Adding Depth to SEE-THINK-WONDER in the IB PYP

The good-old SEE-THINK-WONDER thinking routine. You could probably walk into any IB PYP classroom in the world and you will see it being used. How often do we use this oldie but goodie as a thinking routine? Without a doubt, it is a powerful starter to provoke our students' curiosity and then invite children to think more. But how much do we really utilise the power of this thinking routine as a means for developing the journey towards self-directed inquiry?  When we dive deeper into SEE-THINK-WONDER we uncover the IBPYP sub-skills that fall within the Approaches to Learning Skills.  In particular, we reach into the thinking & research skills.  I have a few exclusive PYP teaching tools to support the popular thinking routine of SEE-THINK-WONDER for both our youngest learners and our upper grades and have them all developing those oh-so-important comprehension skills.

A Thinking Routine for ALL Ages:

Thinking routines help our students to think critically about an object, text, problem or idea and then to communicate their thinking with others. See, Think, Wonder is a strategy that developed out of Harvard’s Project Zero. It was originally developed with the goal to help children to think critically. It has since exploded with potential for the multitude of thinking skills involved in the inquiry process and design learning.

When we introduce any thinking routine we want it to become exactly that, a routine. Therefore, we use the same routine over and over until the children become familiar with that routine and thus it becomes a strategy and a tool that supports self-directed learning.

Developing IB PYP thinkers and inquires begins by creating an understanding with what is involved throughout the thinking process. We want to think of the IB PYP ATL sub-skills as actions that lead towards self-directed learning. I created a set of tools that really helped to bring greater awareness and understanding of those sub-skills to my students as they built upon their metacognition and became more independent thinkers and inquirers. Take a look at the ATL Skills posters perfectly suited for early years.  IB PYP ATL Skills for early years

• Front Loading Information: Pre exposing children to content that you will be explicitly teaching later can lead to deeper thinking and result in quicker learning and understanding.
• Create Their Own Provocations: the blank SEE-THINK-WONDER templates within the resource allowed the children to be part of the planning as I asked them to TAKE ACTION and find images to practice on others.

BREAKING DOWN SEE-THINK-WONDER

When you think about it, each step within SEE-THINK-WONDER involves a multitude of sub-skills. As you focus on your ATL skills across the Programme of Inquiry, you can actually identify some of those sub-skills within each part of the SEE-THINK-WONDER routine and then explicitly bring them to the children. Lets break it down a bit:

• SEE: encourage slow looking, developing observation skills, analysing information, describing the form, sharing perspective, provoking feelings.......all of which connect with thinking, research and communication.
• THINK: the entire array of metacognition is here with critical and creative thinking - making connections, remembering, visualising, predicting, inferring, synthesising and on and on. This leaves you VAST scope for planning as you break it down into the sub-skills for your focus through thinking, research, communication etc.
• WONDER: the obvious skill of questioning lies within this step and can be further developed with formulating questions for our youngest learners and foreign language acquisition, together with formulating  higher order questions and conceptual thinking.

This is where I come in with the PYP teaching tools created for actually supporting this break down of those skills within the thinking routine. These tools were created to bring explicit teaching of the skills within the thinking routine and provide implicit practice. The end result is a greater awareness of the children's metacognition which, in turn, brings higher order thinking. The tools shown below were created for the earlier years, from kindergarten up to Grade 2. They actually come with blank templates too so you can use them with ANY inquiry to create your own deconstructed provocation materials. You can click through to my store and take a look here. 

• The support posters have symbols that will enable the children to become familiar with each step and the actions behind each step together with the language.
• When the children are comfortable with the template and the language, place copies of the template at your discovery centres. Here, the children are given an opportunity to communicate their own ideas. Some children draw pictures to show their thinking, create models of their ideas with playdough and others attempt to write their own ideas down with a combination of letters and familiar words.

Diving deeper with the IB PYP thinking skills through See think wonder[/caption] Developing Thinking Skills with the IB PYP – PYP Teaching Tools For our early years learners, break up the thinking routine for specific skills with playdough or use as dry erase boards.   

• I introduce the Approaches to Learning Thinking Skills through the anchor chart above. This may work with your age group if adapted. I have used it as low as grade 2.
• I always begin with building an understanding of our metacognition by introducing observation and visualising first. I feel it is easier for the children to relate with these skills initially, they connect with ALL provocations, text and subjects.  (You can read more about how I develop thinking skills in this blog article.)
• Usually, through before our provocation and also with guided reading, I integrate the activities you have within this resource, to practice and reinforce the skills. You can of course adapt the activities to fit any subject.
• As I introduce each skill with a mini-lesson, we add it to our anchor chart and put the related poster onto our wall. (I personally like to have those in our reading corner, since many of the skills connect with reading and research.)
• You will notice, on the chart above, that the children eventually add their own ideas as they begin to make connections with the thinking strategies used and the thinking skills.
• These skills can be introduced in any order that you see fit for your group of students. Since I always begin the year by raising an awareness of our Learner Profile, and by developing Thinkers and Inquirers, I prefer the following order. I feel that this works well for the children as they begin to recognize their own metacognition, understand that these sub skills are all a part of analysing information, and can then connect the other skills with the first three, which I feel are fundamental to the rest. Observing-Making Connections – Visualising-Questioning etc

Developing metacognitive awareness and comprehension skills.

UPPER GRADES COMPREHENSION SKILLS:

As with the early years, the support tools I created for my big kids allows for reinforcement of the sub-skills but with additional guiding questions to elicit profundity with their thinking. This proved to be a POWERFUL tool for adding depth to our inquiries right from the start, as we explored provocations and did the groundwork for our unit of inquiry. Click the picture above or right here to take a look.  If you haven’t checked out the Project Zero website, I highly recommend it! There are a number of amazing strategies and projects there which anyone working with early learners might find useful.

Enjoy!  

Susan

 P.S. If youre looking for additional guidance and professional training, you can take a look at my online course providing over 12 hours of video based learning, Essentials for Inquiry: Getting Started with Student Led Inquiry Over 400 inquiry teachers from around the world have already gone through this training with me. I hope you will too. :)