Course five offers us COETAIL-ers an opportunity to apply and reflect upon our learning throughout the previous four courses. Whilst the course does ask us to redesign a unit from the ground up, I must first state that this kind of agency is not that simple in my given context. I lead and teach a large grade four team in an International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years Programme (PYP) curriculum school. All of our units are collaboratively constructed and designed, and, as best as possible, incorporate the voices of our learners as well. Therefore, I will try as best as possible to inject as much COETAIL learning into this project as possible, given these collaborative constraints. Specifics on the project At the end of course four, we were asked to describe our proposal for our final project for this course. Since "Sharing the Planet" was our next big unit of inquiry that was approaching, focusing on this made the most sense for my final COETAIL project. Getting Started There are several key differences of this year, compared to last, in my context. The two most notable are almost an entirely new team and learning is online due to the current conditions of the pandemic in Ho Chi Minh City. As highlighted in our learning in an earlier COETAIL course, and in the ISTE standards, collaboration with other educators is a key element to the design of this unit. Units of inquiry are always evolving, sometimes rebuilt anew, sometimes refining. With a new team and a new PYP coordinator, and reflecting upon last year's reflections, listed below are things that I brought to the collaborative discussion of ways we could improve the unit, particularly in regards to injecting some of my key COETAIL learning. Simplifying the essential elements of the inquiry Every PYP inquiry has five essential elements, but, simply put, the focus is on concept driven inquiry around an essential idea that can lead to personally meaningful inquiries for every learner. Here are some things that I wanted to suggest changing:
I'll discuss more about how the central idea and lines of inquiry came to be in a future post, but hopefully the contrast between the two unit overviews is clear, particularly from design and accessibility perspectives. Essentially, the new and simplified key wording met more of our learners where they were currently at based on initial diagnostic assessments. Part one and part two vs. One unit Last year, I was brand new to this team, coming from grade five. This unit, for a variety of reasons was split throughout the year in parts one and part two. There was probably sound and just reasons for this, but I wasn't a fan and I don't think my learners were either. Therefore, with so many new team members this year, it was a time for reflection and the potential of change. Units of inquiry generally run for six weeks and ideally scaffold or build upon each other promoting future action and transfer of learning. My preference is usually for that concentrated focus to be done consecutively. After collaboratively discussing this with my team, they also tended to agree with this preference. More community connection One of my big passions as an educator, that definitely grew with more intensity throughout COETAIL, is the power of connection, particularly thinking about how it takes a community to raise a village. These "connections" could be parents in our school community working in a field authentic to the unit, older students, video chatting with global experts and more. Last year, I helped out with the Community Action Service (CAS) final interviews with our more senior high school students and worked closely with the CAS staff coordinator. Knowing the importance of a thriving professional learning network highlighted in COETAIL learning, I did mention to the CAS coordinator that I would love more opportunities for these CAS students to work more closely with students in primary and to think of us whenever there was an opportunity for a possible connection. That wish came true early this year when a group of grade 12 students reached out and mentioned that they were doing their CAS project on educating various communities on climate change. After speaking with the PYP coordinator, I did mention that we should meet with the group and try our best to make it work for some learning experiences for this particular "Sharing the planet" unit since it had such an authentic fit. After initial conversations with the group, it seemed like all would work out with some finer planning to be done later. When this idea was proposed to the grade four team, they were happily on board as well. Provocation A provocation is an appetizer to salivate curiosities for the unit. It's not a teaching moment, it's a chance to get learners excited for the up and coming unit, spark wonder, but also to provide some diagnostic insights as to what our learners know already and any misconceptions. Here's a great post on provocations from inquiry guru, Kath Murdoch, should you wish to inquire further. Last year, the provocation was an "Evil-o-meter" in which children worked in small groups ranking images in terms of which things were more or less evil for the environment. I've attached a few images below for a visual. While the activity was great in theory, upon reflection, we found that children had almost no contextual knowledge of causes of climate change. It was a great activity to keep revisiting throughout learning experiences in the unit, but it didn't really provide us with much data for planning the beginning of the unit. Therefore, being reflective practitioners, and also listening to what our learners were telling us in conversations even before the unit, we felt that a better provocation would be to see what learners could tell us about climate change first and see if they could make any connections to some potential causes. I'll be sure post some examples of the new provocation in a future post. A few examples of last year's provocation: What's next
Stay tuned to the next post where I discuss in detail about how the first couple of weeks of the unit transpired! In particular, the collaboration with the CAS students and how the essential elements of the unit came to be after the provocation.
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