Making the arts make a difference

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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.

Composite skills in the PYP

Preparing students for the Primary Years Program Exhibition, a self directed and collaborative culminating project, has been a rewarding challenge this year. In a sense, I've been thinking of the entire school as a long term project with the Exhibition being the 'deliverable' product.

The process of developing capacities and competencies in my students has led to analysis and evaluation of Transdisciplinary Skills in the PYP.

I like the list of skills and the categories into which they are organized (thinking, social, research, self management, communication), and I have been developing a model for composite skills. These are skills that require fluency in other fundamental skills and attitudes.

[This post was initially titled Hybrid skills in the PYP. After further consideration, I realized that 'composite' was a better description than 'hybrid'. Hybrid connotes that only parts of the fundamental skills are utilized, while 'composite' connotes that each skill is integrated in its entirety. I took the liberty of substituting the terms throughout the post.]

The first composite skill I conceived at the end of the last school year was Conversation. My reasoning was that conversation requires a combination of the Listening and Speaking communication skills together with the attitude of Empathy.

During the year, I have introduced a few other composite skills to our classroom toolbox, and am now in the process of organizing and codifying them in the MindMup below. If you would like to collaborate, the Composite skills mind map is shared via Google Drive. Use MindMup to open it and get started.

What is technology?

On Monday morning, I embarked upon a unit of inquiry with my grade 5/6 class by using our usual 'warm up' routine to reflect on and discuss the slide below.

 

As students arrive in the morning, when possible, I project some sort of provocation, sometimes directly connected to our inquiries, sometimes specifically not, and sometimes just for fun (link to 'warm up' slides).

Many students sit down and begin writing or sketching immediately, while some prefer to converse before working independently. After a few minutes, we share and discuss our ideas.

This 'technology' provocation was effective and I was pleasantly surprised by students' insights. Their responses included definitions with words like 'tools'. 'useful', and 'solve problems'. Some also alluded to negative as well as positive effects of technology. At the conclusion of our brief discussion, I introduced our central idea for the unit: Scientific understanding constantly evolves to build and destroy. (link to unit planner)

Before setting the students loose, we will conduct a modeled inquiry into 3D printing. The purpose will be to model a standard inquiry process as well as generate interest in various aspects of technology including scientific, social, artistic, and cultural. It was extremely effective last year and, especially based on my current class' formative understandings, I'm confident that the next few weeks will be fun and enlightening.

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

Learning Differences MOOC

I am very excited to be registered for my first MOOC of 2015, Learning Differences, offered by the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation and MOOC-Ed, starting 9 February and concluding 22 March 2015.

I discovered the course via a tweet by All Kinds of Minds, proving once again the value of Twitter as a connected learning network.

Learning Differences MOOC-Ed http://t.co/nWt1jBS3KF
— All Kinds of Minds (@AllKindsofMinds) January 19, 2015

The course will be divided into six units including Habits of Mind, Working Memory, Motivation, and Executive Function. Of particular interest to me is how these topics will inform and enhance my approaches to teaching in my inquiry and project based learning classroom.

I'm hoping to cooperate and collaborate with members of my learning network, particularly those at inquiry, project based learning, and IB PYP schools, as well as connect with new highly engaged educators.

Equity in Gamification

I spent a short amount of time today substituting for an absent primary grade teacher. The lesson plan called for a sight word practice game. The teacher left instructions, but years of experience as a substitute teacher taught me that the students would give me the clearest idea of how the game is played.

The game

1 Each student has four word cards arrayed on their desks.

2 The teacher calls one of the words and students race to see who can select the correct word and hold it over their head.

3 The slowest student is 'out' and becomes the judge for the next round.

4 After being a judge, the slow students wait at the front of the classroom until only the two fastest students remain for a final duel.

The problem

The glaring problem with this game is that it is competitive. Especially in classrooms with 8 year olds or younger, games should be cooperative so that each individual's success benefits the group, and the group supports the learning of members who are challenged. 

The card game we played today accomplishes the opposite: Students who are 'slow' were, in a sense, shamed by standing for the rest of the game at the front of the room.

What's worse, the 'slow' students who need the most practice play the game for the shortest amount of time. In fact, the slowest student is 'out' after the first round!

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

Student Empowerment | COETAIL final project

A keen observer will notice that I haven't exactly followed the assignment here. Rather than revising a unit of instruction to attempt to redefine learning, my goal is to utilize educational technology to empower students to redefine their own learning. In a sense, I am reimagining every unit I teach. I started by trying to revise a single unit, but every change I made toward increasing student choice, voice, and agency, resulted in thinking less about deciding what I wanted students to do, and more about how I was going to document and curate what they would decide to do.

Inquiry with Evernote vol 3 | Introducing the Inquiry Learning Resources Project

In the summer of 2013, I started using Evernote to collect and curate resources for planning and pursuing inquiry learning, as I blogged in the posts, Inquiry with Evernote vol 1 and Inquiry with Evernote vol 2 . Since then, my collection of notes has expanded. More importantly, the channels from which I collect these images, videos, and articles have become much more diverse and poignant. Most importantly, I am slowly refining my tagging strategies to make the collection more conceptually connected and social and environmental action oriented.

Now, I would like to introduce the Inquiry Learning Resources Project. The effort to build a digital notebook of inquiry provoking notes continues, but I have expanded the project to social media.

Evernote

The project's primary home is the public notebook, Inquiry Learning Resources. Feel free to join, search, and utilize it for your classroom or personal inquiries.

Tumblr

This project was inspired by a desire to organize the fascinating content I discovered on Tumblr. Resources are shared on the Inquiry Learning Resources blog and using the tag #inquirylearning. That blog accepts submissions, so if you're on Tumblr, feel free to contribute.

Twitter

I set up the account @provokinquiry to share resources on Twitter, and also using the #inquirylearning tag. Hopefully it will also be a great way to raise awareness for the project.

Pinterest

The public board Inquiry Learning Resources on Pinterest is also a great place to share. Please ask to join to submit pins.

Facebook

Resources are also shared on an Inquiry Learning Resources Page on Facebook.

The future

My immediate goal is to get in the habit of updating regularly, although completing projects is always a challenge due to the crunch of the school year before January. Hopefully, more inquiry educators will want to collaborate to help expand the project further!

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?

Inquiry or research?

In the past several years, I have adopted an inquiry based approach to teaching. In connecting and conversing with colleagues, I have observed that there is as much disagreement about what inquiry based learning and teaching is as there are approaches to inquiry itself.

From my perspective, there is one driving question that can summarize inquiry based education as a whole:

How can we all become better inquirers?

If this is the basis for discourse and conversation, then the possibilities for learning are endless.

The tweet below sparked my interest to inquire into the difference between inquiry and research:

@wholeboxndice Thanks so much. I hope we can have a chat about the difference between 'inquiry' and 'research'..that's one of our AFI's...
— Katrina Viloria (@kviloria) May 15, 2014

Technology to redefine learning

There are two possible units of inquiry that I will be leading in the Autumn of 2014 as potential candidates for redefinition through technology:

Rights & Responsibilities - inquiry into how human rights are granted, viewed, and protected

What's your story? - inquiry into personal histories and the role of primary sources in historical understanding

In any case, my goal is to embed technology to maximize student agency. There are also Web 2.0 tools that need to be introduced and practiced throughout the school year so that students will be prepared to use them for their end of year Exhibition. Which one of these units is most suitable to be redesigned around a Web 2.0 tool in a way that redefines the learning of the unit?

One way to address this question, or determine if it is even a good question, is to consider tasks. In order to assess whether students have mastered using a new tool, they must be able to use it to complete a task.

Exhibition: PBL To The Max!

Exhibition

This year, my sixth grade class prepared and presented our school's first Exhibition. As an International Baccalaureate Primary Years Program candidate school, it was an opportunity for me to research project-based learning, put into practice the guidelines established by the IB, and for our students to experience a culminating project to conclude their elementary school lives.

DLMOOC

The timing of the Deeper Learning MOOC, a massive open online course dedicated in large part to Project Based Learning, could not have been better. A host of organizations were introduced and resources shared and discussed, as well as models and frameworks that I could use to inform and enrich my role as a facilitator and coach.

During the Week 9 Participants Panel, moderator Rob Riordan remarked to me, 'If you want to get engaged in deeper learning, a good way to start is to schedule an exhibition.'

His words reminded me of a quote by the prolific composer Duke Ellington: 'I don't need time. What I need is a deadline.'

Transgender Day of Visibility

March 31st is International Transgender Day of Visibility, and it's a perfect opportunity for everyone, particularly teachers, to learn about the impressive progress being made toward gender equity and equality, and individual empowerment.

Visibility is the most important step toward acceptance and empathy, so I encourage you to visit the Trans Student Equality Resources site (transstudent.org) and explore their outstanding resources, particularly the engaging infographics.

For more of my own reflection and classroom practices, please read my post, Empathy & Acceptance: Toward a gender-neutral classroom.

Visual Literacy Achievements Unlocked!

My final projects for the Visual Literacy COETAIL course are a slide presentation to inform my school community about our first PYP Exhibition and a video to inspire my Grade 6 students as they prepare their Exhibition, a self-directed and collaborative research and service action project.

Inform

As detailed in the post, Exhibition pre-Zen-tation, I struggled to transform my text-heavy, visually dry slides into a more engaging and thought provoking accompaniment to my speech.

The process was mostly subtractive. I deleted nearly all of the text and replaced it with carefully selected Creative Commons licensed images.

One of my most important lessons from this course has been the importance of audience. With that in mind, I shared the second draft of my slides and received very insightful comments, which led to the final version.

Introduction to the Exhibition

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!.

Exhibition Week 0

School Community Meeting

On Thursday evening, we held a presentation and meeting for students, parents, and teachers to learn about and discuss our school's inaugural PYP Exhibition to be held in about two months, on 26 April during our International Children's Day event.

I began the meeting by reviewing the description of the Exhibition on the International Baccalaureate Primary-Years-Program website and the directing everyone to the Exhibition Guidelines for further details.

Next, I delivered a short presentation. Here are the slides and notes: