There’s a lot more to this thinking business than we think. When developing IB PYP thinkers and inquirers, I believe it’s so important that we first teach the children to become aware of their thinking. They need to know what this whole thinking thing is about. And before we point to that reference poster on the wall that outlines those sub-skills, I want to help them identify much of what those sub-skills involve. This is where books come into play!
When you’ve been teaching as long as I have, you come across a few books that become your favourite, go-to books over and over, for very specific purposes. This article shares my favourite books for developing the IB PYP Learner Profile attributes of Thinker and Inquirer and, in turn, the Approaches to Learning thinking skills. In addition, I was excited to host a giveaway on my social media accounts and was able to give away 7 books to 7 teachers around the world! In this article, I’m sharing those books I’ve used to build up the thinking and inquiry skills as well as some of the strategies. I will follow up in more detail with how to develop the all important Thinking Skills in my next post.
Developing Thinkers and Inquirers
As inquiry teachers, our goal is to give the children the tools necessary to lead them towards meaningful inquiry that will ultimately lead to greater knowledge and understanding. We want this to become an innate part of who they are- those lifelong learners with a love for finding out more and finding out for themselves. At the beginning of every school year, it is my goal to develop a community of learners with a culture of inquiry in my class. And so, I always, always begin our school year with developing those thinking skills, fine tuning an awareness of who we are as learners and building those higher level questioning skills.
“I want to develop a community of learners with a culture of inquiry.”
This involves explicit teaching of the ATL skills and a pretty hefty review of the Learner Profile.
BEING AWARE OF THEIR METACOGNITIVE THINKING
In those very first few days of school, I introduce the children to their metacognition. This is something that we build upon all year long, integrating it into all subjects. To begin, we start with understanding the form of metacognition and moving into the function. It is so important that the kids are able to use and understand the academic language that is an integral part of their learning.
Reading naturally presents itself to thinking. This is a great place to start for any age level, regardless of whether they can read. I always begin by having the children listening to reading. The thinking that goes on when just listening to words is amazing! I want the children to be amazed too! I want them to gradually become aware of all of their thoughts – their metacognition. This is how we start developing our thinking skills. This is how I begin to develop those thinkers and inquirers.
“Begin by listening to reading.”
This anchor chart gives you an idea of how we begin. Now, keep in mind that this picture is taken at the end of the year. If you look closely, you can see that this whole class discussion begins with a well-presented chart. As the year progresses, it becomes beautifully messy as the children add their own connections, additional thinking skills and strategies, making it a fabulous working document.
I begin by bringing the children an awareness of their own metacognition starting with understanding how our schema relates to our on-going learning as we make connections to the world around us. We move onto visualisation and observation and then those oh-so-important questioning skills. I do it in this order because one of the simplest thinking routines that we use when moving into the inquiry process is observing, making connections and formulating questions. You may know this as SEE-THINK-WONDER. It is my goal to make this all meaningful for the children; for them to see how they fit into the process and, in turn, actually understanding the purpose behind the tools that we give them.
- Schema
- Visualising
- Observing
- Questioning
“Thinking Skills…..something we build upon all year long, integrating it into all subjects.”
You can find an entire list of books that I just LOVE for developing the Learner Profile here. But for today, we are going to look at 6 books that can be used across grade levels and all help to develop those thinking skills. For your convenience, I have also linked each book to Amazon. So, let’s begin…..
Journey, by Aaron Becker
Picture books allow us to focus wholly on our metacognition. In the beginning of the year, I explicitly teach the children what the umbrella of metacognition covers: schema, observing, questioning, inferring etc. , and this is a great book to use at any age for practicing this exact ATL skill.
Making the Learner Profile an Active Participant: Guide the children’s thinking by providing them with specific questions that will structure the activity, leading them to focus on only one or two thinking skills at a time. For example, my Learner Profile Post -It notes are used to guide the children as they observe the pictures making inference and developing that overall awareness of their thinking. Using these guiding questions, allows the children to develop their awareness of how the Learner Profile attributes are contributing to their understanding and learning as well as guiding them with their thinking skills.
Examples:
- Thinker: What do you already know about this character? What do you infer?
- Communicator: Draw what you think the character might be thinking?
- Inquirer: What 3 questions come into your head as you look at the pictures?
- Open-Minded: What clues tell you the character is or is not open-minded?
Key Concepts in Literacy: Creative thinking skills were developed further, as we thought how we might change the story if the little girl had drawn something differently. By using the key concepts in literacy, the children are forced to narrow their focus, deepening their thinking.
Let’s think about the concept CHANGE: This turned into a rather in-depth exploration as each small group planned their own changes and twists to the “plot”. Their collaboratively written addition was also illustrated with their visulisation of the those pages to add to their version of the book. When you consider that there aren’t any words at all in this book, that is a whole lot of thinking going on: observing, analysing, inferring, predicting….not to mention communication skills too.
Younger years children have painted their own version of the ending of the story, as we discussed the concept of change in relation to the theme of Who We Are. It could also be used with How We Express Ourselves.
There is a rather lovely You Tube video of the book, also without words, that could be used with remote learning. You can find that video here.
Now consider the concept CAUSATION: With the same story, we approached the thought process through a different lens by changing the concept. I admit that this can be higher level but this is what we are aiming for, right? Let’s move the children towards higher level thinking. You will know how ready your kids are and when to push.
With this activity, the children then had to discuss their ideas for the reasons for the little girls’ journey. We encouraged discussion, comparing ideas and combining suggestions before each small group created their own prologue. I’m an avid believer is using drama to build on our ATL Skills! (You can read that separate article here, if you wish.) Consider all of the thinking skills that go into this –observing and analyzing the illustrations, making connections with our schema, inferring, evaluating the sequencing of the pictures and so much more; I’m sure you can recognise why it is important to develop the kids’ own awareness of their thought process. Using the key concepts in literacy is a wonderful way to broaden the scope and to build those thinking skills.
None of this happens overnight, of course, and so I created a collection of graphic organisers that really helped to structure the children’s thinking, guiding them as they moved towards thinking more conceptually as they built upon their thinking skills within reading. You can find those here and take a peek.
“One Well: The Story of Water on Earth”, by Rochelle Strauss & “If the World Were A Village” by David J. Smith
I continue to rave about both of these books for so many reasons. Not only do they give a wealth of information in such a way that provokes curiosity and begs for inquiries relating to human rights, equality, beliefs and values and so much maths but it also presents attitudes of acceptance and tolerance, developing the attribute of open-mindedness through an overall global context. If you’d like to read more about integrating maths into the unit of inquiry, there is an article here. And you can actually look at an inquiry-based maths project that I created from my 5th grade inquiries of If the World Were A Village.
The Girl Who Never Made A Mistake is a great illustration of how perfectionism can be debilitating and that we absolutely can use mistakes positively for our own growth. Not to mention NOT comparing ourselves to others’ expectations. If you’re looking for growth mindset, this book covers it!
Questioning: When developing our awareness of our Learner Profile, I like to bring this book into the mix as we work through our questioning skills and look for examples of balance or imbalance. With small differentiated reading groups, I read the story first and ask the children to note their questions. We then discuss how the author answered their questions or what advice they would give the girl. With those groups who need more structure with thinking skills, these are my guiding questions:
- What do you notice wonder about this girl?
- What do you wonder about this girl?
- What profile would you paint of this girl?
- Compare her personality with her brother’s?
- Which lessons were learned?
- How might embracing failure lead to more balance?
- What advice would you give this girl?
When asking the children to work collaboratively with any of these books, I often give them my Learner Profile Reading task cards to find their focus or provide them with that additional scaffold where needed. You can take a look at those task cards here, found in my store. I used the digital file a lot during our remote learning too.
Diamond Ranking Thinking Strategy:
Thinking through understanding the Learner Profile: After reading the book, I asked the children to identify 3 Learner Profile attributes that the character demonstrated well and 3 traits he needed to work on developing.
They then shared their thinking with their small group. From there, the children had to sort each of the profile traits they had identified into a diamond, ranking from most demonstrated at the top to least developed at the bottom. This requires an inquiry into the attributes of the Learner Profile, understanding and identifying those attributes in others and consolidating the thinking skills of analysing: classifying and categorising and much more.
Going Further: You can build upon this thinking routine by having the older
children write a description of the character’s traits, suggest their solution to the character’s problems, create the character as the opposite of how the author created him etc. and then discuss and rank those too.
The Boy Who Loved Math, by Deborah Heiligman just begs for inquiries! It is on this favourites list for very good reasons:
- Questioning
- Formulating higher level questions
- Formulating concept based questions
- Developing research skills
- Integrating maths
This is a biography of Paul Erdos and tells his story as a little boy who travels the world, in awe at the maths that surrounds him. This book lends itself beautifully to inquiry and developing inquiry skills. Through Paul’s global journey, we are inviting curiosity through multiple related concepts such as travel, journeys, mapping, global interconnectedness and, of course, maths, the children are presented with a lot of information.
Developing Questioning Skills:
Explicitly teach questioning skills that will develop higher level thinking and more open-ended questions.
- Create conceptual questions that can change the direction of an inquiry
- Teach the children how questions can be rebuilt to make them deeper and more open ended.
- Challenge the children to create essential questions/provocations for themselves across all subjects.
- Ask BIG questions, questions that puzzle and cannot be answered easily.
- Develop questions that can have multiple answers or solutions.
Upper Grades: My suggestions with this book are to structure the learning by guiding with driving questions to begin and, for more experienced inquirers, use it to develop higher level questioning skills – formulating conceptual questions, categorizing inquiries and writing lines of inquiry for their own independent inquiries. The scope for mini-independent inquiries is enormous and can tie in beautifully with explicitly developing research skills, mapping skills and integrating reading with numerous maths concepts.
Lower Grades: Read the story in connection with a world globe or maps and then have fun mapping Paul’s journey as you explore basic maths concepts travelling around the world with Paul.
I really could go on and on with the ideas to build upon ATL skills with these books. No doubt, I will bring them up again. Meanwhile, I hope you found something that you can use or adapt to suit your little thinkers and inquirers.
If you’d like to be a part of future giveaways, be sure to head on over to Instagram @pypteaching or Facebook PYP Teaching Tools and find me there. Follow along, as I share many more ideas for bringing student-led inquiry to the forefront of your classroom.
Until next time,
P.S. Guess what?! Subscribe to my blog and you will receive a free resource for developing thinking skills in your second members’ only email message from me.
