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The SharingPYP Blog

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How can students effectively develop their own learning pathway through questioning? Read about PYP students who wanted more ownership of their learning: to design their own inquiry. This is a case study of how one year 6 class applied a questioning process to lead their own learning.
In year 6, feedback from our students indicated that what they wanted most was more ownership of their learning and the chance to learn about their own areas of interest.

So when we began a new unit, inquiring into the idea that A nation's story has many perspectives, we decided to create opportunities for the students to move beyond being engaged in their learning to being empowered learners. Students would design their own line of inquiry, beginning with questions generated throughout the guided inquiry that began the unit.

We scaffolded the process of designing questions to guide this inquiry by using our own interpretation of the Question Formulation Technique. We stood in a circle; students stated their question to the group and then they wrote their question on a post-it note and placed it in the middle of the circle. If the students made a statement rather than a question, they were respectfully asked to re-phrase it before writing. Some students struggled with the exact wording of their question. They had an idea or a wondering and the group was able to make suggestions about the wording of the question until the student was satisfied. Because the students were sharing with the group before writing, we avoided double-ups of ideas but still, with a large group of lively students who were full of ideas, it did not take long to build up an overwhelming number of questions.

Next, how were we to organize these questions? Olivia, one of our students, said "I can see a lot of questions about the Gold Rush so maybe we could put them together." Other students identified categories and collected questions that they thought matched. As they categorized, students discussed questions that did not seem to be connected with the central idea and grouped these together. When we reached a stalemate in this categorizing task, students were invited to check where their questions had ended up and whether they were happy with that place for them.

Following this, students were asked to identify an area of interest for their own inquiry and describe it as a line of inquiry in the format beginning with "An inquiry into..." They justified their proposed inquiry by stating its connection to our related concepts nation's story and perspective. They shared their line of inquiry with their teacher so that they achieved clarity.

Finally, our students formulated questions that specifically matched their lines of inquiry and would guide them in their particular area of research. They organized these questions around the key concepts.

We challenged our students to think about what different kinds of research their questions would require, such as factual, conceptual or debatable. This process led to valuable discussion around the category for each question, developing students' understanding of questions.

When we had completed the inquiries, we surveyed the students. Here are some of their responses:

I think it is better when we choose our own learning because when I choose, I always do something I really enjoy and I feel that I work at it better when I am doing something I like.

You become more interested and involved in your learning.

You grow as a learner and you have the opportunity to grow your learning the way you want.

You also can choose a path that can challenge in your own ways.

You can be creative, have an open mind about the tasks and design your own questions and work how you learn best.

-

References:

Rothstein, D., & Santana, S. (2011) Make Just One Chance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Zonca, B. (2017)Student-led development of lines of inquiry, SharingPYP blog
Karen Campbell is a year 6 homeroom teacher at Santa Sabina College, Strathfield, Australia. Prior to this, she worked in international schools in Singapore and China, leading and teaching the IB PYP. She has a broad range of experience across all primary grades and in several leadership roles in both local and international schools. Developing creative and critical thinking skills is at the core of her teaching practice. She is focused on authentically incorporating students' questions in the inquiry process and on facilitating the development of thinking skills that will enable students to be lifelong learners. She tweets @KarenE_Campbell.

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How can students effectively develop their own learning pathway through questioning? Read about PYP students who wanted more ownership of their learning: to design their own inquiry. This is a case study of how one year 6 class applied a questioning process to lead their own learning.

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The SharingPYP Blog

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Student Voice and Choice – Student Ownership | The PYP Classroom

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PYP students take the lead | SharingPYP Blog

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The IB Primary Years Programme encourages students to identify and choose the areas of learning they wish to explore. IB World magazine speaks to three PYP teachers about how they support their students in directing their own learning.

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A “THINK ALOUD” ABOUT SUPPORTING INTERVENTIONS IN A PYP SCHOOL’S PROGRAMME OF INQUIRY

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A “THINK ALOUD” ABOUT SUPPORTING INTERVENTIONS IN A PYP SCHOOL’S PROGRAMME OF INQUIRY

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The Joy of Learning Blog

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Have you ever looked up synonyms for the word INTERVENTION?

There are 711 similar words....from "meddling" to "treatment" from "interference" to "support". And the broad range of related word meanings also brings up a multitude of potentials for designing a reading intervention program at your school.

Developing this program is in response to teaching our learners after a full school year online. We want to be ready to get them growing as soon as we can get them onto campus. We want to ensure that they accelerate when they return. We are currently bringing in Reader's Workshop (aka developing a LOVE of Reading) along with Leveled Learning Intervention (aka the SCIENCE of Reading).

But intervention models typically require those kiddos who need more support to get pulled out of class (Tier 2 and 3). You wouldn't pull them out of literacy, nor would you pull them out of math, so what would they miss? Their Unit of Inquiry (UOI) time? Hmm...I'm not a fan of that. Because if you add something to your program, something else has to be eliminated, right?

That's what I am grappling with right now......and I think back to those words "meddling" and "interference"-is this what is going to happen to transdisciplinary learning?

So I've been considering how we might use our UOIs in service of students getting the support so they need to feel confident and capable. And since many kids' growth has taken a hit from learning in a pandemic, I am thinking about a whole school UOI that could be used for our intervention time, but not just to address their deficiencies, but to explore their assets too! What could a UOI like that look like?

Personal

Timely

Goal-orientated

Empowering

Effective

Joyful

That's what I want for our learners.

What Transdisciplinary Theme?

So I'm starting to think about how we would design a unit like that? My first thought is that this would be developed as a Who We Are and it would need to target many facets of the theme descriptor:

Identity, Relationships, Beliefs, Responsibility, Community-are some concepts that might show up in a UOI

Okay.....so let's start with some potential Central ideas:
Knowing about who we are as learners can help us to set goals, develop independence and build a strong culture of support. Healthy communities develop a strong culture of cooperation, goal-setting, and compassion in order to achieve their objectives. People's curiosity and desire to learn can create opportunities for personal growth and build relationships in a community. Challenges provide individuals and communities opportunities to reflect, problem-solve and develop resilience.
Discovering who we are can help us to define who we want to become, as individuals and as a community.

Alright, that's enough brainstorming for now. There are many possible trajectories in the Who We Are theme.

As I consider the viability of this, we want something that provides breadth so that we focus on the LEARNER, not just on the subject matter. And, although this UOI could be used as a placeholder on our schedules for reading intervention time, we could also use it for math intervention or opportunities to EXTEND their learning. We must be careful to balance deficiencies with assets, spotlighting what makes them unique and helping them to develop self-awareness of who they are. I really need to sit down with teachers to hear their ideas and come into alignment so we can really put something solid on paper. Then grade-level teams can add their polish and shine to any of these potential central ideas and create their own lines of inquiry.

How long?

Once we nail down the Central idea, the next step is to determine the length of the unit. And how might we schedule this? We wouldn't do it as a typical 6-week UOI! This will need to be a year-long UOI because we would need a substantial amount of time to work with students.

Lets's say you take a week to launch it and then provide 1 day a week for intervention (31 weeks on our school calendar) roughly would make this a 5 1/2-6 week UOI. Hmm...that could work, And then different grade levels can use different days of the week to make it easier for our reading interventionist to do "pull out". Although once we analyze our student data, we might need more time in certain grade levels, so, although this might be a whole school UOI, the approach might look different. We might need a steady blast of 4 weeks long in Grade 2, for example, and then pull it back to one day a week. So knowing our learners and being flexible will be the key. Even if we do this as a whole school, we don't have to have the same timelines for each grade level. Could be messy but we have to think about what students need.

Considerations..

The final thing that I wonder about is if we did this as a whole school UOI and scheduled it accordingly, then could we do a multi-grade collaboration, in which teachers could have students move more fluidly between classrooms in order to engage in different kinds of learning? Oh, that could be cool if teachers were open to sharing students. hmm...lots of possibilities, although this would need to be post-pandemic when folks can venture out of their "pods".

Definitely some food for thought.

I'm excited about providing more support to learners as they develop into strong readers and writers, but I want to make sure we don't subtract from other areas of the curriculum. I want to honor that we are a PYP school first and foremost, and we embed additional support strutures because we believe in learners' capacity to grow into flourishing human beings.

As I shared in the post, Should Fear be the Basis of Decision-making in Schools? , I want to do things not because we worry about learning gaps, but we have hope for the future and wish to create a new way forward in education. Although the whole concept of "intervention" is based on looking at what the student is missing, I wish to shift this approach in order to find some new truths in evaluating data.

This is the first draft of my thinking, but as we work together in our learning community, I see a lot of possibilities to cultivate a different ethos around this topic.

Any ideas or suggestions? I'm all ears! Please share.

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A "Think Aloud" about Supporting Interventions in a PYP School's Programme of Inquiry

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Have you ever looked up synonyms for the word INTERVENTION? There are 711 similar words....from "meddling" to "treatment" from "interference" to "support". And the broad range of related word meanings also brings up a multitude of potentials for designing a reading intervention program at your school.

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MAKING GOOD HUMANS Blog

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Making Teaching Visible Blog

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The curriculum of the International Baccalaureate's Primary Years Program (PYP) is a concept-driven curriculum. This means that our main goal is getting students to understand significant ideas, as opposed to being focused on memorizing isolated facts and mastering skills out of context (p. 15 of Making the PYP Happen). In a PYP school, we focus on helping students collaboratively construct an understanding of eight key concepts: form, function, causation, change, connection, perspective, responsibility and reflection.

Our concept-driven curriculum is organized into six transdisciplinary units of inquiry and it is within these meaningful contexts that students construct an understanding of the eight key concepts. Generally two-to-three key concepts are explored during each unit of inquiry. These key concepts help shape each unit, giving the unit direction and purpose.

It is imperative that the school periodically look at the horizontal and vertical balance of their key concepts. The IB publication Developing a Transdisciplinary Program of Inquiry states that "all eight key concepts must be represented on the program of inquiry at each grade/year level" (horizontal balance) and that "there should be a balance of PYP key concepts used throughout each transdisciplinary theme," (vertical balance).

The document goes on to explain that vertical balance, "does not mean that each key concept must be represented under each transdisciplinary theme but rather that schools are mindful of repetition or under-representation of concepts in order to ensure that there are appropriate opportunities for students to revisit and develop their understanding of all concepts," (pages 5 & 6).

During our last evaluation in 2012, our school learned that our curriculum was too knowledge-based and that we needed to revise our planners to make them more concept-driven. Over the last five years, our teachers have worked hard to revise our units, focusing our curriculum on understanding meaningful ideas (THE CONCEPTS). As coordinator, I wanted teachers to authentically identify the key concepts that would best fit with their units and not to pay attention to horizontally or vertically balancing the key concepts as we revised the units.

That meant that our POI may not be horizontally or vertically balanced by key concept and that the work to bring it into balance may be tricky and messy. Change the concepts to horizontally balance a grade level, and the vertical balance might be off. Change a concept to bring about vertical balance and a grade-level might then get thrown out of wack.

During our last professional development day, our entire staff took on the challenge of balancing our POI by key concepts by gamifying the task. What ended up happening was wonderful!

First, we had to set up the game board.

Step #1: We created a Key Concept POI; copying the key concepts that were in each of our planners onto the corresponding box on the grid.

Step #2: Teachers identified the key concepts that COULD NOT be changed by typing them in ALL CAPS. If we were going to balance the POI by key concept, most likely something was going to change, but we wanted teachers to let us know the ones that absolutely COULD NOT be changed. In essence, they were "locking them in". During this step, some grade levels made changes to their key concepts when they noticed they were not horizontally balanced.

Step #3: Next, we wanted teams to identify the key concepts that COULD go into each of their units. Again, as we were balancing the POI by key concepts, it might be possible that a key concept needed to be added somewhere. However, we wanted those additions to be authentic, so teachers needed to tell us which key concepts could possibly go in their units. They recorded those possibilities in light gray on the Key Concept POI. During this step, some teams continued to make changes to their key concepts to bring balance to their grade level key concepts.

With the game board set, we then switched into five vertical teams and the rules of the game were shared:

Goal: balance the POI vertically and horizontally by key concept with as few moves as possible.

Parameters:

Horizontal balance means, "all eight key concepts must be represented (page 5 of Developing a Transdisciplinary Program of Inquiry.

Vertical balance means, "there should be a balance of PYP key concepts used throughout each transdisciplinary theme, but that does not mean that each key concept must be represented under each transdisciplinary theme," (page 6 of Developing a Transdisciplinary Program of Inquiry.)

No concept in CAPS can be moved. It has been "locked in".

Only concepts in gray can be added.

The team that would suggest the lease amount of moves while still creating a balanced POI would win a tub full of homemade cookies. Click here for the Bestever Cookie recipe.

Teams had 20 minutes to work. They were engaged and focused, working to see how they could vertically and horizontally balance their POI by key concepts.

At the end of 20 minutes, all five teams submitted their suggestions for changes to the key concepts. Teams suggested anywhere from 1 to 10 changes. The judges looked over the plan made by the team that had suggested one change and declared them the winner! They then had to explain their thinking to the group:

"First, we looked horizontally to make sure that every grade level had all eight key concepts. We found that all grade levels had all eight key concepts represented.

Then, we looked vertically to see if all eight key concepts were addressed under each transdisciplinary theme. We discovered:

Next, we tabulated how many times each of the key concepts showed up across the whole POI:

Who we are: no connection

How we express ourselves: no change or causation

How the world works: no responsibility

How we organize ourselves: no form, causation or reflection

Although some transdisciplinary themes didn't have some key concepts (as mentioned above), throughout the entire POI, all eight key concepts seem to be represented in a balanced way; all except reflection.

So, we made the suggestion to add reflection to the Kindergarten unit How we organize ourselves."

Throughout this entire process, teachers were engaged in digging into their units and thinking in an honest and meaningful way about how the key concepts are taught and learned in each of their units of inquiry. As they worked vertically, they were engaged in suggesting authentic changes that would help bring about a more balanced Program of Inquiry, " to ensure that there are appropriate opportunities for students to revisit and develop their understanding of all concepts."
Moving forward, we will look for opportunities to incorporate more reflection into our units of inquiry, which still is under-represented in our POI. Also, any time a key concept needs to change in the future, we will look to see how the horizontal and vertical balance will be affected by such a change.

Balancing our POI in this way proved to be engaging, meaningful and even fun! How have your schools balanced your POI by key concepts?

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The curriculum of the International Baccalaureate's Primary Years Program (PYP) is a concept-driven curriculum. This means that our main goal is getting students to understand significant ideas, as opposed to being focused on memorizing isolated facts and mastering skills out of context (p. 15 of Making the PYP Happen).

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Inquiry into Learning Blog