Wonderful example of action: Band promotion

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Exhibition rubrics & Global Issues Expo

Symphony of Ideas has moved! Follow the link to read the post Exhibition rubrics & Global Issues Expo at its new home on WordPress.

Elements of the PYP Exhibition

This week, my class of fifth and sixth graders began the culmination of their IB Primary Years journey, the Exhibition. A self-directed and collaborative project, it is my favorite part of the year and a deeply enjoyable challenge to facilitate.

Before setting out, I organized a meeting with all Exhibition stakeholders including students, parents, teachers, and administrators. We discussed everyone's ideas, questions, and concerns in order to draft our Essential Agreements.

Components

The Exhibition Guidelines provide clear expectations, which I have synthesized for the students to provide support for their projects. One helpful practice I have chosen is to clarify five required components of the project. Specifically, every student must choose a global issue, deliver a persuasive speech, write an expository essay, create a work of art, and engage in community action. Among our first activities was introducing the organizer below.

In this way, each student has a clear map of expectations, yet is empowered to pursue their project along their own path.

Twitter: Promoters, connectors, and why I unfollowed you

I have something to confess: I finally did it: Something I've been meaning to do for a long time, but haven't mustered the courage until now:

I committed twittercide.

CISC 2015 - the most inspiring symposium I didn't attend

(This post contains embedded 'tweets' that may not render properly depending upon your device and browser.)

It all started, as so many connected learning experiences do, with a tweet.

Ummmm... let's do this. #Tomorrow #Edcamp #CISC2015 #Couldntbemoreexcited #EdcampPalooza pic.twitter.com/r3K6AlFZ8I
— Kristen Swanson (@kristenswanson) February 11, 2015

If Kristen Swanson #couldntbemoreexcited about #EdcampPalooza, then lurking on the #CISC2015 hashtag on Twitter with @Haydeewan seemed like an inviting activity. 

Inquiry math: Estimation

One of my challenges as an IB PYP teacher is how to design authentic opportunities for inquiry using mathematics. I think it's due partly to the fact that the outcomes tend to be predetermined but also because upper elementary mathematical skills aren't often prominent in the students' own inquiries.

'There is a place for predetermined outcomes, but these should be treated with a degree of suspicion,…' Peter Moss #ibpyp #reggioplc
— Bart Miller (@BarMill) January 29, 2015

My solution has generally been to provide an inquiry provocation to introduce a concept with related skills to be practiced in subsequent lessons.

Estimation

Recently, we completed a unit on estimation. The initial challenge was simply to estimate the number of various objects in various containers.

Warming up an estimation #inquiry. Soon will be using very large numbers. #inquirylearning pic.twitter.com/SdOahN8bX7
— Bart Miller (@BarMill) November 17, 2014

Making action visible in the PYP

Of the facets of the IB Primary Years Program, my Grade 5/6 class emphasizes Action by focusing on three elements from our school's Mission Statement & Philosophy: 'inspired', 'independent', and 'contribute to world peace'.

With this in mind, in the first week of school we discussed and agreed to a class identity: Uniters.

Rather than addressing my class as 'Grade 5/6' or 'children' or 'hey you', I say 'Uniters'. Aesthetically, it's a bit like being a team of superheroes. Compared to being called a number or being identified by one's category, who wouldn't prefer being called 'Uniter', 'Peacemaker', or 'Humanitarian'?

The theme of 'unity' provides a rich context for inspiring, evoking, sharing, discussing, and reflecting on action. An emphasis on action will be particularly important in the spring when this class prepares their PYP Exhibition, a self-directed inquiry project with the ambitious goals of authentic action, community service, and engagement with globally significant issue.

Organizing

Along the LX Design line of inquiry, I realized that we need an interactive tool to document and share our 'action' in its various forms. At first I considered digital tools, but none seemed to provide the immediacy and high visibility required. Thinking of my wife, Yuka's 'inspiration board' at home, I wondered if a bulletin board would be best.

The following tweet from Craig Dwyer and the informative Action in the PYP document to which it links helped to stimulate my thinking further.

What does ACTION, Look Like, Sound Like, Feel Like? https://t.co/y753w9ilPh #pypchat #ibpyp #inquirymaths
— Craig (@DwyerTeacher) September 8, 2014

Asking for help

I've had bad luck with mentors, at least when I needed them most. In my first two years of teaching in a startup charter school in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles, my teaching mentors quit and left the school. At least I'm pretty sure they didn't leave because of me.

On top of that, I'm not very good at asking for help. Being introverted and stubborn, I tend to want to do things in my own way and bulldoze my way through challenges.

Luckily, I shared a lunch period with Karen Kazanci, an outgoing teacher of similar age and a bit more classroom experience, who was generous to share ideas, provide feedback, and offer reassurance. She is now the proprietor of Leaping Lotus Yoga, which provides yoga classes designed for young children.

She taught me that the most important act of mentoring is listening. When I struggled, she listened to my lamenting patiently and always responded with positivity. When I celebrated, she celebrated with me. When she offered advice, it was usually to capitalize on what she saw as my strengths.

She also seemed to know exactly when not to talk about the classroom and work.

The two of us were the only founding teachers to stay as long as we did in what was at times a challenging and intense environment. We contributed to what would become a healthy and supportive learning community in spite of significant obstacles. I suspect that our chats over lunch had a lot to do with it.

Service learning in elementary school

The New York Times Magazine cover story, Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?, explores the work of Adam Grant, whose 'studies have been highlighted in bestselling books such as Quiet by Susan Cain, Drive and To Sell Is Human by Daniel Pink, Thrive by Arianna Huffington, and David and Goliath by Gladwell'.

In that article, the case is convincingly made that altruism is not only beneficial to the beneficiary, but also to the benefactor.

A little kindness goes a long way by Ed Yourdon CC BY NC SA 

This apparent contradiction is supported by research findings not only in neuroscience, as in the article, Altruism, egoism: Brain exercises cognitive analysis, but also by commonly accepted wisdom contained in the world's ancient and respected religious and spiritual disciplines as explored in Carolyn Gregoire's post, What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About Compassion.

Mindfulness and empathy help to make connections in the brain which manifest as action.

Caring for others makes us smarter.

So why isn't service learning an essential characteristic of every school? Why isn't it designed into the curriculum and culture of schools?

PYP Exhibition: A Rite of Passage

Several weeks ago, I began an inquiry into visual literacy. Feeling that visual communication is My Greatest Weakness, it's been an exciting challenge to spill this can of worms and start stomping. It has been easy to find opportunities to practice and apply new skills and understandings in the classroom.

Purpose

My students have begun preparing their PYP Exhibition. It's our first in every sense: as individuals, as a class, and as a school. I have researched extensively about elementary school Exhibitions around the world and have been trying to approach the process from a design perspective.

Metateaching

The essence of metateaching is knowing students well and designing an environment in which their learning can thrive.

For Exhibition, that environment consists primarily of independence, yet it is important to introduce the project in a way that helps inform and inspire the process.

When I was preparing the presentation I would deliver to the school community about Exhibition, the Exhibition pre-Zen-tation, I intended to provide information about what we should all expect during the coming several weeks.

I blogged about the meeting in the post, Exhibition Week 0. It was successful, but there was something missing. From the perspective of visual literacy and storytelling, I realized that my efforts could accomplish much more if I aimed to persuade rather than inform, or, to use Seth Godin's terminology, 'persuade' rather than 'convince'.

The presentation and slides are effective at delivering information and provoking thought, 'convincing', but they wouldn't inspire anyone to join the adventure. They don't 'persuade'. They lack emotion.

What I needed was a video.

My own inspiration

To inspire my video, I pondered the Exhibition. The objective is for students to demonstrate mastery of the IBO Primary Years Program through self-directed and collaborative inquiry. It occurred me that it closely resembles a traditional rite of passage, a ritual marking the transition from one state or status to another.

In this case, the students are moving from elementary school to secondary school. They are presented with a challenging task and provided limited assistance and expected to use what they know to organize and take action. They are intended to cause cognitive dissonance, the resolution of which is both the process and product of the experience.

This led to the conceptual framework for the video. It would start with an introduction to rites of passage, then invite the students to engage in the inquiry process through video footage of other schools' exhibitions.

I do everything the hard way

At that point, things became ugly. Or interesting, depending on your perspective. I was trying to learn several different technologies, as well as visual literacy concepts and skills, all at the same time.

First there was searching for Creative Commons licensed images and video to remix. Next, learning how to use iMovie to organize and edit them, as well as adding the text. Adding text involved searching for an interesting font, a process in which I became totally lost for most of an evening. Finally, I hacked together a scratch music track with audio from one of my class' collective improvisations for keyboard percussion. Unfortunately or fortunately, I'm really not sure, technological misunderstanding prevented the audio from being included in the uploaded YouTube video.

Without further ado

I decided to share this version of the video because part of my personal inquiry is to be more collaborative. I have always had a very thin skin when it comes to critique and criticism, something I am working to improve. 

Please view my video and tell me what you think!

EDIT 19 March 2014 - View the final video in the post, Visual Literacy Achievements Unlocked!.

Empathy & Acceptance: Toward a gender-neutral classroom

Through Her Eyes Film

The debates within and surrounding LGBTQ communities about gender identity and sexual orientation, and how individuals (and groups) express themselves, are reaching a sort of critical mass. Educators would be remiss to ignore it. Nobody explains the situation more fluently than Peter DeWitt, author of Dignity for All: Safeguarding LGBT Students.

In the classroom, the first step can only be to tear down obvious and ubiquitous bias. As Dawn Casey-Rowe documents in the article, Does Gender Bias Affect The Way You Teach?, the negative effects of bias persist even when it arises from positive intentions. Pernille Ripp addresses the issue from a different perspective by asking, Are the Boys Welcome in Your Room?. I would argue that even the notion that boys and girls have stereotypical preferences should be categorically rejected in the classroom. Societies do not need any help promoting traditional gender roles. In fact, I believe that the messages from media and commercial ventures about gender and sexuality should be subdued, filtered, and contextualized in order to empower every individual to thrive.

As an elementary educator, I feel the responsibility to promote a culture of Empathy and Acceptance. I am also in an ideal position to do so.