IB Primary Years Program

Agenda

Objective:  Use PYP Key Concepts to enhance transdisciplinary learning

  • Mindful Moment
  • What it means to be Transdisciplinary
  • Essential Elements of IB
  • Review Key Concepts
  • How to use key concepts to connect all subject areas

IB is the plate

It's not adding more to your plate

 

What it means to be Transdisciplinary

PYP Essential Elements

The Key Concepts

The PYP key concepts simplify and refine our teaching practice. These big, organizing ideas are revisited again and again, building shared mental schema and language for explaining the world around us. The concepts have been created with the aim of being timeless, universal and abstract, to help learners engage in creative and abstract thinking to deal with tricky ideas. Concepts can enable students to deal with information in a transdisciplinary way, which the IB is keen on encouraging.

The Key Concepts

Inquiry in Math

The PYP Key Concepts are an amazingly effective tool we and our students can use to promote inquiry in Math.  They can form the framework for structured, guided or open inquiries in math and also naturally help children to develop deeper wonderings about the concepts and skills explored.  They can  change mathematical thinking from skills-based learning to student-owned, deep conceptual explorations.

Inquiry learning process is for kids to ask questions and wonder.  Using the Key Concepts gives children the (sometimes) needed framework for them to develop deep wonderings and the more they use them in math units the deeper and more powerful their questions become.
Using them to generate questions they can inquire into brings about a lot of curiosity in children and they can also greatly broaden the conceptual thinking behind a math concept.  Shallow questions suddenly start transforming into deep questions with their use.

  • Think about the subjects and related concepts you already teach.  
  • Choose one of the Key concepts
  • Chart how the key concepts connects to those subjects

NGSS

CKLA

Next Steps

  • Incorporate key concepts to what you already teach.

 

 

PYP Essential Elements

What are ATL skills?

Approaches to Learning are the skills you need to learn anything and everything. The IB highlights five key ATL skills: Thinking, social, communication, research, and self-management. These skills empower learners to take meaningful action on issues that matter to them.

ATL’s are skills students develop that have relevance across the curriculum.  These skills help students “learn how to learn”. ATL’s are learned, explicitly taught, improved with practice, and developed over time.

 

Next Steps

  • Think about the ATL (thinking skills, social skills, communication skills, research skills and self-management skills).

  • Choose one ATL to focus on

  • Which teaching strategies would you use to explicitly teach that skill.

  • Be prepared to share next meeting

Reflect on the ATL's

  • Which ATL skill came most naturally to you as a student?

  • Which ATL skill has been the hardest for you to learn?

  • Which ATL skill is the most important for students’ success in your subject?

  • Which ATL skill can students best develop in your current unit?

For each prompt, move to the poster corresponding to your answer

Toddle

Next Steps

  • The IB Profile

  • Transdisciplinary Themes

  • Creating a Unit in Toddle