Refresher course in PYP

Months ago I had come across this very familiar video sent to me by a twitter friend. I had glanced at it, marvelled at genius of the animator and sighed.
Today, at the PD session, I was pleasantly surprised to see the same video presented in a context that I could relate to: International-mindedness. How do we make our students more aware of the world around them and nudge them from being passive observers to problem solvers of the world. Our children are growing up in an age where things are in a constant state of flux. What we teach them now may not be valid later. Do we need to focus as much on the individual needs of children as in the curriculum? Where do we find the time? How do we get teachers who are uncomfortable with IT to teach their students web 2.0 tools. Later web 3.0 tools! Is it necessary? The pace of life is overwhelming and teachers have a huge task ahead of them(at least those who want to make a difference in the life of the kids). What is the role of education in context to creating a child of the future? Is education the only thing that shapes a human being? The video is amazingly fast and one may get distracted by the visual bombardment. But seeing this repeatedly makes for some great staffroom discussion nonetheless!

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Classification -Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 1)

In this series, we will discuss how we can design lessons for conceptual understanding. Having recently completed an upskilling course with IB, I felt we may all benefit from looking at some of these strategies and how they might look like in our PYP classrooms. Strategy 1: Classification Source: Ibo.org In this post, I will be focusing on the research-backed strategy, "classification". Chadwick (2009) highlights that classification helps develop conceptual understanding by allowing students to organize information, recognize patterns, and understand relationships among concepts. Here are some examples across several disciplines on how I have used tools to classify. Math Class 1) In my math class (Grade 3) instead of having students simply rote learn the names of the shapes and their properties, have them sort the shapes based on the number of sides, angles and symmetry. Even better, use the Concept Attainment Strategy (I keep returning to this strategy be...

Generalization-Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 3)

This post is the third of our blog post series on how to design lessons for conceptual understanding. Part 1 here Part 2 here Strategy 3 : Generalizations You may have come across Lynn Erickson's diagram on the structure of knowledge. In my IB workshop's I always like to present the avocado model alongside this diagram when I am talking about facts. The intention of inquiry-based teaching and conceptually-driven understanding (or Concept-based inquiry- whatever terminology suits your fancy) is to enable students to make generalizations. In other words, can they transfer their learning to a new context because they have understood what they learnt. In order to make generalizations, we need to first plan lessons that help students acquire facts/topics that are interesting and worth knowing. Bringing in local and global issues that are relevant to the topic help students as they begin to compare the topics and see emerging patterns. Remember, facts and concepts have a syn...

8 Strategies to Overcome Math Anxiety in the Classroom

Have you ever considered what math anxiety may look like in your classroom? As I prepare to begin my lesson, handing out notebooks or math prompts, I look around and observe my students. As the lesson progresses, I continue to look around and monitor their behaviour. Are there some students who take time to settle down or start to talk about things completely unrelated to math? Does one student ask to go the washroom? Or maybe complain about a stomachache or a headache? Is there a student who may start crying or become angry and indulge in negative self talk? "I am dumb." or "I can never get this right!" and so on and so forth. The more subtle symptoms : Is a student being being extra chatty, taking time to settle down, obsessing about the answer, refusing to answer questions, seldom asking for help, hurtling through work or showing a reluctance to work with others. A broad categories these symptoms would look like this: cognitive difficulties emotional distress...

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