2020**

If you have kids in school, read parenting articles, or work in education, you've most definitely heard the buzzword - "growth mindset".

Growth mindset refers to people who think of intelligence as something that can improve and grow with effort and hard work. The term was coined by psychologist Carol Dweck in her best-selling book, Mindset, The New Psychology of Success.

People with a growth mindset, Dweck explains, tend to experience greater success in work, relationships, and life in general than those with a fixed mindset - or people who feel intelligence is set at birth, unmalleable, and impossible to change.

I remember when I first read Mindset a few years ago - the message in the book was revolutionary.

I began to see how much of a fixed mindset I had - placing limits on my abilities and not taking on challenges for fear of failure.

I also started to notice ways I would talk to my daughters that suggested a fixed mindset. Instead of praising their efforts I was praising their results and would caution them instead of encouraging them to take on risks.

Changing the way we talk to our kids is one step towards helping to reinforce the message of a growth mindset. Another is to read books to kids with stories that convey a similar message.

Below are fourteen books that let kids know it's OK to not at first succeed, that failure and challenges can be viewed as opportunities rather than dead ends, and that determination often results in a far better outcome than being perfect.

See Related: Encouraging a Growth Mindset in Children: Resources for Parents

14 Children's Books That Promote a Growth Mindset

Michael feels the reason he isn't very good at basketball is because he's short. His mother suggests he put salt in his shoes and say a prayer to help him grow. But months go by and he still isn't any taller. Finally, while talking to his father, Michael learns that being taller isn't everything - it's practice, determination and giving your best that will that really make the difference. And the rest of Michael Jordan's story is history...

Beatrice is a girl who never makes mistakes - not ever. Until one day she comes close to dropping a few eggs (a mistake) and thereafter her life is governed by the fear of one day making a mistake. Beatrice begins limiting her activities so she will never make a mistake. But Beatrice learns an important lesson about making mistakes after something unexpected happens at the school talent show.

A young boy has a hypothetical problem and he doesn't know what to do with it. He's scared of his problem, tries to hide from it, and worries about his problem. Until one day, even though he's still afraid, the boy can't take it anymore and decides he must face his problem. He then discovers that his problem wasn't as bad as he had made it out to be and even contains something special...opportunity.

From the same author of What Do You Do with a Problem?, is a story of a boy with an idea. Despite having an idea and liking it, the boy brushes it aside and worries what other people will think of his idea. The idea sticks with him, however, and eventually the boy decides to share his idea with other people and some people DO say it's not a good idea and won't become of anything. Eventually, though the boy realizes that these other people may not know what they're talking about. The story ends with an empowering resolution of what can come from the pursuit of good ideas.

Reinforce a growth mindset in kids with these cards. Each card contains an words of encouragement to remind kids to keep trying, that progress is more important than perfection, and that failure is normal and an opportunity to learn. Click here to find out more.

This delightful book is about a young boy named Jabari who announces to his dad that he's now ready to jump off their pool's diving board. But when faced with the prospect of actually jumping, Jabari's hesitant. As he waits in line to climb the diving board stairs, Jabari lets other kids pass in front of him. Eventually, Jabari climbs the ladder but then gets back down and decides to wait until tomorrow. The next day, he climbs up again and after a quick pep talk to himself - finally takes a leap! This story normalizes the fear everyone goes through when faced with new challenges. Jabari's father also serves as a positive coach and support for Jabari as he struggles to take his first dive.

Hana Hashimoto has only taken three violin lessons yet she still signed up for the local talent show. Her brothers think she's crazy since she's just a beginner but Hana is determined...that is until just before her time to go on stage. But remembering advice from her grandfather - also a violinist - Hana performs her act, experiencing her own form of success.

This is the story of Nadia Comaneci, the famous women's gymnast who received seven perfect scores in the 1976 Olympic Games. While Nadia was always busy (couldn't sit still) and seemed to be a natural for gymnastics, her path to stardom wasn't without bumps along the way. When she was nine, Nadia fell three times on a beam exercise at the National Junior Championships competition and came in thirteenth place. While disappointed, Nadia continued to practice and try to perfect her routines - and the rest is history.

A whimsical tale about an artist trying to draw a girl but who keeps making mistakes. Each mistake is turned into an improvement of the drawing, illustrating (literally) how mistakes can be turned into opportunities.

Not all artwork is perfect, and in fact, sometimes mistakes can turn into wonderful designs! Beautiful Oops is a fun, visually appealing book that shows the creative process isn't always perfect and making mistakes can turn out to be excellent opportunities. The companion book, My Beautiful Oops, is a hands-on journal that's sole purpose is to be torn up, folded, smudged and otherwise artistically wreaked.

This simply written book outlines a series of activities that the main character, a stick figure, is OK at - showing kids it's alright to just be OK at many things. The stick figure acknowledges that one day he'll grow up to be excellent at something, but he doesn't know what that is yet, and that too is OK.

Rosie has big dreams of becoming an engineer and spends most of her time tinkering and making machines. Until one day when the uncle she loves most giggles when she shows him a hat she made from parts of a fan and cheddar cheese spray. After that, Rosie begins to keep her dreams to herself. It's not until a great aunt comes to visit and tells Rosie about building airplanes that she helps Rosie see how failures can be turned into opportunities.

Sophie is a young girl who has trouble with puzzles. She just can't do them - or math, for that matter. So when Sophie's teacher tells the class that they will be working on a math puzzle, Sophie feels discouraged. But her teacher assures both Sophie and her classmates that while they may be struggling to solve the puzzle they need to keep in mind the Most Important Word: "yet". They haven't solved the puzzle yet but should keep trying. Her teacher also explains how just like muscles get stronger with exercise, by thinking hard our brains get stronger too. As she continues to encourage the children, they find that by trying new methods they are able to solve the puzzle. Of all the books listed in this list, When Sophie Thinks She Can't... has the most direct growth mindset message for children.

Vashti feels she's can't draw, so after art class, her piece of paper is still blank. With a little subtle encouragement from her teacher and a growing desire to improve, Vashti discovers that she can, in fact, draw and even comes to encourage another student to overcome his discouragement.

Ramon loves to draw - anytime and anywhere. But one day his older brother Leon makes fun of Ramon's work and then all of a sudden drawing is no longer the joy it used to be. Fortunately, Ramon's little sister Marisol sees things differently and lets Ramon see that sometimes art is more than getting things "just right". A valuable tale for any child who questions their artistic ability.

A boy has a dream to catch a star. He tries everything he can to catch a star - jump up and grab it, use a life preserver as a lasso, and then thinks of other possibilities like using a spaceship or getting a seagull to help. In the end, the boy's wish comes true in a somewhat unexpected way.

In this classic tale, Willie is determined to whistle. It's not easy and takes a lot of practice but Willie doesn't give up. He tries and tries until suddenly - he's whistling!

This story follows a boy named RJ as he does the things he enjoys - such as blowing bubbles, playing soccer, and spending time with friends. But when a few friends give him compliments, RJ isn't too sure how to respond. Later, he hears from his teacher and parents that there are a few things he needs to work on. In the end, RJ learns what it means to receive positive and negative feedback and what an appropriate response is in each situation.

While not a book per se, Big Life Journal is full of growth mindset stories, poems, quotes, illustrations, and writing prompts, specifically to encourage a growth mindset in children. Through stories, kids will be inspired by the failures and successes of people like Elon Musk, J.K. Rowling, Walt Disney, and others. The journal is broken down into 26 weeks. And now there's also a Big Life Journal for tweens and teens. See it by clicking here.

Are you wondering when it's appropriate for kids to begin doing certain tasks on their own? Sign up for my weekly emails and you'll receive my one-page Age-Appropriate Guide to Kids' Independence as a free gift. It's essentially a chart showing which tasks parents can expect their kids to be doing at which ages. (Click here to subscribe and get your free list).
See related: Encouraging a Growth Mindset in Children: Resources for Parents 12 Children's Books That Teach Perseverance 10 Children's Books That Teach Empathy

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14 Children's Books That Promote a Growth Mindset

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(This post contains affiliate links. If you click on a link and purchase the item, I will receive a commission at no extra cost to you.) **Updated for 2020** If you have kids in school, read parenting articles, or work in education, you've most definitely heard the buzzword - "growth mindset".

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Blogs to Follow: ​Professional Development Sharing PYP Practice A blog dedicated to sharing what PYP implementation looks like in World School What Ed Said Edna Sackson is a Teacher and…

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Are You Pushing Or Pulling Students In Your Classroom? by Drew Perkins, Director of TeachThought PD
At the risk of characterizing teaching and learning in a factory context let's face it, classrooms are a kind of marketplace system with an exchange of ideas and thinking incentivized by a variety of factors.

With this in mind, it can be helpful to think about the design and architecture of learning in a push vs. pull kind of way. When I say helpful, I mean this in the way that can help us empower students to think and learn about things more deeply while developing a set of processing skills that are transferable to other contexts and situations.

Deconstructing the push vs. pull graphic shown above, how many classroom teachers feel like a 'pushy' salesperson desperate to convince students that what they're selling is worth buying. Some of those techniques include dangling grades and using points as an incentive in learning, trying to convince students they'll need this in the future, or admonishing them for not paying attention because this is going to be on the test.

None of these tend to resonate with students and most often feel less than genuine for teachers. Positioning learning in terms of compliance is always going to be an uphill battle where even the best and most passionate teachers will struggle.

Sure there will be some students who will comply but how many won't? And what do we do about them? Some more authoritarian educators (and non-educators) might take this opportunity to blast current culture and say kids should do what they're told and sometimes that means doing something they don't like.

I agree with this sentiment in some ways, I certainly require my own daughters to comply on certain things, but if that's our go-to it's not only going to be tough-sledding for all parties involved, it's also a potential missed opportunity to build capacity in the learner in a way that might actually better prepare them for the modern world.

Rethinking the dynamics of teaching and learning to pull thinking from students can empower students as they learn how to identify what they need to learn and better understand in order to answer a challenge or question. In project-based learning, this dynamic takes place when a teacher initiates a project with a quality Driving Question and facilitates in a way that helps students identify what they need to understand and remember and as their Need to Know and Learn list.

Some of my favorite moments as a leader of professional development and coaching are seeing that "a-ha" light bulb turn on for teachers as they realize the leverage that this process allows for as students learn how to uncover content. No longer does the teacher need to be solely responsible for 'covering' content, a practice that often feels like climbing the down escalator.

To be clear, this pull dynamic can surface outside of project-based learning, it's the inquiry process that we're focusing on here.

But why is this so important? The simplest answer is that it helps us change the culture and climate of our classrooms and schools away from one where adults and their learners are often inherently in conflict (adult: I want you to learn and do this - student: I don't want to and you can't make me). More importantly perhaps, is the building of a habit of mind where we're helping these future adults to make better decisions, some of which can impact their entire lives.

Consider the 2008 housing crisis. How many people would have been able to avoid the disastrous effects of this market crash had they gone through the process of identifying and learning things they should know and understand before buying a house they couldn't actually afford? If it's a project-based world and buying a house is a project with a Driving Question of sorts like, " How can I/we create a plan to buy a house that meets my needs and budget? "

One would need to know and understand things like how a mortgage works, what happens if you can't pay your mortgage, how and why housing prices fluctuate, how to avoid foreclosure, how banks profit from mortgages, etc. Heck, they might even learn these types of things from students doing authentic work like this ( Good Explanation of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis) video that strikes me as likely created by students.

One criticism of constructivist teaching like this is that students need to have content and 'stuff' to think about. Or put another way, they 'can't think about nothing.' That's absolutely correct but the false choice that most proponents argue is that we either ask students to learn and gain knowledge or we ask them to engage in inquiry in kind of 'free-range chicken' type of setting. The former is a more traditional approach and yields a low-ceiling of results, the latter is a train-wreck. Instead, let's ask students to engage in both. Let's pose interesting and meaningful ( to them, not just us) questions and challenges that help us facilitate their thinking and learning to the content pieces and questions that are important to us.

When we engage in teaching and learning using a "pull" dynamic we're effectively helping students process the types of complex problems and ideas in ways they are likely to need to be able to do. This doesn't mean content learning or knowledge isn't important, far from it. But just knowing things won't be good enough for the future. Being able to analyze, synthesize, evaluate...think critically and ask beautiful questions with and about that knowledge is what we need to focus on.

'Push' teaching at students is a low-yield way to build those abilities let alone produce great test results. Prepare your students for the modern world by asking beautiful questions of them that helps pull profound thinking and deeper learning.

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Are You Pushing Or Pulling Students In Your Classroom? -

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Are You Pushing Or Pulling Students In Your Classroom? by Drew Perkins, Director of TeachThought PD At the risk of characterizing teaching and learning in a factory context let's face it, classrooms are a kind of marketplace system with an exchange of ideas and thinking incentivized by a variety of factors.

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Modern family living for book-loving parents

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examples of central ideas

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A Giant List Of Really Good Essential Questions

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Essential questions are ‘essential’ in the sense of signaling genuine, important and necessarily-ongoing inquiries.

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Children's Stories on Global Goals and The PYP Learner Profile

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Africa Art Asia Aussie Bites, Nibbles, Chomps, Solos and Mates Australian Animals Australian Children's Fiction Australian Children's Nonfiction Australian Indigenous Peoples Big Books Early Childhood Wordless Picture Books Australian CBC Book of the Year Awards 2017 Australian CBC Book of the Year Awards 2016 Australian CBC Book of the Year Awards 2015 Australian CBC Award Winners 1965-2015 Kate Greenaway Award Winners

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I once read an interview with a hero of my early teaching days - Donald Graves. He was asked about the way people had misinterpreted his 'process writing' model and replied that sometimes he wished he'd never written it down! Years later I understand the frustration behind that sentiment. It's hard to do justice to the complexities and nuances of inquiry in writing. So much gets lost. Something that is rich, layered and multidimensional can come across as flat, linear and recipe-like. Over the years, I have published several books that share a 'cycle of inquiry' and the kinds of learning engagements that we might design within a cycle. I have seen hundreds of interpretations of this idea in classrooms. Many have been gratifying and exciting. Teachers who really 'get' the intention, understand the complexity and invite their students into the learning have blown me away with what they have done. And I have also seen (and heard) many bewildering versions or iterations of the cycle that are such a long way off the original conceptualization and intent! Ironically, I have seen slavish adherence to a cycle actually impede rather than enhance inquiry.
So why even 'have' such a cycle?
Articulating a model or framework for the process of inquiry is a helpful way to support and guide our practice. The intention of the 'cycle' is to guide the teacher's (and learner's ) thinking beyond simply coming up with 'activities' and towards a more thoughtful process that assists students to move from the known to the new. The need to 'name' some kind of process was first revealed to me as a young teacher by my fabulous mentors Marilyn Woolley and Keith Pigdon. They helped me move beyond thematic planning and into a more rigorous way of thinking about how to guide learning. Once I understood constructivism - it made sense to me to describe what was such a natural process of building understanding over time. My job as a teacher was to help design experiences for learners that would support the brain's best inclinations to wonder, look for patterns, seek new information, link to prior learning and transfer. While it has changed over time, the cycle I now use owes much to Woolley and Pigdon's visionary work.

Here are some of the more common misconceptions about 'the cycle' and my response to them. I hope it is as useful to read as it has been to write!!
Misconception 1: Inquiry is all about 'the cycle'. We DO the cycle....therefore, we DO inquiry.
Simply using an inquiry cycle does not make us inquiry teachers. As I have written before, inquiry is a 'way of being' in the classroom. Yes, there are planning frameworks that can support the ways in which we design learning experiences for and with students but this is only part of the inquiry story. An inquiry teacher knows how to question students in ways that enhance and deepen thinking, how to offer choice and honour voice, how to seize an unexpected moment for investigation and how to embed learning in purposeful context It's a pedagogy - not just a planning framework.
Misconception 2: The cycle is a recipe. We need to follow the stages in sequence for it to 'work out' in the end.
Nope. It's a flexible framework. Not a recipe. Essentially, inquiry cycles provide labels for a process that is common to many disciplines. Most people agree that inquiry : involves time to establish your current thinking, your needs and questions, some 'hunting and gathering' of information/ideas/ data, some sorting organizing and meaning making and some kind of creation/application/transfer/use. And most agree that this process is cyclical in nature. New discoveries lead to new questions and so on. But this process is much neater on paper than it is in practice. True inquiry is often messy and recursive. We gather and sort then realize we have new questions so we return to some more gathering. In the cycle I use, I place great emphasis on the role of 'tuning in' to students' thinking to establish pathways for investigation. While it often sits at the 'start' of the process - I return to 'tuning in' regularly. These are phases more than they are stages, elements more than they are steps. There is nothing contained, neat or particularly orderly about a lot of inquiry BUT having a relatively simple iteration of it in the form of this cycle can help us think more clearly and actually better manage the messiness without getting overwhelmed!
#Misconception 3: All inquiries go through the same phases over a similar time frame.
Much as it would be convenient, no two inquiries are the same. Although most journeys will contain elements of this cycle, starting points, emphases and time frames vary from context to context and depend on the group of students, their age level and what they bring to the journey in the first place. I have seen some beautiful inquiry journeys travelled within an hour. I have seen some that last a year. I have seen some that really don't involve much 'action' but are highly worthwhile and engaging and others that are really all about the action.
# Misconception 4: Using a 'cycle' as a guide, we can plan a complete unit of inquiry for students
I think this is the most troubling use of the cycle I see. The cycle should INFORM planning, guide it but it doesn't mean we can create the whole thing before we start. When I use a planner with the elements of the cycle in it - I see that planner as a guide throughout the process - not as a template to be filled in one sitting. The cycle is emergent....how kids 'sort out' the ideas information depends on what they gather - and that is not something we can determine in detail. The cycle unfolds.
#Misconception 5: The cycle is for teachers.
Students benefit from having some 'meta-language' to attach to processes they use as inquirers. Some kind of framework should be developed for and WITH students that helps everyone gain a shared language. Making this visible to students helps them think about how journeys of inquiry are both similar and different. It is really useful to display the cycle but only if it is referred to, analysed, played with and critiqued!
#Misconception 6: The cycle only applies to 'units of inquiry' in disciplines like science and social studies.
I see many examples of this cycle in action in a range of disciplines and contexts. Some 'tweaking' is needed at times to best fit the nature of the discipline but it is interesting to explore this kind of transfer. Check out for example - the great work done on http://www.iphys-ed.com about inquiry based PE or Bruce Ferrington's application of the cycle to math inquiry - http://authenticinquirymaths.blogspot.co.at/
# Misconception 7: It's my way or the highway or 'there is only one cycle'....
There are many versions of a 'cycle of inquiry'. The fact that there ARE many versions is healthy and affirming. I love the different emphases, language and uses of these cycles and think that, together, they help offer us lots to consider as we continue to clarify this intriguing process in our own minds . Explore various cycles. Look for patterns...where do they all agree? Find one that works for you and your students. Create your own - but be consistent. Shared language across a school has great benefits.

A cycle of inquiry helps us plan and teach with intention. When it is understood, it pushes us beyond simply coming up with 'activities' and challenges us to think about how skills and concepts can be developed and deepened over time. It gives us some shared 'meta' language to use with students and colleagues

How do YOU use a cycle of inquiry to inform your work as an inquiry teacher?
...Just wondering....

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Busting some myths about 'the inquiry cycle'.... - KATH MURDOCH

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I once read an interview with a hero of my early teaching days - Donald Graves. He was asked about the way people had misinterpreted his 'process writing' model and replied that sometimes he wished he'd never written it down! Years later I understand the frustration behind that sentiment.

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I'm an avid believer in making maths an adventure of discovery and creation rather than simply an expected chore. By integrating maths into our units of inquiry and making it an authentic experience, we are dispelling the myth that maths is boring and we turn our learners into investigators, truth seekers and explorers! Far more exciting already, don't you think?

I'm well aware of how tricky it can be to integrate maths into all of our units of inquiry and so there are several alternative routes that I turn to when the going gets tough, which I'll be sharing soon in a future post. But for today, I want to share how picture books are one of the easiest ways to bring the adventure back to your maths lessons.

Here are some of my favourites that I've found provoke inquiry and are simple to slot into multiple units of inquiry, whilst covering many maths standards. Many of them are flexible enough to adapt for all ages. You can link directly to each book for more information by clicking on the titles or images. This will take you directly to Amazon. So, grab a cuppa, read on and explore.
If the World Were a Village: A Book about the World's People, 2nd Edition (CitizenKid)
This is such a fabulous book that explores the population of the world by comparing it to a village. It looks at the large numbers of populations and reduces them significantly, thus ratios are explored as well as place value. It allows for integration into any unit that looks at mapping, communities, human rights and responsibilities, religions of the world and continents. I have used

this book with 3rd grades up to 6th grades and I even have an inquiry based maths resource that specifically integrates the information from the book. The project culminates with the building of a 3D village, as it also explores geometry and measure.

Another fabulous book by David Schwartz. It explores the enormity of a million by comparing it to things that the children can imagine. For example, if you had to count to one million, it would probably take you about 23 days. With statements like this, I use it to explore what we wonder and we suggest different ways to compare a million. Some examples of questions that the children have come up with are:

How much room would 1 million elephants need?

What is the smallest number ever?

If it took 23 days to count to 1 million, how long would it take to count to 1 BILLION?

Pythagoras and the Ratios: A Math Adventure (Charlesbridge Math Adventures)
I then let them investigate ways to solve their own problems and even to decide whether or not they can they be solved? You'll be amazed at their creativity! Of course, as facilitator, I like to lead them towards strategies that we are investigating for our current maths standards too.
What's Your Angle, Pythagoras? (Charlesbridge Math Adventures)
These Pythagoras books by Julie Ellis are cleverly written with the use of puns for maths vocabulary that the children love to identify. As Pythagoras explores the pattern of music and timing, the concept of ratios comes up and I bring this into our maths exploration with the use of musical instruments. Kids LOVE this! There's so much to explore looking at sheet music and how it is broken down, the pattern of music and how we connect this with patterns in numbers and ultimately ratios. By creating their own music, using a variety of instruments, the children explore pattern, number,counting on and scale. With questions such as: Where else do we see pattern in maths? and How else can we use pattern and grouping techniques? , it is something that can be adapted to suit little kids all the way up to calculating problems with ratios for big kids. It is an easy book to incorporate into any How We Express Ourselves theme.
The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdos
This is a great book for all age levels since the maths can be s o easily adapted for whatever level you're teaching.

Another adventure with Pythagoras, this time diving into geometry, it explores angles and how they connect with buildings. I have integrated this book with inquiries into architecture and different structures, into ancient civilizations and their inventions and also into how we express ourselves through design and architecture. The investigations can be very hands on with the children creating their own designs through various STEM activities, along with learning to identify and/or measure angles. Great for Where We Are in Place and Time, How We Express Ourselves and How We Organise Ourselves.

Sir Cumference and the Isle of Immeter (Math Adventures)
Another book for it tells the tale of a little boy who travels the world, noticing all of the maths all around him, often stopping by prominent world sites. I love to use this book when we are investigating maths all around us. It is brilliant to have the children brainstorm their observations of everyday maths and it leads to some very interesting inquiries such as: Who invented weight? Why do we use our numbers and not other symbols for numbers? When was the first ruler invented? Who made maths? Our inquiry board always overflows with the children's inquiries after this book, making it easy to create a maths centred, student led inquiry.

Older grades can adapt it to travel and journeys, mapping, distance and even for research skills. It lends itself naturally to inquirers.

With younger grades, it ties in well with any Who We Are theme, regardless of your central idea. It can be a standalone unit within your unit. It's also easy to plan around units inquiring into shopping, money, communities and our world/environment .

The Grapes Of Math
I have used this book with 2nd grade up to 5th grade as both an introduction to perimeter and area, as well as a review. I just love how it is also filled with puns using maths vocabulary. Always brings a giggle to those in the know!

With these books, there are actually activities that can be copied in class throughout the tales.
A Place for Zero (Charlesbridge Math Adventures)
All of the Sir Cumference series of books are just amazingly easy to integrate into your units of inquiry. They are written by a third grade teacher. You really just have to adapt to the level of maths that you're looking for. I recommend that you explore all of the options available. I have integrated these books with units exploring conquerors, travellers and explorers, space, structures and architecture, ancient civilisations as well as mythical creatures and fairy tales! I have integrated geometry by designing flags, coats of arms and modes of travel using 2D shapes and lines and angles, we have created planets of the solar system and measured the diameter and circumference of our models using "Sir Cumference and the First Round Table". I'm telling you, they are SO easy to fit in maths investigations of all shapes, sizes and levels! Puns intended! 🙂

This pack of Sir Cumference adventure stories will cover your entire year of maths concepts for 3rd -5th grades. I believe it contains 8 books.

The Grapes of Math by Greg Tang offers problem solving strategies for quick counting, including grouping.

With rhyme and riddles, this book is engaging for all age levels, as they try to solve and keep up with the problems. I love to follow up this book with the exploration into how many different ways we can solve problems. It's a fabulous way to practice collaborative thinking. You can see how this could be integrated into anything at all age levels. The provocation doesn't have to be mathematical. It can be any problem, such as: How will we carry all of those books downstairs to the library? From there, you can have the children come up with multiple strategies by themselves. This of course leads you into maths problems at your students' level. It's fun to use for illustrating grouping strategies, tying in with all four operations. And, of course, any unit that inquires into poetry and writing.

The illustrations in this book are just adorable. They actually led to a place value activity where we had to express

ourselves by designing our own digits, creating 3 and 4 digit numbers out of them and finally ordering them within our small groups. A simple but effective way to add maths into our How We Express Ourselves unit. (You can find this unit in my store by clicking here.)

This is a wonderful book for looking at place value and addition for younger children. It can also be used to explore the importance of zero with older children too. When I posed the central idea: "A world without zero would be drastically altered." ,the investigations that arose were incredible! Groups worked together to come up with the myriad of issues that this would present. They then shared their possible solutions. The ideas were all shared and the BEST debate ensued! Try it with your older kids! Or even your younger kids! The discussions will blow your mind!

By using picture books within our maths, I've found that the inquiry process is naturally enhanced. With inquiries using maths we have to experiment and, with experiments, questions arise. From those questions, the children come up with their own connections to the maths in question, the unit of inquiry and the real world around them.

I hope that you have got some useful ideas from this post and please do share your own ideas too. I love to learn from others! If you're interested in more planning tips for maths, I will be sharing a cheat sheet for maths planning soon, along with the post detailing other ideas for integrating maths into your units of inquiry. Make sure you're subscribed to my mailing list so that you don't miss out.

Enjoy!

FOLLOW ME HERE, FOLLOW ME THERE.....

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Brilliant Picture Books for Integrating Maths in the IB PYP

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I'm an avid believer in making maths an adventure of discovery and creation rather than simply an expected chore. By integrating maths into our units of inquiry and making it an authentic experience, we are dispelling the myth that maths is boring and we turn our learners into investigators...

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Questions to guide inquiry

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by TeachThought Staff

Learning through inquiry is one of the most 'natural' and organic forms of learning.

In addition to learning through play, mentorship, and self-directed learning, inquiry-based learning happens whether we plan for it or not. When anyone is curious or confused and then uses that curiosity or confusion to drive their own learning, they're 'doing' inquiry-based learning.

Inquiry-based learning provides a framework for students to use one or more questions-often changing in evolving as knowledge levels change-to learn. It is an approach that works well with other teaching trends such as project-based learning, blended learning, challenge-based learning, place-based education and more.

The above graphic by Sylvia Duckworth illustrates questions that can help inspire inquiry-based learning ideas that act as a catalyst for curiosity in a way that makes an educational impact as students explore their problem-solving skills.

Add a personalized element when choosing inquiry-based learning projects with questions like:

What will I learn?

What will I create?

What will I solve?

What do I love?

What are my interests?

How can I make an impact?

According to our own Terry Heick in Phases Of Inquiry-Based Learning: A Guide For Teachers, "there are several different inquiry-based learning models, but most have several general elements in common:

Learning is focused on a meaningful, ill-structured problem that demands consideration of diverse perspectives

Academic content-learning occurs as a natural part of the process as students work towards finding solutions

Learners, working collaboratively, assume an active role in the learning process

Teachers provide learners with learning supports and rich multiple media sources of information to assist students in successfully finding solutions

Learners share and defend solutions publicly in some manner."

The post above then goes on to break the inquiry-based process down into stages including interaction, clarification, questioning, and design, which are summarized below.
4 Phases Of Inquiry-Based Learning Interaction
Due to the fact that inquiry is open-ended and curiosity-based, traditional research methods may not be the most effective or interesting way to investigate. Encourage students to interact with unique materials and sources such as peers, experts, or formal and informal media in a playful and exploratory fashion. Students should be engaged in finding a method of research that interests and is available to them.
Clarification
Clarification happens as students begin to dig into the material and gain a greater sense of understanding of their selected topic, their own thinking on the subject, and what steps may be necessary to tackle the project. Students should be focused on possibility, the credibility of sources, and have a full understanding of related facts and opinions and the potential influence of that on their own work.
Questioning
One of the more critical phases of inquiry-based learning is questioning. As students begin to form questions to drive self-directed inquiry, any weak spots in their thinking or understanding should become clear in a way that helps them realize the limitations of their scope of work, or begin to develop an understanding of what information is lacking, and move forward to resolve any gaps in knowledge.
Design
The final stage of an inquiry-based learning process concentrates on design, or the ability to create an informative and curiosity-driven product that satisfies the initial inquiry creatively. This end result is the answer or solution and should demonstrate the process - and although it is inevitably what students will focus on, the true learning happens along the way.
See Also 20 Questions To Guide Inquiry-Based Learning
One of the ultimate goals of education is to instill in students the ability to identify an issue and brainstorm and implement a solution. Inquiry-based learning offers the opportunity to wonder about the world, our place in it, and how we can improve it while providing an important framework for critical thinking and curiosity.
6 Questions Students Can Use To Guide Their Inquiry-Based Learning

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6 Questions Students Can Use To Guide Their Inquiry-Based Learning

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by TeachThought Staff Learning through inquiry is one of the most 'natural' and organic forms of learning. In addition to learning through play , mentorship, and self-directed learning, inquiry-based learning happens whether we plan for it or not. When anyone is curious or confused and then uses that curiosity or confusion to drive their own learning, they're 'doing' inquiry-based learning.

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Mathematics is about wonder, creativity and fun, so let’s teach it that way

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Mathematician Peter Taylor taught high school math to prepare to develop a new ‘RabbitMath’ curriculum that emphasizes collaborative creativity and learning to work with complex systems.

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In January 2019, PYP teachers in South St. Paul, Minnesota, United States read sections of the new digital resource, "PYP: From principles into practice".

Our digital creations (Here are just
To share our understanding of the enhancements with others in our local and global PYP communities, we created digital content: infographics, mind maps, presentations, blog posts, videos and a hyperlinked word cloud that summarized the contents of "PYP: From principles into practice".

some of the digital creations creatively made by PYP teachers in South St. Paul, Minnesota. Click on any of them to go to the vast Treasure Trove of digital creations that summarize the new PYP digital resource. THERE ARE OVER 70!) can be found using this link. They are organized in the same way as the enhanced PYP and you can use the table of contents (the third slide of the linked slide deck) to navigate to different sections. In each section, click on the thumbnails to be linked to the original digital content to see it in bigger detail.

Nothing is a substitute for reading the original content from IB, but we hope our digital creations inform, inspire and provoke you to act and learn more!

Note for PYP Coordinators and other organizers of professional development: If you'd like to replicate or adapt what we did in South St. Paul as a way to help your teachers dive into the new digital resource, "PYP: From principles into practice" here are the steps we took:

Learning Engagement 1 (teachers had the option of doing this ahead of our January professional development day and then coming in for Learning Engagement 2 halfway through the day)

Build background (all resources available on the Programme Resource Centre)

Read one of the sections from "PYP: From principles into practice"

Create digital content in response to what you learned. We provided the Success Criteria for the digital content.

Suggestions:

Examples (using the Learner Agency section)

Digitally submit what youcreated

Learning Engagement 2:

Review others' digital creations and ask:

What's important to remember? What comes up again and again?

What's new? What's different? What's changed?

Did someone interpret the enhanced content differently than you?

First individually, then with a partner and finally with the whole group, reflect on what was learned about the enhanced PYP after looking through your colleagues' digital creations.

Using a Google Form, submit ideas for what our PYP should do now. These ideas will be added to our action plan.

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In January 2019, PYP teachers in South St. Paul, Minnesota, United States read sections of the new digital resource, "PYP: From principles into practice". Our digital creations (Here are just To share our understanding of the enhancements with others in our local and global PYP communities, we created digital content: infographics, mind maps, presentations, blog posts, videos and a hyperlinked word cloud that summarized the contents of "PYP: From principles into practice".

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Children's Stories on Global Goals and The PYP Learner Profile

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Teaching grammar, there has to be a better way

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Teaching grammar, there has to be a better way

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To help kids master sentence structure, I describe sentences with simple English words, not unfamiliar Latin words. I won't claim to have invented this approach; it just made sense to me when I began dealing with grammar problems in the classroom early in my career.

In my experience, this approach helps kids learn almost instantly how to write well-formed sentences. And because it's so simple, I can start it with primary kids and ELL students with limited English proficiency.

Every Writer Serves a Sentence

Take a look at this sentence:

On a bitter-cold winter morning, Malcolm Maxwell, a young man of simple means but good intentions, left the quiet country town in which he'd been raised and set off on the bold errand he'd been preparing for all his life.

Like all sentences, this one is made up of parts. In this system, there are four kinds of sentence parts:

1. Main Parts These parts contain the main action of the sentence: "Malcolm Maxwell,...left the quiet country town in which he'd been raised,...." (Notice that I don't have to call this a "main clause" or refer to a "main verb".)

2. Lead-In Parts These parts lead into other parts, especially main parts: "On a bitter-cold winter morning,...." (Notice that I don't have to worry about what Latin grammatical function this "phrase" performs. Is it "adverbial", "adjectival", "prepositional"? Who cares? Certainly not the kids!)

3. In-Between Parts These parts fall in between other parts. They feel like a slight interruption: "...a young man of simple means but good intentions,...." (Notice that I don't have to call this a "non-restrictive phrase or clause" or worry about things like "direct or indirect objects"; I can also avoid "subordination" here and when working with Lead-In Part as well.)

4. Add-On Parts These extra parts convey additional information about other parts: "...and set off on the bold errand he'd been preparing for all his life." (Notice that I don't have to worry about "compound, complex, and compound/complex sentences", nor do I have to explain "appositive constructions.")

Using this system, I can describe our model sentence like this: Lead-In + Main + In-Between + Main (continued) + Add-On.

New sentences can be created by combining different parts in different ways. To make longer sentences, more parts can be added. But it's surprising how effective we can be with just a few.

Six Simple Patterns

Here are six of the simpler patterns typical of those I use as models to help kids construct their own:

1. Intro + Main As class began, Mr. Funston dreamed of a winter vacation.

2. Main + Add-On He stared blankly at the blank faces of his students, convinced that he had nothing whatsoever to teach them.

3. Main + In-Between + Main The Lesser Antilles, he realized, would be the perfect place for a warm winter hiatus.

4. Main + Add-On + Add-On He saw himself on the beach, baking in the midday sun, enjoying tasty snacks and refreshing beverages.

5. Intro + In-Between + Main Ten minutes later, having dismissed his students early to lunch, he surfed the Net for a cheap trip to the West Indies.

6. Main + In-Between + Add-On Mr. Funston leaned back in his big teacher chair, forgetting about the twelve pounds he'd put on at Thanksgiving, and immediately tumbled backward into the October bulletin board he'd neglected to take down.

It Works in Reading, Too

By analyzing and describing sentences kids read, and using those patterns as additional models, students develop a robust repertoire of well-formed structures. I also use the system to teach combining and inversions.

I'm amazed at how well kids communicate by mastering six simple two- and three-part patterns like these. There are, of course, many more complicated structures I will teach them. But if they can learn these six, they'll be on their way.

This simplified sentence structure system is the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine of traditional grammar go down. When students create and analyze well-formed sentences, they have a meaningful context for the mastery of concepts that might otherwise seem arcane.

This is only part of the sentence skills curriculum I teach. For a more complete view, see some word choice lessons, here for sentence structure lessons, and punctuation lessons. Since grammar is the study of sentence construction, focusing on the sentence, in a way that doesn't depend on explicit grammatical knowledge, is the key to teaching an otherwise difficult set of concepts successfully to groups of diverse learners.

For a quick overview of major research studies going back to the 1930s on the inefficacy of traditional decontextualized grammar instruction, consult Chapter Two of Constance Weaver's " Teaching Grammar in Context".

© 1995-2011 by Teaching That Makes Sense, Inc. Used by permission. For more free teaching materials, visit Teaching That Makes Sense.

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Teaching Grammar: There Has to Be a Better Way (And There Is!) | Edutopia

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To help kids master sentence structure, I describe sentences with simple English words, not unfamiliar Latin words. I won't claim to have invented this approach; it just made sense to me when I began dealing with grammar problems in the classroom early in my career.

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Inquiry based approach to teaching grammar 

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Inquiry based approach to teaching grammar 

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An Integrated Inquiry-based Approach to Grammar

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Takeaways... A look at how it works. Unexpected Findings Example: When teaching commas with introductory clauses, don't define the rule for students. Let them read, notice, and discuss their findings. By using mentor texts to showcase the grammar, students can see the skills

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Authentic Inquiry Maths - how it plays out in the primary/elementary school context

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Looking at the Why?
Prior to becoming a PYP teacher, when I reflect upon my teaching I think I was a so-so maths primary teacher. I understood the skills and concepts children in my class should be learning and tried to make maths learning fun mixed with the all-important skill rote learning routines I had also grown up with whilst in school which still seemed to be the expectations of the day.
Joining my first PYP school 7 years ago, I started experimenting with how we could use the PYP framework with maths learning.
I began playing around with central ideas for my students to explore and lines of inquiry that matched PYP key concepts. That became a big game changer for me in how I'd help guide my students towards their maths learning and importantly, allow them to take ownership of their learning.
When we create a successful maths planner using a strong central idea married with supporting lines of inquiry (matched with key concepts) some of the benefits are:
° students have a clear understanding of what the unit is about
° it gives them freedom to explore areas of maths thinking that interests them
° it transforms the learning to become inquiry-based learning in a natural way
° it creates a shift from skills-oriented to more meaningful concept-oriented learning
° it provides them with opportunities to take ownership of their learning
° by generating their own questions to explore they are doing what real mathematicians do and their engagement increases
° they gain a sense of pride in what they have decided to enquire into

Central Idea:
The tricky part, which I still stumble over occasionally, is getting that great central idea. It takes time and a lot of thought to create a central idea that allows children to:
° foster a curiosity towards the concepts
° instill a need to explore skills & strategies
° to be broad enough to allow students to take ownership and inquire into avenues that they find interesting in that particular maths strand. How?
° should be able to cater to all the different inquiries when they reflect during their summative (see below)

(I wish the IB would create some 'think tanks' and share possible central ideas with possible lines of inquiry out to PYP schools as a starting block for teachers.)
Present or Don't Present a Central Idea?
There are two camps it seems amongst PYP teachers: those that present a central idea towards the beginning of a unit and have it displayed for constant reference and discussion and those that don't reveal the central idea till the end of a unit or have children determine what the central idea could be as a summative.
Personally, I'm in the former camp and so I feel it is important to discuss a maths central idea early on in a unit. By presenting the maths central idea, kids are encouraged to generate their own questions in small groups of things they feel they need to know and what they need to do to gain a deep understanding of it. This provokes curiosity towards the maths topic and also allows them to take ownership of their learning because they will be given opportunities to explore their own questions during the unit.
Quite often we are in the midst of a maths unit and when I see all the different avenues the children are taking their learning, I can find faults in the central idea we are discussing. The central idea can sometimes feel limiting to where they have actually gone with it so at the end of the unit, we discuss how the central idea could be improved. This serves as a in interesting reflection activity for the children and it helps me create better central ideas for next year. My students enjoy when I share with them: "This was a central idea students last year created. Let's explore it and see what changes we think we should make to it over the next few weeks." They appreciate the idea that there new central idea they create will then be used in the following year for the next students to explore and possibly debate over its effectiveness.
Lines of Inquiry
Using the PYP key concepts to form lines of inquiry, I feel, is an easier process. You can look at the maths concepts and skills you want the children in the unit to explore and so use this to create the lines of inquiry.
PYP Maths Scope & Sequence, the conceptual understandings can be a good place to start creating a central idea. Tweaking them to add some grit for students to inquire into rather than just being told the fact needs to happen.

An example maths unit:
Central Idea: When angles co-exist, connections and relationships form.
° FORM: What different types of angles, triangles and quadrilaterals are like
° FUNCTION: How we can estimate and measure the size of angles
° CONNECTION: Patterns and relationships that exist between angles
° CONNECTION: How we use angles in our daily lives
Because the maths unit becomes student-led due to them generating their own questions to explore from the central idea, sometimes areas outside the planned lines of inquiry are examined. I think this is great.
The children needn't be constrained within the lines of inquiry I had planned for the unit. Usually I don't share the lines of inquiry with the children anyway. I use them as a personal skeleton guide of where I feel the learning should go based on the scope & sequence. If particular students or the class as a whole,aren't taking their learning to broad enough avenues, then I can refer to these to help guide the class.
Everytime I create a maths unit, I always create a line of inquiry using 'connection'.
Eg, CONNECTION: How we use angles in our daily lives
CONNECTION: How we use mental maths strategies in our daily lives
CONNECTION: How we use 3D shapes in our daily lives
This serves as a reminder to me that I need to guide the children to understanding why we are learning about this maths topic. Children need to know the relevance of what they are learning and by finding a connection that what they are learning does or will relate to their own life experiences, they will become far more engaged. An easy, but powerful way for the children to inquire into this is they will often ask their parents how they use this particular maths in their lives. We collate all the parents answers and discuss together.
Since the unit becomes student-led, the summative assessment needs to accommodate all the diverse learning that took place. It would be ridiculous and grossly unfair to have my class all inquire into different avenues of a maths concept only to then hit them with a traditional maths test which wouldn't serve any real purpose. So, what I have found to be a powerful assessment (and reflection) tool is to simply give the children the central idea and they write /draw what they understand about it.

Here are some blogspots explaining how the summative assessment works and the advantages I have found in using them: ° °

Measuring Time Summative Assessment
Probability Summative Assessment

Blogpost with some example central ideas & lines of inquiry I've experimented with:
Example Central Ideas & LInes of Inquiry

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Looking at the Why? Prior to becoming a PYP teacher, when I reflect upon my teaching I think I was a so-so maths primary teacher. I understood the skills and concepts children in my class should be learning and tried to make maths learning fun mixed with the all-important skill rote learning routines I had also grown up with whilst in school which still seemed to be the expectations of the day.

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I'm often asked how I integrate maths into our IB PYP units of inquiry. I won't deny that depending on the unit, it can sometimes be easier said than done. However, I've found over the years, that it's best to keep it relaxed and, if necessary, simply focus on concepts in maths rather than content. Often, especially within the public IB schools in the USA, we are expected to meet certain maths standards by a certain time. This often results in a clash of math units and units of inquiry and a creative juggle ensues. But hey, who doesn't love a challenge? The rest of the IB world? You've got it luckier, I assure you! Anyway, a great resource for math in the beginning of the year is https://www.youcubed.org/. It encourages a maths mindset and is centred around collaborative thinking. It does require signing up for a free account but, once you're in, you can view the Week of Inspirational Math. This gives you a couple of days of lessons that demonstrate inquiry based thinking. It really has a ton of great information though.
Content vs Concepts
When in doubt as to how best to integrate maths, I will take the focus more to the conceptual level. For example: if we are learning about operations with decimal

s and our UOI doesn't lend itself to this, then I'll look at the key concepts of CHANGE & CONNECTION. We can the see how those big ideas tie in with the different strategies needed to compute each operation- How is it changing? What is making the change? How do the equations connect with a different/the same answers? The children can make the connections and voila, we have succeeded in critical thinking and analysis of number and operations. ? You can link to a past blog post about the Key Concepts within the PYP here.
Content Based Inquiry
Another method to integrate maths, and this is my favourite, is to slightly stray from the central idea and work through a mini, project based learning opportunity.

This kills several birds with one stone: concepts, content, math conceptual reinforcement and inquiry. Not to mention the myriad of opportunity for developing the Approaches to Learning skills. Think COMMUNICATION, RESEARCH, THINKING, SELF MANAGEMENT etc. Love it! ( there is a great post all about developing those skills here)

The pictures show how I took a social studies unit about Human Rights, tossed in a great book about diversity in the world and used those together to come up with a differentiated maths based inquiry.

If the World Were A Village is a fabulous book to use by itself to look at the diversity amongst the people in the world. It uses large numbers ( in the millions and billions) as it shares how many people are of each nationality, religion, wealthy, educated, poor, starving, well fed etc. and how those large numbers would be shrunk if the world were only a small village. It's really an eye opener to see that the western civilisation is in the minority throughout the world when it comes to many aspects of life and exactly how diverse we are in some ways and yet wholly connected in many others. The numbers bring an easy connection to maths and lends itself nicely to our UOI and it ties in so well with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with global citizenship, with civil rights and religion.

By incorporating the information from this book, I created a mini unit that had a huge emphasis on our math area of focus; measure, area & volume.

The kids made connections with the lines of inquiry in our unit, learned about the massive differences in the world's human rights and created their OWN 2 dimensional and 3D global villages using their math skills.

Such a hit with my fifth graders! The unit, found in my store, is differentiated and can be easily adapted for 3rd-6th, phases 3& 4, depending upon your IB World school.

You can find several more inquiry based math projects within my store:

Our School, The Thanksgiving Journey, The American Revolution, Tessellations All Around Us and of course, all of my complete units of inquiry packs contain integrated math lessons. Click here to keep in touch.

A few other great math resources that I love are linked here too.
Inquiry through authentic tasks from Dan Meyer and you can see Dan Meyer's famous TEDTalk here.

If you have other suggestions for integrating maths, please shout out. I'm always keen to learn from my peers. : )

Enjoy!

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Integrating Math into an IB PYP Unit of Inquiry

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I'm often asked how I integrate maths into our IB PYP units of inquiry. I won't deny that depending on the unit, it can sometimes be easier said than done. However, I've found over the years, that it's best to keep it relaxed and, if necessary, simply focus on concepts in maths rather than...

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This article shares how the approaches to learning can be integrated into mathematics through a shift in focus from pure concept teaching to the process of learning and integrating skill development. Regardless of level of proficiency in mathematics, every student enjoys and learns from the activity.

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approaches to learning | Search Results | SharingPYP Blog

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This article shares how the approaches to learning can be integrated into mathematics through a shift in focus from pure concept teaching to the process of learning and integrating skill development. Regardless of level of proficiency in mathematics, every student enjoys and learns from the activity.

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The word is well and truly out. The newest hub bub in the IB world is the Approaches to Learning Skills. Formerly known by the International Baccalaureate Organisation as the Transdisciplinary Skills, these are, simply put, a set of skills that we use when we are involved in learning. They come grouped into five sets: Thinking, Social, Self Management, Research and Communication. They naturally have growth mindset occurring within them, since they cover many different behaviours, self control as well as thinking and communication strategies.

As part of your IB PYP classroom, it is usual to see the skills listed somewhere within the room, as posters ( more posters can be found in my store here and also here) and as part of our daily learning objectives. We often refer to those throughout our week and I also like to list them on my daily Learning Objectives boards, tied in with the subject and goals for that day.

By incorporating the skills (as well as the Learner Profile and Attitudes) into your daily learning objectives, they naturally present a great way to reflect on the learning and skills used at the end of each day.
" How were you a good communicator today?"
"How did you use your research skills?"
"When did you use self-management skills today?"

Developing An Awareness of the Approaches to Learning.

Developing an awareness of the transdisciplinary skills within the children is one of the first things that I like to do at the beginning of the school year. It is important as learners, that they not only recognise the skills that accumulatively make up their active learning but that they can actually point them out when they are using them. Reflection is tantamount to growing, improving and setting goals. There is an entire post on reflection within the PYP here, if you feel like clicking over.

Looking at the picture of my busy kiddos above, you can identify how many of the skills are being used within this learning activity, without even hearing the conversations. It is easy to see there is communication, sharing and discussion of ideas, thinking of ideas, noting down suggestions and coming up with a plan, not to mention the social skills that it takes to listen to others , take turns and self management required not to infringe on others' space etc.

This is an easy activity to follow through with your own kids too. Take a few pictures of them in action, show them on your Smart board or overhead and have them identify the skills they themselves have been using. A teacher author on Teachers Pay Teachers sells a pretty simple but effective recording sheet for keeping track of the skills we have used in a day. You can take a peek at it here.

In a bid to get my fifth graders up to par with their skills, before the onslaught of our Exhibition, I developed these task cards as a fun and interactive resource for practising the skills and putting them into play! With drama, research and many thought provoking scenarios presented, the kids ABSOLUTELY LOVE THEM!

I designed these with my 5th graders in mind and I'd definitely recommend them for 3rd-6th grades. However, the Self Management cards and the Social Skills cards can be used from 1st grade up, if the teacher reads the cards aloud to those lower grades. The Research, Communication & Thinking skills task cards require basic multiplication knowledge, reading of graphs and so on.

They are a terrific way to actively practise the growth mindset directly involved within the Thinking, Research, Communication, Social and Self Management skills. The task cards can be used in a variety of ways that encourage the children to reflect and think positively of themselves and others in various scenarios that are easily relatable to them. They are asked to reflect on situations that require analysing, synthesising, categorising and evaluating, present doubt, possible antagonism, confidence issue s and other difficulties. As you help the children with these skills in a safe, familiar environment, it will greatly benefit them throughout school year. You can purchase them as individual packets, each skill contains approximately 32 cards and a classroom poster outlining that particular skill, or the entire bundle of 5 sets, with all of the cute posters too.

Some ideas for ways that I have implemented them include:

Whole class - sitting in circle, each child will have a card to read aloud and then share their opinion. These can be discussed as you go around the circle.
Teacher led - read aloud a card to a small group and have them interact with each other to solve the problem or scenario.

Small groups- Place a pile of cards face down in the middle of the group. Each person will take a turn to read a card, act out or offer their opinion and then those can be discussed within the group.
Independent work - Each child can work with a few cards and write or draw how they would solve the social problems presented on the task cards.

I hope that this has been somewhat useful for you and that you are able to use a few of the ideas included. You can link to another blog post here, specifically focusing on how drama can reinforce the ATL skills. It is really so much fun! Please do let me know of your own ideas for developing the Approaches to Learning Skills. I love to share ideas! Let's stay in touch! By clicking here, you'll be able to follow my store and know first when new IB PYP products are available.

Enjoy!

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It Takes Skills! The word is well and truly out. The newest hub bub in the IB world is the Approaches to Learning Skills. Formerly known by the International Baccalaureate Organisation as the Transdisciplinary Skills, these are, simply put, a set of skills that we use when we are involved in...

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In this article you will learn how to use the Responsive Classroom practice of morning meetings in the primary years programme class.
Our IB Primary Years Programme (PYP) school has been implementing Responsive Classroom practices for the last two years, including holding Morning Meetings at the start of each day. I currently teach an early years class (5 year olds) and my meetings consist of four elements: a greeting, individual student sharing, a group activity and a written message.

Morning meetings have several functions, including creating a respectful learning environment based on trust and to support each student to feel significant within the group. My reflection working with my students in morning meetings is that there are many aspects of the PYP which these meetings can enhance.

I discovered very quickly that meetings could form the basis for international-mindedness and provide a global perspective, both crucial aspects of the IB. The initial greeting section establishes shared classroom respect, for example students use and pronounce each other's names properly, an important aspect of identity particularly for EAL (English as additional language) students. Students use different languages to greet each other thereby learning we all come from different places in the world and yet have the commonality of polite communication using welcome receptions.

By creating a classroom environment rich in different languages, students begin to get a sense of their place in the world as global citizens. These young learners are more mindful of their international colleagues, their first steps towards learning 'intercultural understanding and respect' ( IB mission statement).

Second is a sharing activity. Students build stories and histories about their friends, make connections with their own lives and also see 'that other people, with their differences, can also be right' (IB mission statement). Here students develop the learner profile attributes as communicators and being open minded. Students are better able to extend their inquiry through asking questions. By practicing this in our safe circle students demonstrate agency and confidence as they create and ask meaningful questions. Students also demonstrate risk-taking by asking questions publicly in the circle and then later students are better able to verbalize their questions, something that can be difficult at times for the younger and particularly EAL children.

Third, a group activity in which everybody participates. Here we focus on pre-academic skills such as rhythm and rhyme in preparation for reading, counting games to enhance number work, and songs and poems to develop rich vocabulary. Many of these games require students to focus on social skills such as cooperation and negotiation and, on occasion, conflict resolution.

The meeting closes with a written message which has been visible during the entire meeting. We use it to develop shared reading skills with messages about the day ahead, extraordinary activities in school, birthday announcements and even problems to encourage critical thinking skills.

Morning meetings have instilled a sense of family in our classroom, creating a safe arena for students to express themselves; I have seen even the most introverted students become willing participants. By the end of the school year students can use their self-management skills to independently run our meetings as they know the sequence of actions. I had never considered that students would have agency in what initially seemed to me like a teacher-driven endeavor. Considering the focus on student agency in the enhanced PYP, I will certainly be fostering more choice, voice and ownership with the students as to the content of their morning meetings in the future.

References:

IB mission statement: http://www.ibo.org/about-the-ib/mission/

Responsive classroom: https://www.responsiveclassroom.org/

Davis, C, Kriete, R. (2002). The morning meeting book. Greenfield, MA: Northeast Foundation for Children.
Vanessa Keenan has taught at Raha International School for 8 years in the Early Years. Vanessa is currently grade level leader for EY2 and has recently completed an MA in International Education and the IB advanced educators certificate in teaching and learning research from University of Bath, UK.

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In this article you will learn how to use the Responsive Classroom practice of morning meetings in the primary years programme class. Our IB Primary Years Programme (PYP) school has been implementing Responsive Classroom practices for the last two years, including holding Morning Meetings at the start of each day.

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Using literacy to drive inquiry | SharingPYP Blog

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Inquiry based Language learning in a PYP classroom 

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Inquiry based Language learning in a PYP classroom 

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This article focuses on how a fundamental mathematics concept can be learned in an enjoyable manner, through the celebration of Pi Day, thus, reinforcing the conceptual understanding and making real life connections.
Grade 5 students were inquiring into the central idea: "Our global culture today is built from the contributions of past civilisations" under the transdisciplinary theme "where we are in place and time". As they were exploring the line of inquiry, "ways in which aspects of the past civilisations are relevant today", they found that one of the most significant contributions is that of mathematics. Mathematics has a rich history that cannot be overlooked. In geometry, students had just concluded learning about the area and perimeter of squares and rectangles and were curious to know about circular objects. A question that arose was, what makes a circle a circle? This set off an exciting inquiry called "The Infinite Life of Pi" which beautifully integrated as a past contribution of mathematics into the unit of inquiry being investigated.

We began with a quick recall on the characteristics of a circle. This prior knowledge led the students to measure circumference and diameter of various circles with ease. Groups were formed and they went around the classroom discovering circular objects. From water bottles to lids, not even the dustbin in the corner of the classroom was spared. Once we followed up on the techniques used in measuring, the students set out to measure circles around the school campus.

The school's sprawling campus provided the perfect environment for students to take their inquiry outside the walls of a classroom. The circles within the basketball court and the large circular tables in the dining area were challenging to measure. But that did not deter their enthusiasm and curiosity?

The next task was to figure out which operation gives a constant when performed on the circumference and diameter. Though the students were a little confused initially, a group was quick to understand that on dividing the circumference by the diameter, a constant was arrived at, the value of which remained "constant" for circles of varying diameter. Once that was done to all the circles, they discovered that the ratio is almost the same in all circles.

An introduction to the mathematical constant Pi (π) created a buzz among the students wherein the students' sense of achievement of having discovered it on their own was palpable.

The next day being 14 March (3.14), the International Pi Day was celebrated in class. To mark this day, various activities, both student-led and teacher facilitated were conducted. The morning was made cheerful with the circle song. They also had a rapid fire vocabulary game to list as many words as they can that begin with Pi. This was followed by a read aloud of the book Sir Cumference and the dragon of pi (1999) where a boy named Radius saves his dad, Sir Cumference, through a potion that equals the value of Pi.

The highlight of the day was a Pizza Session. Before the children dug into it, they once again, in groups, measured the circumference and diameter of each pizza. The group closest to the value of Pi was awarded an extra pizza!

Using strategies that make real life connections demonstrates that mathematical concepts can make a meaningful and memorable experience through greater student engagement. A variety of skills and strategies were used to unravel the "infinite Life of Pi". Students proudly displayed their findings of discovering Pi and their reflections on celebrating Pi day on a school bulletin board, thereby, sharing their learning with the community.

References:

Neushwander, C. 1999. Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi: A Math Adventure. MA: Charlesbridge. Watertown, Circle song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e0StGfjzVk
Flona Tauro is currently a grade 5 homeroom teacher at Singapore International School, Mumbai. She has been teaching for twelve years, six out of which as a PYP practitioner. She believes in creating learning experiences in which her learners can make real life connections and also enjoy the process. She wants her students to grow and develop in their use of the transdisciplinary skills; applying them to become confident, independent and concerned citizens of the world. You can follow her on Twitter @flona_tauro.

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This article focuses on how a fundamental mathematics concept can be learned in an enjoyable manner, through the celebration of Pi Day, thus, reinforcing the conceptual understanding and making real life connections. Grade 5 students were inquiring into the central idea: "Our global culture today is built from the contributions of past civilisations" under the transdisciplinary theme "where we are in place and time".

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In this article you will read how a Primary Years Programme (PYP) school in China used the mathematics scope and sequence to help organize their learning spaces.
At our bilingual school, students currently follow the Chinese curriculum for mathematics. Their Chinese mathematics teachers come to class one period per day to teach mathematics aligned with the national curriculum. One of the biggest challenges for the PYP teachers is to integrate the IB Mathematics scope and sequence with both the Chinese mathematics scope and sequence and the units of inquiry. As a PYP candidate school, we are still working to link the Chinese mathematics curriculum with our programme of inquiry. During our unit on "how we organize ourselves", fifth grade students were learning about decimals and measurement in their Chinese mathematics class. PYP teachers were able to link the "measurement" and "number" strands with a section of the transdisciplinary theme. Since it was the beginning of the year, this provided a good opportunity to enable students to use mathematical operations to design a layout of their ideal classroom to scale. As PYP teachers, we wanted to support learner agency by enabling students to create their ideal learning space.

First, we discussed the most effective units to use to measure the classroom-centimeters or meters? And if we use meters, how will we account for this when measuring very short distances? Students practiced converting smaller measurements to meters using decimals.

Once we knew the measurements of the classroom (length and width), we then discussed designing floor plans. Some students noted that we did not know the size of the classroom furniture. We discussed whether it was necessary to have precise measurements and to which decimal place we would round when measuring. Then we began our second round of taking and recording measurements.

After students measured everything in groups, they compared their measurements with the other groups. There were many variances, so there was additional discussion and re-measuring. We talked about why different people got different measurements and determined that there was not a standard that everyone was using. Some students started their measurements flush with the wall, while others stood a few centimeters away.

Once students were satisfied that they had measured everything correctly, we then inquired into ensuring that our floor-plans would be accurate. Using graph paper, students represented the length of the wall to give us our scale.

Students next determined how many squares wide and long each object in our classroom would be.

Students spent a few days calculating and drawing objects in the classroom. They cut the objects out, labelled them and tried various configurations on their graph paper to see which layout they liked best. Once students determined their ideal classroom, they presented their plan to the class for feedback. After another round of rearranging furniture on their paper, they finalized their designs.

Finally, students viewed everyone's final designs with a gallery walk. They offered feedback on what they liked about each plan and what could be improved. As a class, we discussed the question, "How do we know if a design is good?" Responses ranged from, "The design is realistic." to "We can have tents in the classroom!" After the discussion, students chose their favorite plan and moved the furniture accordingly. After implementing this design for two days, students were again asked for their feedback.

What worked? What did not work? How can we improve the layout? They also got feedback from their teachers. We discussed how an ideal learning space allows for free movement and agreed on a slightly altered design. What we discovered in the end, was that the original classroom design was close to ideal. However, the students did make the classroom more aesthetically pleasing with regards to placement of cubbies and bookshelves.

The last step of this learning process was to have students reflect. Some thoughts from the students: "I learned to work patiently.", "I learned to work with a team.", "I learned how to use a calculator." Although not every mathematics unit lends itself to integration with the transdisciplinary theme so readily, I feel that this was a successful way to start the school year-affording students agency and integrating mathematics in the process.
Joshua Durey, grade 5 PYP teacher at Beanstalk International Bilingual School (BIBS) in Chengdu, China. Joshua is an upper primary teacher and has taught at IB schools in China and South Korea. He joined BIBS this year as a grade 5 teacher. Outside of the classroom, Joshua is working on his second master's degree and learning Chinese. Joshua is passionate about supporting agency in students' learning and keeping up to date on trends in educational technology.

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Using an integrated mathematics unit to design learning spaces

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In this article you will read how a Primary Years Programme (PYP) school in China used the mathematics scope and sequence to help organize their learning spaces. At our bilingual school, students currently follow the Chinese curriculum for mathematics. Their Chinese mathematics teachers come to class one period per day to teach mathematics aligned with the national curriculum.

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This article shares how the approaches to learning can be integrated into mathematics through a shift in focus from pure concept teaching to the process of learning and integrating skill development. Regardless of level of proficiency in mathematics, every student enjoys and learns from the activity.

"I am a math teacher". When I introduce myself this way, I always feel the words do not do justice to my role as an IB Primary Years Programme (PYP) mathematics specialist. I have three years of PYP teaching experience and I still feel as much of a student as I am a teacher-I am constantly learning how to teach-from my mentors, from my colleagues, from my experiences, and most of all-from my students themselves.

What makes teaching mathematics concepts different in a PYP environment? The PYP stresses that the development of skills and demonstration of a positive attitude towards learning is as important as the acquisition of knowledge. Concepts can be taught but attitude can only be role-modeled and experienced. I am aware that my students learn from me not only in my classes, but also by observing me-in class and outside; through my body language, my willingness to always be an open-minded learner, my sense of humour, the tone in which I speak to the "bhaiya" serving the snacks, and through my interactions with my colleagues.

To assimilate the PYP elements into my mathematics classes meant that I first had to make an adjustment in my thinking. I had to make a shift from a focus on conceptual content only to a focus on integrating development of skills and attitudes in my students. The core philosophy of the PYP is transdisciplinary learning integrated with the programme of inquiry. However, where it is not possible to integrate mathematics' concepts within the programme of inquiry, the focus then is on inquiry-based learning and building the approaches to learning (ATL) skills. Students are encouraged to construct their own meaning rather than being "taught" in the conventional sense; they construct meaning when they build on their prior knowledge and make real life connections. A simple example can be the concept of calculating elapsed time. Students make real life connections by calculating the time taken for different activities during their daily routine in school such as their classes, time taken for lunch or time taken to travel to school. The learning is thus deeply rooted and enduring.

The most important message I wanted my students to imbibe is that "how we learn" is as important as "what we learn". This would be a first step towards building of metacognition skills. If students can reflect on how they learn best, what works well for them, what difficulties they face, what skills they use; they are on their way to becoming independent learners. Translating this theory to awareness in the classroom is not easy; however, the first steps on this journey must be to enhance the student learning process.

A recent mathematics activity (a division relay) highlights how skills and attitudes can be developed through simple activities. This activity demonstrates how ATL skills can also be developed while teaching mathematics outside of the programme of inquiry.

Students were grouped randomly, based on single digit division quotients (eg 6 ÷2, 9 ÷ 3, 12 ÷ 4 grouped together). Division sums with 4 to 5-digit dividends and 1 or 2 digit divisors were written out on a sheet for them to solve. Instructions were given for each team member to do only one step of the division sum and then pass the baton to the next student. As in a relay, team members were not allowed to help one another. The next person would have to correct any error and then move on. The last step was rechecking their own answer using the (divisor x quotient + remainder) rule.

Many students were capable of doing the entire sum themselves, so it was difficult for them not to jump in to help their team, but they displayed respect and tolerance towards their group members. Students used their thinking skills (application of their knowledge of division) while participating in the activity with enthusiasm and confidence. Upon completion, students discussed what skills they applied during the activity. They observed the ATL chart which is displayed prominently in the classroom and listed the skills they felt they applied during the activity.

Students themselves were quick to point out that though this was a mathematics activity, social skills were more at play:

They had to respect each other and cooperate while awaiting their turn at the division game.

There were group decisions to be made. Students decided who would begin and who would complete the relay. They drew upon their experience from the recently concluded swimming relay held at school to decide what was more important for their group-to start strong versus a strong finish.

Students had to accept responsibility-if their part of the division had an error, the entire team performance would fall behind.

Communication skills were involved while solving the sum; however, their body language played an equally important role. Was their body language encouraging their friends or disheartening them?

Students deployed self-management skills of time management and organization of work. I have been encouraging students to assign roles and divide responsibilities during group work: presenting the work, researching, keeping track of time, struggling and working out compromises in group work. Students reflected that the activity helped build collaborative skills as much as it enhanced their division skills.

It was important to help students understand that attitude is a more important factor in determining success than intelligence. As a teacher, it is my responsibility to shape student attitudes.

The highlight for me was that not only did all the students enjoy the engagement but each one learned something different: about division, skills needed to work in a group, collaboration and empathy. The student responses further reinforces my commitment to the PYP ethos. As a teacher, I also learn through the same cycle as students: conduct a learning engagement and then reflect how I can modify my methods and engagements and progress as a PYP teacher.

As Albert Einstein said "Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school"-along with subject knowledge, teachers must aspire to build attitude and skills that will endure for a lifetime.
Sonia Trakroo is teaching mathematics at DPS International, Gurgaon, which is an IB continuum school in India. She has 3 years experience as a form tutor and mathematics specialist. Sonia enjoys planning strategies to empower students with learning skills. She is passionate about student engagement in the learning process and wants to develop a love for the subject in every student within the framework of the PYP. You can follow her on twitter @soniatrakroo.

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Integrating approaches to learning development in mathematics class

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This article shares how the approaches to learning can be integrated into mathematics through a shift in focus from pure concept teaching to the process of learning and integrating skill development. Regardless of level of proficiency in mathematics, every student enjoys and learns from the activity. "I am a math teacher".

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Mathematics routines to cultivate agency

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Mathematics routines to cultivate agency

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This article shares examples of how classroom routines could be one of the effective tools to foster learners' agency and raise their voice and choice while learning mathematics.
During the last months, the concept of "agency" has dominated the discussion between educators since it is one of new terminologies that appeared in PYP: From principles into practice. Although it is not "new" in the programme because PYP educators were aware of student-centered learning, supporting learners too have voice, choice, and ownership is a challenging journey.

Being responsible for assisting and supporting teachers to implement the Mathematics curriculum effectively and for sustaining the growth of the programme, we started to experiment with practices in mathematics that build student agency. We chose one tool for teaching Math: classroom routines.
Mathematical proficiency and routines
The National Council Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM, 2001) defines five strands that are interwoven and interdependent in the development of proficiency in mathematics: conceptual understanding, strategic competence, adaptive reasoning, productive disposition, and procedural fluency. One of the known tools or activities that help learners develop procedural fluency and conceptual understanding, as well as reasoning and problem-solving skills, is mathematics routines, where learners work together on a strategy or skill to develop specialized knowledge and language needed for conceptual understanding and applying mathematical concepts.
Dynamic Routines
Supporting learners to guide their learning required making a shift in the way routines are delivered and instructional practices that foster sense-making in Mathematics. Accordingly, I transferred the traditional routines into dynamic ones and put the needed criteria or the key elements that guide us toward planning meaningful experiences that support the learner's voice and choice.

To apply dynamic routines, teachers create a safe learning environment where learners are provided with opportunities for metacognition, are confident and motivated, contribute to a positive attitude toward Mathematics, are encouraged to use mathematical language and test others' strategies to assess their validity.
Examples of Dynamic Routines
We have started implementing the dynamic routine this year with fourth grade students. We chose the learning outcome: describe mental and written strategies for adding and subtracting two-digit numbers- Strand Number (Phase 2), and we extended it to teach adding and subtracting three-digit numbers.

Learners were asked to find one or more strategies and justify their answers. They shared their ideas with peers and then in groups using appropriate mathematical language. We used posters in classroom as samples to encourage them communicate and explain their thinking.

Figure 1: Sample of Class Poster

The following are samples of learners' thinking:

Figure 2: Vertical and horizontal Calculations

Figure 3: Decomposing and Skip Counting

Figure 4: Use of Soroban

Figure 5: Same Change Method

Research suggests that once students have memorized and practiced procedures that they do not understand, they have less motivation to understand their meaning or the reasoning behind them (Hiebert, 1999). Therefore, we aim to develop our understanding of how to create opportunities for students to develop agency in the mathematics classrooms by encouraging them to participate as creative agents, who think and reason for themselves in mathematics, rather than being passive recipients of knowledge. Our routines reflect our beliefs, so all what we need to do is to choose the best way to apply these routines, reflect on their effectiveness in the sense of raising agent learners, and then act to go beyond and deeper.

References:

National Research Council. 2001. Adding It Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/9822.

Hiebert, J. (1999). Relationships between research and the NCTM standards. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 30(1), 3-19.

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Samia Henaine is a PYP Math coordinator who assists and trains teachers to implement the curriculum effectively, deepens their understanding of how teaching and learning are viewed from the perspective of new educational approaches, and support them to adapt teaching methods and materials to meet students' varying needs and interests. You can follow her on Twitter @HenaineSamia.
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The Mathematics routines that cultivate learner agency

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This article shares examples of how classroom routines could be one of the effective tools to foster learners' agency and raise their voice and choice while learning mathematics. During the last months, the concept of "agency" has dominated the discussion between educators since it is one of new terminologies that appeared in PYP: From principles into practice.

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IB teachers speak to IB World about how their classroom-management systems encourage and celebrate growth and potential, and why the student voice is key

Effective classroom-management tools are essential for creating successful learning spaces for all ages. But, working with students to develop an 'agreement' or a set of 'values' is crucial to success.

Two IB educators share with IB World how their new classroom-management techniques inspire students to become the best version of themselves and give them a sense of ownership in how their class culture is developed.

The Pygmalion Effect and positive expectations

The idea of 'self-fulfilling' prophecies and positive expectations has a long history. For example, researchers Rosenthal and Jacobson found that teacher expectations influence student performance after their experiment at an elementary school in 1968.

For the experiment, students took intelligence tests, but researchers gave teachers the names of 20 per cent of students who were showing "unusual potential for intellectual growth" and would bloom academically within the year. Unknown to the teachers, these students were randomly selected with no relation to the initial test.

When students were tested eight months later, they discovered that the randomly selected students scored significantly higher.

They called this the 'Pygmalion Effect'. The experiment highlights the powerful role a teacher plays in setting classroom expectations and how they impact on student engagement and learning. Rosenthal insists that the effect also applies to higher education.

PYP educator Matthew Scott at Rivercrest Christian College in Australia, was reminded of the Pygmalion Effect at a Project Zero Conference in Melbourne. "Harvard researcher Daniel Wilson suggested that the role of teaching and learning was really about working with 'human potential'," he recalls.

"This idea resonated with me as I considered how my classroom culture was geared to inspiring students to strive for more, or to be more. I was familiar with research conducted about the effects of positive expectations on learners and intrigued by the implications of Rosenthal's work."

Scott has applied the concept to his classroom essential agreement, which he calls the "oxygen" in the classroom. "The agreement is used in everything we do," he says. "It is used for individual and group goal setting. At times, we will focus on one specific line and inquire as to what it can look like and sound like in our context."

Positive expectations and the Pygmalion Effect has shifted the agreement from being a more traditional teacher-driven set of rules to a negotiated set of values, says Scott.

His students wrote the agreement using positive phrases, reminding them of their potential and what they are all working towards, says Scott. It breaks down elements of classroom conduct and is also used to encourage, inspire and motivate students. "The agreement is pivotal in giving all students a voice and a sense of ownership in how the class culture is developed and maintained," he says.

It's not about the basic rules, but more about the kind of people students want to be and how they can strive to be internationally minded

Students now see learning as a challenge and an ongoing process. "The students have embraced the positive aspirational nature of the agreement and it has positively affected our classroom culture and their attitude towards learning," he says.

Positive expectations and the Pygmalion Effect have also enhanced Scott's teaching. He says: "I proactively plan and teach elements of our classroom essential agreement and weave it into units of inquiry and the fabric of the classroom life.

"Now, I spend far less time managing student misbehaviour and much more time supporting students in motivating themselves to be more caring, peaceful and contribute to a better world."

Punishment- and reward-free classrooms

Mike Mackenna, MYP and IB Diploma Programme (DP) English Teacher at IB World School CIEDI, in Colombia, soon learned from experience that being "too strict" did not result in better student behaviour. He switched from punishment-and-reward classrooms to help build relationships and trust with his students.

"I spent my first six years of teaching getting progressively stricter," he says. "I embraced the principles of exacting discipline, outlined in books like Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov and Assertive Discipline by Lee Canter, trying to create a perfectly designed, uniformly enforced system of punishments and rewards. I was going for that '100% rule' - all students follow instructions at all times."

But some students didn't like this approach. More than a hundred recess reflections proved it was not resulting in better behaviour. "For class feedback, students frequently wrote comments such as 'Do more fun activities' and described my class as 'boring and repetitive'," says Mackenna. "The more charitable students tended to write comments like 'Classes are complete and informative, but monotonous'."

He decided to try the other extreme and researched the argument behind not punishing or rewarding students. Now, rather than giving out a list of rules at the beginning of the year, he asks students what they valued and what they should do in class to honour those values. Students named values like 'respect', which would lead to actions like listening to each other.

"This kind of classroom management fits well with the IB's mission of building a 'more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect'," says Mackenna

When students misbehave, Mackenna focuses on emphasizing the logical consequences of their actions. "I frame their behaviour as a choice. For example, 'Read the book and learn more, or don't read it and learn less. It is your choice, but I recommend reading'."

He says punishment- and reward-free classrooms encourage honesty. "When you do have to correct student behavior, students are much more likely to accept the correction and move on, rather than fight it, since the correction doesn't come with a punishment they want to avoid."

He's since not given out a single punishment, and says it was "the most enjoyable year of teaching" of his career by far. Student feedback has been much more positive, too. "Now I receive comments such as, 'Mike always tries to make every activity as fun as possible' and 'Mike is cool and polite'," he says.

Punishment-free classrooms could go a long way to improve boys' learning and engagement. As IB World magazine investigated in the September issue, boys are often perceived as disruptive and undisciplined, which can reinforce their negative attitudes to school.

Makenna has noticed a difference, he says: "Boys are more engaged than they've been in the past. Being able to just talk and sometimes joke with them about misbehaviour, without having to apply punishments, has made my relationships better with them, and that leads to more engagement."

He has also learned that class management can't be separated from engagement and morale. "If you teach more interesting lessons, misbehaviour generally goes down. I have put a lot more focus on making my lessons engaging by using the greatest variety of activities possible, giving students some form of choice in every assessment and frequently offering extra help to struggling students. To boost morale, I focused on making the workload reasonable and by frequently asking for, and acting on, student feedback," he says.

Simply removing punishments and rewards wasn't enough. I had to replace that sort of system with one in which students were challenged to honour their own values. I had to acknowledge that students, just like anyone else, react best to leaders who treat them well and try to make their work stimulating and enjoyable.

How do you manage your classroom? Email your stories to editor@ibo.org

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IB teachers speak to IB World about how their classroom-management systems encourage and celebrate growth and potential, and why the student voice is key Effective classroom-management tools are essential for creating successful learning spaces for all ages. But, working with students to develop an 'agreement' or a set of 'values' is crucial to success.

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Setting up a PYP classroom - what to expect in the first week 

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Setting up a PYP classroom - what to expect in the first week 