Learning Never Stops

"The power of question is the basis of all human progress." - Indira Gandhi. During an IB workshop I was conducting a few months ago, I remember a teacher heaving a huge sigh of relief when she learnt that it was okay for her students to struggle with generating questions. I was a little taken aback to see her so stressed. Though young children are naturally curious, they usually struggle to articulate their queries in a formal setting. While engaged in play, as they create things with loose parts for instance, most of their questions are in their minds. If they fail at something, you can see their questions in their expressions and movement of their hands as they try and figure out what to do next. Lately I have seen a lot of posts on "X" and some educational platforms where the focus is on surface and deep questions. This is usually accompanied by a visual of a scuba diver trying to reach the depths of the ocean. So this time, instead of a wonder wall for my unit ...

"The ability to work with, understand, and use data has become an essential life skill and requirement for an ever-expanding range of jobs and careers.  Data is everywhere around us.  Ninety percent of the world’s data has been created in the last two years." (Marr, 2018)   Many of my unplanned lessons (happy deviations) have been far more powerful than my planned ones. This post is not touting the idea of ignoring planning. It is just a recognition and celebration of unplanned inquiry and its potential and power. I would like to share a completely unplanned lesson with you. This happened almost a year ago and unfortunately, I do not have pictures and graphs to garnish my words. Here goes... The vice principal of our school walked into class one day looking very grave. She was clearly upset about something. It turned out that someone in the boys washroom was not following the rules. He was peeing on the floor. As a school, we were all supposed to keep a log of students vi...

In order to teach a skill, what strategies do we have under our belt? Which strategy works better? How can we gauge the effectiveness of a strategy? Educators need to have many different ways of approaching a lesson. Knowing your students really well, will help you decide which strategy will work best. You will know it works best when you observe the children during that activity. Be observant. Are the students engaged? Are they interacting with one another? Are they focused on the task even when you are not in the vicinity? If yes, then the strategy and task are 'just right.' If not, no need to panic. Use your judgement and tweak it. You can even abandon it right there. It has to be meaningful to the students. Otherwise, you are wasting your time and theirs. I am posting a video of a lesson in my class. Feel free to critique it. I love reflecting on a lesson. The strategy is familiar to many I am sure. But that's not the point of this post. Did it work well? How...

How can you teach something you are not excited about? As a PYP teacher, I need to convey excitement and enthusiasm to my students and the only way to do this is to be excited about a new unit myself. I am not a student of history and since my next unit, Old is Gold is all about the past, I plunged headlong into it. I borrowed enough books to last me the mid term holiday. I am reading all about the history of Mombasa. It is fascinating. As I keep reading, new ideas keep coming to me. I am all set to try them out in class. This is a unit where kids will study artifacts and ask "fat" questions; where they will analyse, interpret and reconstruct the past. So what types of activities will promote these understandings? I will be creating centers in my class. In one center, the kids will be watching YouTube videos on the life of archaeologists, or observe what goes on in a historical site. In another another center, they will draw arti...