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Within the IB PYP Exhibition, your team of mentors are a crucial support tool for students and facilitators alike. They are often a mixture of other staff members ( teachers, support staff ), members of the local community and parents. Many mentors are coming to the Exhibition for the first time. And, even if it isn’t their first time, its so important to ensure right from the very beginning, that everyone is on the same page. Mentoring your mentors is one key to making the journey  a smoother one.  I have a couple of GREAT tools to help! In this article, you will find a fantastic video, a free guide and my best-selling Exhibition journal. If this is your first journey through the PYP Exhibition, make sure you grab your FREE timeline here.

[caption id="attachment_3787" align="alignnone" width="980"] Get your FREE Exhibition timeline now![/caption]

Within my student journal, Journey Through the PYP Exhibition, you will find ideas for mentors as well as clarifying...

I’m delighted to have teamed up with PYP teacher, Parvana Guliyeva again, to share these strategies for integrating maths into the inquiry authentically. Parvana is currently teaching PYP4 at The International Sharing school in Lisbon, Portugal. You can reach her on Instagram @space_for_learning. Scroll down to watch the video below. You may remember Parvana from a previous collaboration when she shared her ideas for inclusive assessment and bringing a greater degree of AGENCY to our students with reflection &  assessment. You can read more about assessment tools and strategies here and link to the video in this article.

And of course, if you are looking for a ready-to-go professional development workshop packed full of practical strategies for bringing agency into assessment for ALL age levels, take a look at my workshop package. 

As you watch the following video, consider our transdisciplinary approach and how we plan to investigate through...

What kind of a learner are you? Consider the question. Are you more of the lion type of learner or perhaps you're more of the hamster? This is a simple activity that I use at the beginning of the school year, as we are getting to know, not only our class community but also ourselves. As I am building this community of  learners, I want them to have a greater understanding of who they are as learners and to recognise and appreciate our diversity.   And that, as we know, all stems from the IB Learner Profile. Let's begin with an inquiry into who we are as learners.

  With a simple question and fun images, the children are asked to relate themselves to the pictures. You can choose to use words or simply begin with only the images. This adds to the thinking. I have done it both ways, depending on the students abilities with language, the vocabulary of the PYP and their thinking skills etc. Ask them: Are you more of a lion when it comes to learning, or are you more...

Student Agency and Inclusive Assessment

Over the years, Ive chatted about inclusive assessment as a practice that needs to become embedded within any student-led, inquiry-based classroom. This message has been spread far and wide that this is a really important part of our daily routine. The IB themselves shifted towards on-going reflection, we have student agency as all the buzz ( and hallelujah for that!), numerous educators within our community are sharing their rationale for the value that inclusive assessment brings and none of this could have come a moment too soon. Yes, its that vital.

If we consider assessment as a key element within education, then we have to reconsider the role our students play within that element.

If you'd like to catch up with my 3 part series of articles,  you can link to those here. They cover the form and function of assessment in the inquiry-based classroom, together with  strategies for developing inclusive assessment in your...

As an international teacher, it is highly likely that you will be teaching English as a second or even third foreign language. In many international schools, we find ourselves with a beautiful broth of multiple languages and cultures within our classrooms. And, we deliver our inquiry-based framework to the children in English. For many others, we are teaching in a host country, to a class full of native speakers from our host country and, again, part of our repertoire is to teach those children to not only speak in English but also to learn in English.

Language therefore becomes more than simply a means of conversation. We are teaching a language, about language and through language and we do all of this with that authentic, inquiry-based approach that we truly believe in.  In this article, I will be sharing a recent video from a conversation I had live on Facebook with grade 4 teacher, Maria Vidal. ( @bilingualising on Instagram) [caption id="attachment_2738"...

The early years in the IB PYP can be a whole new experience for teachers new to student-led inquiry. It is a beautiful mix of play-based exploration,  guiding invitations leading to inquiry and  provoking wonder all led by the children's natural curiosity.

I do not profess to be an expert with this age-group. Having never taught in an early years classroom, it amazes me when I see creative early years teachers working their magic and bringing the elements of the PYP seamlessly into practice with our youngest learners.

Common Challenges

I often hear from early years teacher-facilitators that their challenges include questioning and developing this skill with the children.  Such struggles include:

• How do I get the children to ask meaningful questions?
• How can we use thinking strategies with such young children?
• They can't  read or write, how do I plan for inquiries?
• They're too young to ask good questions.

Perhaps you can relate to one or a few? Well, I am...

What is mindfulness exactly? And why would we need mindfulness in the classroom? According to Wikipedia, mindfulness is:

• a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.
• the quality of being aware or conscious of something

Research. The ability to help ourselves to find an answer to a question or the solution to a problem.

This potential to find answers for ourselves is a skill that  includes the ability to decide specifically what we want to know, to find information about a topic, evaluate that information,  analyse and interpret the information  and then put it all together in a way that brings us answers and solutions for ourselves. This is a skill that we want our students to develop.

Developing research skills includes explicit teaching of the skill, leading to implicit practice. This resource does exactly that with task cards targeting the research sub-skills.[/caption] The research sub- skills that our IB PYP students need, right from the earliest years include:

• Observing
• Formulating questions
• Media literacy
• Sourcing data
• Evaluating sources
• Analysing & interpreting data
• Synthesising
• Reflecting
• Presenting

We want to ensure that the children's research inquiries are...

When it comes to being an inquiry teacher and an IB PYP teacher, there are a bazillion articles and blog posts and podcasts and books telling us what we can do: become an effective facilitator, research new curriculum,changes to practices, to assessment etc. etc. and on and on,  all while making sure we follow through with the latest buzz words -this is all well and good and no doubt valuable. But sometimes it becomes, and I'm speaking from personal experience, totally and utterly overwhelming.  Well, to add a variation to the theme,  I'm here today to tell you what you DONT have to do! :) Ready? Here goes. You DON'T HAVE TO.......

1. Give Feedback Daily

But how will I know if they are meeting the objectives? How will I know they understood the concepts? What if they are falling behind?  These are a few of the questions that I used to ask myself back in the days when I was rushing around in a stressed out state, trying to ensure that I had enough evidence of...

There is partnership of thinking taking place at this stage of inquiry. It goes beyond setting the scene of the inquiry and triggering background knowledge. We are dipping into the possibilities, inviting our students to connect what they know with what they want to know and with what excites them. This requires our creativity with linking this opening learning experience to the concepts we will explore in such a way that will excite, engage, invite wonder and spark curiosity. This is where the magic begins and the student-led inquiries stem. This is the art of the provocation.

But what exactly does it mean? What is this thing we call "a provocation"? These synonyms from the definition of the noun (provocation) from  the Oxford English Dictionary are  indicators of what we are aiming for: