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Connect:  I connect to the transdisciplinary elements of the PYP as a highly organized framework to support all members of the school learning community. Our POI units and lessons iterate every year as we address students' curiosity and inquiry questions.  This ensures that our programming is refreshed, learner driven and relevant to our learners.
Challenge:  Our challenge with moving forward with transdisciplinarity across the school involves new curriculum adoption. Our challenge is supporting our teachers as they integrate an entirely new CKLA literacy curriculum into our Units of Inquiry.  Teachers are completely starting over with adding CKLA curriculum into the POI, so supporting them with planning time with both our IB Coordinator and Literacy Lead has been challenging, but well worth teacher release time and making time in our  school's calendar.
Extend:  Regarding new curriculum adoption into our POI, wondering how we can best plan for instruction by reflecting about what subject area knowledge, concepts and skills will be necessary to understand the central idea.  Is this best reflected on, and planned with with the Literacy Lead and the IB Coordinator or both together?

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Connect, Challenge, Extend              (Tamikia Harris)      

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Connect, Challenge, Extend              (Tamikia Harris)      

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Connect:
I believe, our staff can connect the learning experience in a positive way that sparks the interest of students, and increase engagement in a way that makes the learning fun and meaningful.
Challenge:
As a team, we will challenge teachers to create units that have more "teacher agency", promote student productive struggle, and increase student ownership.
Extend:
As I look at moving forward positively with staff, it is my goal to ensure we increase our teacher capacity to plan units of inquiry that increase meaningful learning experiences.

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Connect- Transdisciplinary learning is connected by exposure of diverse cultures, others' experienced, and different subjects incorporated across the curriculum. Students are then able to show connectedness with real life experiences by expressions or experiences of others. As a 4th grade Reading teacher, I think there are some things they should already know; however after connecting with them across the curriculum/real world their strengths and weaknesses help me to better understand how important connections are within transdisciplinary learning.

Extend- My extension or push for thinking in a new direction across curriculum was by realizing although I only taught Reading/ELA/Writing/Social Studies my exposure to other students were just as essential. Students and I began learning on one topic, then we extend it by exploring, researching, and connecting after other ideas are raised. This aspect gives me an opportunity to not just look at my new direction of thinking, but my students as well.
Challenge- My challenge is always hoping that as a class we can expose one another to great ideas and new challenges. However, at times we do not always have the means (funds) to expose in ways teachers feel. Also getting away from teaching time within our class can become a challenge because it is always a lot that is wanted to be shared, exposed, and given due to a limited amount of time.

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I can connect PYP learning to a documentary I watched on Finland. They have a few hours of core classes a day and the rest of the day is outside the classroom. While out of the classroom, they take the content that they were taught and apply it to real-life scenarios. The students had to problem solve the situation, come up with a plan, and solve the problem using math and other subject areas.

Extend: Students are more intrinsically motivated to work when the task applies to to them on a personal level and when they are the ones constructing a plan.

Challenge: I am still curious about how real-world experiences can be integrated into the math block. I feel it would be beneficial to take the students to a company or facility to see how math plays a role.

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Connect- I was able to to connect to learning the transdisciplinary world because it connects through the world of new knowledge and a deeper undertanding to real life experiences. As a Kindergarten teacher, my students and I learn through exploration, feelings etc. daily.

Extend-I feel that I can extend transdisciplinary learning  by shifting away from my comfort zone by helping my students (Kindergarteners) grow and learn at a more deeper learning.

Challenge- A challenge is teaching across the curriculum, making sure I connect my students to real life problems, beliefs, by going beyond the subject boundaries.

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Jennifer Asberry-Connect:  As a STEM Lab teacher, everything I do with my students involves connectivity.  Everything we do in the lab involves connection across multiple content areas and to “real world” problems and creating/testing solutions to those problems.  I feel a professional obligation to help broaden the perspectives of the children I teach.  I want them to feel connected to their immediate community and beyond.  It is important for them to see the “real world” problems we face locally are sometimes the very same problems people face globally.  Challenge:  Sometimes it feels challenging to help lower elementary students grasp what it means to be global or international.  For some of them, it seems as though they are not quite ready to understand that there is so much more to our world that what is right in their own backyard.   Extend-My “take away” for the extend section is to slightly alter the stance from which teachers approach their units.  Instead of viewing them from just their respective grade level’s content area, think of them in terms of vertical planning.  What do these students need to know from their prior grade level’s content area to make deeper connections and what would they need to know in the next grade level’s content area to make deeper connections moving forward?  It might serve teachers well to actually vertically plan their IB units in the future to see if they can build connections between or at least see what path the next grade level’s units are moving towards.  

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Jennifer Asberry-Connect:  As a STEM Lab teacher, everything I do with my students involves connectivity.  Everything we do in the lab involves connection across multiple content areas and to “real world” problems and creating/testing solutions to those problems.  I feel a professional obligation to help broaden the perspectives of the children I teach.  I want them to feel connected to their immediate community and beyond.  It is important for them to see the “real world” problems we face locally are sometimes the very same problems people face globally.  Challenge:  Sometimes it feels challenging to help lower elementary students grasp what it means to be global or international.  For some of them, it seems as though they are not quite ready to understand that there is so much more to our world that what is right in their own backyard.   Extend-My “take away” for the extend section is to slightly alter the stance from which teachers approach their units.  Instead of viewing them from just their respective grade level’s content area, think of them in terms of vertical planning.  What do these students need to know from their prior grade level’s content area to make deeper connections and what would they need to know in the next grade level’s content area to make deeper connections moving forward?  It might serve teachers well to actually vertically plan their IB units in the future to see if they can build connections between or at least see what path the next grade level’s units are moving towards.  

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Connect, Challenge, Extend - María del Carmen Barniol

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Connect, Challenge, Extend - María del Carmen Barniol

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Connect:
1. Our brain integrates all of our resources (knowledge, abilities, etc.) when in need to response: make decisions, react, understand something, etc.
2. Two key aspects for learning are motivation and understanding the relevance of what we are learning.
Working with transdisciplinary themes makes 1 and 2 possible.

Extend:
"...we provide opportunities for them (students) to explore our shared humanity, and reflect on complex and interconnected issues of global significance".
"This framework engages our students in a more meaningful school experience and develops an understanding that they can take with them into their future learning".

I am always looking answers when it comes to the question what are schools for? In these two phrases I found great appealing answers that I would like to work more on. One gives focus on the main problem (in my opinion) of the world: selfishness. And the other can be connected to metacognition.

Challenge:
To answer the enduring values questions.

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Connect, Extend and Challenge - Michelin Taylor

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Connect, Extend and Challenge - Michelin Taylor

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Connect: After viewing the video, I connected with providing learning experiences that aren’t restrictive and allow students to explore, inquire and research concepts that interest them. I also love how transdisciplinary learning promotes inquiry and global minded thinking. I am a firm believer that when children have voice and choice learning is much more meaningful.

Extend: Moving forward I want to support my teachers with thinking beyond the standards, strengthen our units of inquiry and learning experiences. Keeping the question, “What subject area knowledge, concepts and skills will be needed to understand the central idea and lines of inquiry?” at the forefront of planning.

Challenge: I believe a possible challenge moving forward would be supporting my staff with developing outcomes across content areas that strongly support students in understanding the central idea and lines of inquiry.

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Connect, Challenge, Extend (Jenny Arango)

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Connect, Challenge, Extend (Jenny Arango)

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Connect: I do love how the kids engage, interact and respond when you present them with real life situations, when they relate what we are studying to something they have observed before but maybe had not given much thought. They take initiative, you don't have to force anything, they bring ideas, and you don't have to push anything.
Challenge: In my case, time is a challenge. I am a DLI teacher who has two classes for half the day each. Many time, it is very difficult to cover everything you want and everything you need.
Extend: I believe that a wonderful way for  keep the thinking of my students going, could be to provide an open space (such as a club, in-person or virtual), where they can provide their new findings and research all year long, even if we have finished a unit of inquiry, and allowing them the opportunity to  access their recordings outside of school and whenever they are able to.

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Connect---I can make connections to the video because I've tried to be very intentional with the lessons that I've planned for my math students.  I tried my best in creating lessons for them in order to connect to real world experiences. One of my projects even had my students interviewing professionals in their future occupations.  One of the main questions my students had to ask was "how does math relate to your job."   My goal was for the students to realize that math was everywhere and will always be needed in any situation.
Challenge--I would like to challenge all of our teachers by having them to look at their planners and reflect upon how their units would take their students into future learning experiences.
Extend--During our collaborative planning time, I would like to support teachers in evaluating the "enduring value" of their next units of inquiry.  Participating in this exercise was very thought provoking.

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Connect, Extend, Challenge - Margaret Wright

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Connect, Extend, Challenge - Margaret Wright

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Connect - I immediately made a connection with the first video as it related to how learning must be meaningful. The video mentioned how students make connections when learning through experiences at home. I am an avid believer that students need to care about what they are learning for meaningful and deep learning to take place. This meaning can be activated through all types of experiences, not just during classroom time. Another connection that I made is due to being enrolled in a Read to Succeed Course. In this week's course assignment, I read about integrated curriculum though the Transdisciplinary, Multidisciplinary, Interdisciplinary approaches. These approaches to integrated curriculum focus on how the disciplines taught in schools can work together to create a synergic learning environment that broadens students horizons and activates the development of inquiry skills.

Extend - After completing the nanoPD, something new that I considered is that when devising units, they don't need to just be in the scope of a 4th grade student (as a 4th grade teacher). I somewhat held the notion that the units in IB had to be solely reliant on the standards that I am required to teach to my students. After really looking at the information today, I see these units differently. I see that these units focus on global issues that can be molded towards the standards that I am required to teach. The quote from the Reflect portion of the PD that states, "a transdisciplinary teacher will ask: “What subject area knowledge, concepts and skills will be needed to understand the central idea and lines of inquiry?” compared to “What subject area knowledge and skills can I cover in this unit?” truly sums up my new understanding of creating IB units.

Challenge - A challenge that faces me now in developing the best IB instruction for my students is that my standards will be changing next year in Science. As a departmentalized Science and Social Studies teacher, coming from a deeper understanding to new material, I'm curious to see how I will be able to develop my best IB units. I am also a little confused on how to pull the "right" central ideas with the best topics to be the most cohesive. I'm also wondering if cohesion is more of the goal or is the goal to make connections with seemingly less related material? Both goals help students make connections, but which goal will yield in higher level thinking?