We're Internationally-Minded! A song about the IB Learner Profile

Central to the mission of the International Baccalaureate Organization is to "develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect."

In order to accomplish this goal, authorized IB programs use the IB Learner Profile, a set of "10 attributes valued by IB World Schools. We believe these attributes, and others like them, can help individuals and groups become responsible members of local, national and global communities."

In our PYP, we introduce the IB Learner Profile to our kindergarten students right away when they start the year with us and throughout the next subsequent six years, continue to provide students with opportunities to further develop their understanding of these 10 attributes. Our students collaboratively create classroom displays, highlight particular attributes when reading and recognize when those around them demonstrate attributes of an internationally-minded person.

In addition to these and the many other ways we bring the IB Learner Profile to the center of our life at our PYP, we also sing about it as a way to remember, understand and celebrate the IB Learner Profile.

Check out these second graders singing "We're Internationally-Minded!", an original song we created at our school about the IB Learner Profile. Can you figure out which learner profile attributes they're singing about in the verses? All 10 are mentioned!


If you want to sing this song with your students, check out the lyrics below. If you want to play along, here is a copy of the lyrics with the guitar chords. Note: The second graders in the video are chanting "K-A-P-O-S-I-A" to celebrate our school, but you can easily change the lyric to fit your Primary Years Program.

We’re Internationally-Minded!

Verse 1
We’re curious and we love to learn.
Knowing the big idea is our concern.
We are responsible and act with honesty.

We show compassion to all our friends.
We truly care for them, it's not pretend.
We can express ourselves and listen carefully.

Chorus
We know, inquire, and care and we are thinkers.
We’re principled and balanced and risk-takers.
We communicate, reflect, we’re open-minded.
(chant school name): We’re internationally-minded! (x2)

Verse 2
We use our thinking skills to make decisions.
We value other cultures and traditions.
We think about the world and ourselves thoughtfully.

We balance different aspects of our lives.
Take care of mind and body, to survive.
We’re brave and take risks when faced with uncertainty.

Chorus

Bridge
We’re all in this together.
There’s just one human race.
We want to make Earth better,
to bring peace to this place.
If not now, then when?
If not us, then who?
It’s all up to me and you, you, you!

Chorus

5 steps to teach concepts ... in math

Last year, I shared a blog post with friends and colleagues on Facebook entitled "Are You Doing It Wrong? How to Introduce Telling Time" by Cindy Lee of Ainslee Labs (which has since been reposted here: Avoid the biggest mistake teachers make when teaching time ).

It caught the attention of my second grade colleagues and now together, we're trying to figure out how to put Ms. Lee's ideas into practice with students.

Traditionally, students are introduced to telling time by first learning time to the hour. Next, students learn to tell time to the half hour, then to the quarter hour, then to the nearest five minutes and finally to the exact minute.

Ms. Lee has experience that shows this way is confusing to kids (I've had that same experience!). We first teach kids to look wherever the short hand is pointing to to read the hour. But soon thereafter, this understanding becomes a misconception.

To address this confusion, Ms. Lee suggests using a clock graphic colorfully divided into twelfths, teaching the kids that each hour has an area or space that belongs to them.

Below, I've detailed how I used my five-step concept-based lesson framework to introduce this idea to the students.

1. Start with a concept.

Before the lesson, I decided on three related objectives to make sure that my lesson was three-dimensional (to learn more about 3D curriculum and instruction see anything by Lynn Erickson).

Concept: The students will understand that you can't achieve your goal if you use the right tool the wrong way.

Knowledge: The students will know that the hour has an area or space that belongs to them on the clock.

Skill: The students will be able to read the hour on a clock, regardless of how many minutes have passed.

Although I was specifically concerned with students gaining mathematical knowledge and skill during this lesson, I was equally interested in them learning the timeless, abstract, universal and transferable idea that even if you're using the right tool, you need to use it the right away to be able to reach your goals. Striking a balance between teaching and learning knowledge, skill and concept objectives is paramount, in concept-based teaching.

2. Pick a specific, concrete example of a person, place, situation, or thing that illustrates that concept & 3. Create an opportunity for students to explore that concrete example.

To introduce students to the concept of using the right tool the right way, I brought in a tool box, a hammer, a small board and my lanyard.

I told them I had a goal of making a lanyard hanger so that it wouldn't get tangled on my shelf at home. We first chatted about the right tool I'd need out of my toolbox. When we decided that a hammer was indeed the right tool, I tried to hammer in the nail with the end of the hammer. When that didn't work, a student suggested I use the top of the hammer. When that didn't work, someone suggested I used the circle part of the top.

As the nail went into the board, so too did the idea into the kids' brains that you need the right tool used the right way to get the job done!

Then I introduced them to another tool - a clock.

"When we use a clock as our tool, what is our goal?" I asked.

As one girl offered (and all the second graders agreed), we use clocks to read the time.

So, I asked the students to write on their whiteboards what the time was on each of the following clocks:

All the students were able to accurately tell me the time. We all agreed that to read the time on those clocks, you just needed to look where the hour-hand was pointing.

"Okay," I said, "now tell me what time it is."

We counted together that 55 minutes had passed and they all had to read the hour by themselves. Just like clockwork (pun completely intended) all but 1 or 2 students said it was 2:55.

Then, we had a conversation about how we had been using the right tool to tell the time, but we were using it in the wrong way.

Next, I showed them the clock face with the partitioned hours (thanks again to Ainslee Labs for the free clock face. Want to pay for her whole telling time kit?).

We used this clock face to practice telling the time with various times. Over and over again, the students had no trouble identifying the correct hour, even when the hour hand wasn't pointing directly to a particular number. Eventually I removed the gray numbers inside the clock and 100% of the students were able to read the hour on a clock, regardless of how many minutes have passed because they knew that the hour has an area or space that belongs to them on the clock.

4. Check for understanding by having them write a concept statement. 

(This step is very similar to the thinking routine Headlines found in Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison, p. 111)

Since I was confident that the students had reached the knowledge and skill objectives of the lesson, I asked, "What did you learn today about how you should use a tool to achieve your goal?".

I gave the students a chance to write down their individual responses on their whiteboards and then one-by-one we shared until everyone's ideas were represented in our statement. Below is the sequence of revisions that our conceptual statement when through. My prompts are highlighted in yellow.

"What do you have to remember about tools when trying to achieve a goal?" First child responds:

"Does anyone want to add anything?" Second child adds:

"Does anyone want to add anything?" Third child adds:

 "Is this true just when we're telling time?" Fourth child adds:

"Who needs to do all of this?" Fifth child responds:

"That doesn't sound right." Sixth child corrects: 

The students were comfortable that their conceptual statement encapsulated all the learning they had done up until that point, so we ended the lesson there.

Often times when crafting conceptual statements (sometimes called generalizations, central ideas, or enduring understandings) we create hard-to-understand statements that don't sound like how we normally talk. Concept statements should be written in language that is easy to understand to all who read it. One way to do this is let the students craft the statement, as we did together in this lesson.

5. Reflect on their thinking and decide next steps.

Moving forward, I would want these students to continue to practice reading the hour using this partitioned clock. Eventually, I would want them to independently be able to read the hours and the minutes first with the partitions and then after slowly taking away that support.

Conceptually, I would want to explore other tools and discuss the correct way to use them and contrast that with the wrong way to use them. This conversation would fit in wonderfully with any beginning-of-the-year guided discoveries that students experience as they are exploring the learning tools of the classroom.

After reading how I used a clock lesson to teach a timeless, abstract, universal and transferable concept to second graders, how do you teach these BIG IDEAS to your students?

Documenting Thinking

Spring has sprung and many classes in our school have begun to dig into different scientific inquiries.

In second grade, students are busy constructing an understanding of the big idea that survival depends on the relationship between living things and their environment. To begin, students formulate questions on the inside of their plant journals that guide their inquiry. These questions are the starting point for their own inquiries and research.

Students are required to write at least one question, but they can write more if they have more questions. They share their questions out loud to generate more questions and ideas. Then they write the questions on cards and post them on the wall. Students can continue to keep adding questions to the wall and to their lists throughout the unit.

After formulating and recording their questions, students are ready to research. Specifically, students are learning about how plants survive, the life cycle of plants, the relationship between plants and their environment and about how human actions/choices/decisions can impact the environment.

Students are encouraged to title the pages of their journals with the questions they've previously formulated and then write what they've learned with words, illustrations, diagrams, labels, and captions. Here are some examples of G2 plant journals.

 

  

 

To be able to give students feedback on their progress, some teachers have used this rubric. The descriptors were whited out for copyright purposes. You can fill them in with your students or buy the text the rubric came from: Differentiating Instruction with Menus, Language Arts (K-2) from Prufrock Press Inc.

Meanwhile, in first grade, students are constructing an understanding of the idea that making observations leads to discoveries. To document their thinking, G1 students are also using science notebooks.

  

After seeing how these G1 and G2 students use journals to document thinking as they construct understanding of timeless, abstract, universal, and transferable concepts, how could you or have you use inquiry journals/notebooks with your students?

Teaching Math in Authentic Contexts

Our staff recently has been examining the question: "What does math teaching and learning look like in a Primary Years Program (PYP)?"

To answer this question, we explored the text "Mathematics in the Primary Years Programme," one of the subject annexes from Making the PYP happen: A curriculum framework for international primary education. In that document, teachers were able to see the clear vision of how math teaching and learning should look like in our PYP.

To document their thinking, teachers created a Practice Profile (a rubric of teacher behavior) based on what they were reading in the text. As primary and intermediate teachers were working in separate sessions, there were two separate practice profiles created and can be found here: KEC PYP Math Practice Profile - Primary and Intermediate.

An important idea that came up during that professional learning engagement was that in a PYP classroom, teachers should provide students with multiple opportunities to explore relevant problems both inside and out of the units of inquiry. The math annex provides some guidance on concepts that might be best suited for learning in context when they say, "data handling, measurement, and shape and space are best studied in authentic contexts provided by the transdisciplinary units of inquiry," because they represent the "areas of mathematics that other disciplines use to research, describe, represent, and understand aspects of their domain," (p. 85 of Making the PYP Happen).

Reflecting on this new understanding of math instruction in the PYP, one G2 teacher planned for her students to create a timeline, an authentic opportunity to explore the abstract mathematical concepts of measurement, subtraction, space, and time. She knew that the timeline would give her students a better understanding of the heroes they were studying in their unit of inquiry, as they were trying to make sense of the big idea that people influence the world in different ways.

First, the students created the timeline using the scale 1 cm = 1 year. The students worked together to create century strips, each measuring a meter (and alternating in color).

Then, the students needed to figure out how long each of the heroes' strips should be. The teacher modeled how to use a number line to figure out the age of the hero they'd be researching. Using the birth date and death date (or the current date for living heroes), the students figured the difference between the two. It is important to mention that the students did pretty well with this since they have been using number lines and open number lines all year for almost every math topic. This shows how effective it is to give students the opportunity to use the same thinking tools and structures over and over again until they become routine.

Next, students used that information to create strips for each of their heroes, again with the scale 1 cm = 1 year.

Finally, the teacher gave students the opportunity to look at the timeline and document their observations, thoughts, and questions using the thinking routine See-Think-Wonder (from Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Morrison, & Church).

This G2 teacher continues to see other ways that math can be learned in meaningful ways during her unit of inquiry. Recently, she used the data they had collected on heroes' ages to introduce median, mode and range. Using the data the students had already collected made it more authentic and engaging.

The students found that their heroes ranged in age from 37 to 95, a range of 58 years. Kids were surprised and impressed because that seemed like a lot. There were two medians and two modes, so that was confusing for their introduction to the idea of analyzing a data set using those tools, but it was engaging nonetheless.

After reading about how this G2 teacher taught the mathematical concepts of measurement, difference, and data in the authentic context of her unit of inquiry, how could you or have you taught math in meaningful, engaging and authentic ways?

Don't teach concepts to children

Yep! You read it right. Don't teach concepts TO children.

Instead, give your students opportunities to EXPLORE concepts.

Let them DISCOVER the complexities of concepts by INVESTIGATING concrete examples from a variety of times, places, and situations.

In doing this, children will CONSTRUCT UNDERSTANDING of these timeless, abstract, universal, and transferrable ideas that we call concepts.

Letting students construct their own understanding of life's BIG IDEAS is known as inquiry, which is more than question asking. Teaching in this way doesn't come naturally to me, so until it does, I've been trying to follow these five steps.

1. Start with a concept.
2. Pick a specific, concrete example of a person, place, situation, or thing that illustrates that concept.
3. Create an opportunity for students to explore that concrete example. 
4. Check for understanding by having them write a concept statement.
5. Reflect on their thinking and decide next steps.

If you think using these steps could help your students construct their own understanding of life's BIG IDEAS, try them out and let me know how it goes. That is exactly what one second grade teacher did recently. Here is her story:


1. Start with a concept.

In grade 2, teachers collaboratively decided to have their students explore how people influence the world. During this unit of inquiry, students also explore the genre of biography, as they read about various heroes.

2. Pick a specific, concrete example of a person, place, situation, or thing that illustrates that concept & 3. Create an opportunity for students to explore that concrete example.

During the last several weeks, students in second grade have read, listened to, and watched biographies and have learned a lot about specific heroes.

After all this learning about individual heroes, the teacher posed two questions to the students: "Who is a hero?" and "What is a hero?"

Students responded using the Chalk Talk thinking routine (for more on Chalk Talk, see p. 78 of Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison). In the last step of the thinking routine, when students were sharing the thinking, they identified common themes and ideas that emerged. Those were notated by the teacher and are written in black marker and boxed in the pictures below.

4. Check for understanding by having them write a concept statement. (This step is very similar to the thinking routine Headlines found in Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison, p. 111)

The next day, the teacher simply gave students a blank piece of paper and prompted them to write all they understood about heroes. The following were the student responses:

They stand up for people.

(they) doing awesome

Then, the students worked collaboratively to create one, concise concept statement.

When each individual statement was read, the teacher confirmed with the class if it was true or not. Then, students had to decide if the statement had any new information to be added; if it said anything different.

If it did have some new and different information, students had to work together with their teacher to revise the existing concept statement. The images below show the progression the concept statement went through as the class collectively constructed their understanding of the concept of hero.

First, the students started with ...

Next, they added a couple of attributes and took out the pronouns.

2nd graders then added how heroes did this.

To fit better with the vocabulary of the IB Learner Profile, they decided to replace kind.

2nd graders realized that heroes don't just help people.

The students struggled with what is the "right" thing. That value-laden statement is based on one's perspective and is not an absolute truth, so they knew they had to get rid of it.

But the students felt something was missing when they took out that phrase, so they put the idea back in, while acknowledging that "right" is subjective, based on the perspective of the "hero".

At this point, the teacher invited me into the conversation to see what a fresh eye could add. To make sure that "hero" was front and center, I suggested moving the dependent clause to the end of the independent clause.

Then, I suggested to the students that they change some of the wording so that it sounded more like a second grader. Often times when crafting concept statements (sometimes called generalizations, central ideas, or enduring understandings) we create hard-to-understand statements that don't sound like how we normally talk. Concept statements should be written in language that is easy to understand to all who read it.

Finally, I had the students test the statement to see if it was true in any time and in any place. To do this, we briefly brought up "heroes" from different times and from different places that they had already learned about. We decided their definition of a hero held up when applied to all those heroes, so it was indeed timeless and universal.

The students were comfortable that their concept statement encapsulated all the learning they had done up until that point, so the teacher wrote it down on their whiteboard.

5. Reflect on their thinking and decide next steps.

The second graders' understanding of hero is certainly deep and complex. The next step now is to continue to explore the concept of hero: read more biographies, watch age-appropriate biopics, read age-appropriate news articles, interview heroes local to their community, reflect on how their own actions could lead others to believe they themselves are heroes, etc.

As they continue to learn about other "heroes", second graders should be encouraged to continually revisit and revise their definition of hero as needed.

After reading about how one second grade teacher set up opportunities for her students to EXPLORE the concept of hero, instead of directly teaching this big idea to her students, how could you or have you had your students construct understanding of life's BIG IDEAS, known as concepts?