As we look at playing with the ATLs, I’m reminded of my friend Vidhya. She is a passionate PYP educator from India. If you are on Twitter in the education community, you have probably run across her many tweets. Ever since last summer, she has opened my eyes to so many possibilities in seeing learning and teaching. In a recent chat, Vidhya and I were discussing this challenge and the role of the ATLs. She posed an amazing question that got my mind thinking. What skills do we learn naturally within a purposeful learning space that is designed for play? Not just materials, but play with ideas. This sparked my curiosity and I had to know more about this idea. Here’s where my mind meandered to. When we consider our learning space design, we need to think about the big purpose. Is it to inspire play? Bring about inquiry? Control the learning? Evidence of learning and growth? All of these considerations greatly impact how the approaches to learning (ATLs) are exhibited to the school community. With purposeful learning spaces focused on play, the learner is able to self-direct their learning pathway by manipulating materials and ideas in their own way. Why does this matter? More than ever, our learners need to learn how to create their learning identity by mastering and applying a variety of skills in different contexts. These skills will help them to navigate uncertain times and hone problem-solving skills that they will need in the future. To bring context to this process, Vidhya shared with me how she encourages her learners to make a personal connection to the ATLS. As part of a unit of inquiry, Vidhya asked her learners to go beyond “learning” the ATLs, but rather applying them to real-life context. Here are some connections that her learners made.
Application ChallengeYour challenge is to brainstorm with your learners how they can possibly make a personal connection to the ATLS and let them showcase it to the school community. Let them make the learning decisions and justify their choice.
When I make connections to the ATLs, I think of how we all pivoted so quickly during the pandemic to learn new skills and increase our technological understanding. This podcast was such an adventure for me. We just passed the second anniversary and I am proud of “The Little Podcast That Could” and I hope it’s helped your practice in some way. A big shout to the top 5 countries with the most downloads: United States, Australia, Canada, India, and United Arab Emirates. I’ve lived in four of these countries and they all have a special place in my heart and India is still on the bucket list. The top 5 cities are Singapore, Hanoi, Melbourne, Sharjah, and Brisbane. Ironically, I’ve been to four out of five countries; Hanoi is also on my bucket list. Thank you for listening. I’d love to hear your ahas and topic wish lists on social media #thinkchat2020, so I can continue to grow. I can’t wait to see your ideas!
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Let’s continue on with this theme about learning space design and how it impacts play. From an organizational standpoint, what makes your space so special? When you look around your special spot in your home, what are some special things and tools you use that inspire you to play? One of my favorite spots in my home is my inspiration room. Everything is organized in drawers, tubs, cabinets, and shelves. For me to function, I need it to be clearly labeled and organized. Imagine that. When you look around the walls, you will see comic art from one of my favorite artists, Des Taylor. One of my treasures is a hand drawn sketch of Poison Ivy that he made for me. Interspersed between the pictures is a Banksy with Billie Holiday, record covers of my favorite childhood tales, and local street art. This sets the tone of inspiration and creativity to come. All of this décor sounds silly, but to me it sparks creativity. On the shelves, I have materials from my mother’s house, a cross stitch sampler with my name made by a student as a Genius Hour project, and artifacts from my travels. These artifacts make me feel at home…all parts of me are represented from different chapters in the story of my life. As I examine the tools, I connect to my mother. When I was a child, she was quite crafty and I’ve inherited her love of creating within and beyond the classroom. My sewing machine is circa 1990’s. It’s solidly built, made out of metal, and has very few stitches. It makes me happy when I hear the hum of the machine as I create something new. The pinking shears she used to use all the time with her handwriting sit in my drawer. They are no longer sharp, but I keep them anyway. Besides being sentimental, the materials are carefully organized, so I can easily retrieve like materials to create. All of my sewing notions are together while my cardmaking supplies are nestled together. As you can imagine, I have lots of drawers, baskets, and containers. Every time I walk in the room, I feel inspired to create something new. Application ChallengeWhen looking at your home and learning spaces, consider answering these questions and make some suggestions for improvements.
Just like my inspiration room, our learning spaces should be a place that excites, invites, and provokes. This should get your mind racing with new ideas! Let’s have some fun with this application challenge. Be sure to post your new thinking on social media with #thinkchat2020. I can’t wait to see your ideas! Welcome to another application series, where we are going to take ideas we have explored before and apply them into a new context. I absolutely love this part, because it helps to look at old things again…the process of anew (4A’s by Misty Paterson). Since our last application series, you’ve had a chance to participate in the Transdisciplinary and Design Thinking challenges. They helped you to take content and apply it to your individual context. Now, we are going to do a minor version for learning environment, play, and the approaches to learning (ATLs). Over the past couple of months, I have become obsessed with the Danish way of life called Hygge. I know it’s been coined as the next design trend or lots of candles with fluffy blankets. It’s more than that. It’s about looking for little things that bring you happiness, contentment, and joy, such as candles, good lighting, comfortable textiles, and cozy aesthetics. Even still, it’s a way of being. In Denmark, most of their year is cold and dark. To offset this dreariness, they create work, home, and place spaces that celebrate those simple pleasures. Besides candles, the Danes are known to eat a lot of cake. My kind of people. When I think of Hygge, I consider my own home and yours. Here are some questions to consider about your own living space.
If the feeling of coziness and warmth are important at home, why don’t we focus on it more when designing learning spaces? Most of the time, we’re married to overhead fluorescent lights and flat pack furniture. How can we bring a little Hygge into our school spaces? Application ChallengeGo around your school and find a learning space that is underused or not reflective agentic thinking. Consider how you will bring it to life. We will use a reflective tool to help us make lasting, sustainable change. TheoreticalWhen we are thinking theoretically, we consider the big abstract ideas or philosophy that we are learning about. We are trying to identify and connect the big aha moments that have arisen. For the theoretical reflection, consider asking yourself these questions:
OperationalWhen we think operationally, we determine the resources that we need and how they are being used. We advocate for support through human resources, professional development, and collaboration. We consider the potential obstacle that may block our way. For the operational reflection, consider asking yourself these questions:
PracticalWhen we think practically, we focus on how we are going to make our process work on a daily basis. We think literally. We think concretely. We want to know how it will happen. We demonstrate our inquiry thinking strategies to make relevant connections to our learners.
For the practical reflection, consider asking yourself these questions:
This should get your mind racing with new ideas! Let’s have some fun with this application challenge. Be sure to post your new thinking on social media with #thinkchat2020. I can’t wait to see your ideas! by Lu Gerlach Welcome to the third and final episode of our application series. If you haven't had a chance to apply your learning of the learner profile and international mindedness, I'd suggest you do so before moving forward. It's a great chance for you to synthesize and apply your understanding of the big ideas to your school/ unit context. This is our ultimate goal with any professional development to make meaningful application to what we are already doing. As we know, agency and action take up a lot of space in our practice within the PYP. They shape everything we do, so we need to take time to apply their role into our practice. Take a look at the table below to remind yourself of their role. Choices, Choices, ChoicesLet's use this strategy to help us take a deeper look at how to use agency and action more readily in our practice.
Let’s take look at an example for those who might need a bit more inspiration Step 1:
Step 2:
Step 3:
Step 4:It’s only a great idea on paper until I share it with my team. This will put it into action.
Final Thoughts Something that came to my mind after our agency and action series. We live in a world of endless choices: what career we will choose, what colleges we want to attend, which cities we want to live in, and so forth. If we don’t get students to practice with making choices at a young age, they will struggle greatly to make informed choices when it truly matters. The last three episodes have been focused on applying our knowledge and understanding into our practice. This is so important if we want to make lasting change and grow in our practice. Reflection and application are never easy, because they often require us to change. As we know, change can be scary and daunting at times. My goal has been to get the dialogue started, so it’s easier for you to approach your team with tangible suggestions for improvement. See you in the next episode and hold on to that passion! by Lu Gerlach Welcome to our second episode in our application series! Today, we will look at ways to apply international mindedness and reflect on our practice. When we apply international mindedness, what might this look and feel like? It’s hard to put into action something that is so tied with our disposition and belief system. Here are some ideas that we shared previously:
The first step is looking at this list and thinking about some actions that you would like to take on within the next term. My advice is to choose 1-2 items, so they can be truly mastered before trying something new. It’s all about learning transfer; repeated practice and meaningful application will make it happen. The second step is reflecting on our practice using a reflection quadrant. We will use a table in paper or electronic form that you can use with your students. It’s a great way to capture ideas in short sections, so it’s not too overwhelming. This is a perfect way to get older students to reflect on their learning process and make suggestions for improvement. Let’s try it out. To set-up our reflection quadrant, fold a piece of paper in half two times to make four boxes. Label each box accordingly.
Now, we are going to take our time to reflect in each box answering the following questions. Remember, our path towards growth begins with an honest assessment of the situation as it really is and not how we wish it would be.
In the upper left side, Identify the potential for international mindedness to happen in your class and/or school. In the upper right side, brainstorm ideas which represent a desired situation or “the bigger picture” that you would like to see happening with relationships in your class and/or school. In the lower left side, add notes which represent the current situation with relationships in your class and/or school. In the lower right side, identify and list the areas of growth that may inhibit the development of international mindedness in your class and/or school. Now, take these ideas back to your team and share your honest feedback. As a team, decide which pieces will be the next step in your action plan and annotate them in your PYP unit planner. Our goal is tangible application. In our next episode, we will apply our understanding of agency and action in a new way. by Lu Gerlach Welcome to our Application Series!What is the application series? It’s a time to reflect on all of the learning we have shared so far, reflect on our practice, and make concrete goals for the future. Application and reflection are at the heart of the PYP. They help us to see where we’ve come and where we need to still go on our journey. It’s important for us to own our truth and not compare our journey to someone else’s. We don’t see their challenges, just their successes. Remember that as you apply your learning. Let’s go back to our podcast journey so far. We started our journey together with inquiry. Seven months ago, people were clamoring for new ways to keep their students engaged with the new virtual learning platform. It was all new and we had to quickly pivot our thinking and the way we do things. It seemed like a natural fit to begin with inquiry. Our first few episodes began with an inquiry challenge that focused on our role and needs as an educator. This was a fun way to evaluate our journey so far and set the stage for new learning ahead. This helped to lay the foundation to learn about agency, action, the learner profile attributes, and international mindedness. Although it’s amazing to learn strategies to help our students, we also need time to reflect on our teaching practice to calibrate where we need to grow. When I was creating the visual for the PYP House, I decided to make the font different for agency & action, the learner profile, and international mindedness. At the time, I thought it would look visually pleasing, but as I reflected I saw a bigger picture. If you consider the foundation and roof of the home, they are the pieces that hold a home together. They help to weather the storm of district or board mandates, standardized testing, and parental pressures, because they are founded on the feeling and being of a campus culture. If you look at the other parts of the PYP house, they focus on how students take steps towards independent thinking through the approaches to learning and how teachers shape the learning through the approaches to teaching. Are you having an Aha moment right now? It took me forever to come to this conclusion and the PYP house greatly helped me to put the pieces together. Now, let’s go back to the IB learner profile attributes and how they shape our thinking. They are: Remember to revisit the definition of each attribute in episode 20 to avoid making misconceptions. Now, let’s take a deeper look at the attributes and try to apply them to our teaching practice and our unit planners. We will answer a set of three questions to probe into our practice and help us to devise the next steps of our action plan. KnowWhat do you know about the learner profile attributes? How are they connected to your purpose as an educator? FeelWhat are your feelings about the learner profile attributes? How do your students feel about them? DoHow do the learner profile attributes drive the learning in your classroom? Are you actively doing something with them on a regular basis?
Now, take these ideas back to your team and share your honest feedback. As a team, decide which pieces will be the next step in your action plan and annotate them in your PYP unit planner. Our goal is tangible application. In our next episode, we will apply our understanding of international mindedness in a new way. |
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