The PYP Attitudes are going away!

Before the roll out of the official Enhanced PYP documents last fall, rumors started to swirl within the IB World Community about what changes to the program would be coming from the IB. One such rumor was that the IB was doing away with the PYP attitudes.

Last fall when The learner in the enhanced PYP was released, one line mentioned what was happening to the attitudes: "'Attitudes’ in the PYP have now been subsumed within the descriptors of the learner profile," (p. 4).

It is important to point out that although the PYP attitudes will no longer be articulated as a separate list of dispositions we want students to feel, value and demonstrate, the PYP is still committed to and focused on "the development of personal attitudes towards people, towards the environment and towards learning, attitudes that contribute to the well-being of the individual and of the group," (p. 24 of Making the PYP Happen).

Subsuming the PYP attitudes within the descriptors of the learner profile aligns the focus of the development of international-mindedness and reinforces how central the learner profile is to not only the PYP, but to all programs under the IB umbrella.

Special note: If some of you are like me and have never heard the word 'subsumed' before, it is defined as "to include or absorb [something] in something else". :)

In order to "see" where these attitudes are within the descriptors of the IB learner profile attributes, I created a poster (based on the IB learner profile poster) which highlights the attitudes in the PYP.

Tolerance is the only current PYP attitude which doesn't appear by name in the descriptors of the IB learner profile attributes, although students obviously work on being sensitive about differences and diversity in the world and being responsive to the needs of others as they develop many of the attributes of the IB learner profile.

Click here for a PDF of my version of the IB learner profile poster with the attitudes highlighted.

My hope is that being able to see the attitudes highlighted in this way within the descriptors of the attributes, teachers, students and families will be able to easily understand how the development of the PYP attitudes support the students' development of the attributes of the IB learner profile.

PYP Essential Elements: More than a bunch of lists

To prepare for my first year of teaching G3 in an IB World School, I attended the workshop, "PYP: An Introduction to the Curriculum Model." It was at that workshop that I first learned about the five essential elements of the PYP:

• knowledge
• skills
• concepts
• attitudes
• action

At first, the essential elements represented an overwhelming amount of lists with an overwhelming amount of words to learn. To make things easier, we learned the mnemonic device "Calvin Klein Sells Awesome Apparel" to remember that the essential elements include concepts, knowledge, skills, attitudes, and action. However, this memorization tool only helped me to believe that the essential elements were lists to memorize and remember, missing the big idea of the essential elements.

Since that time, I have developed a deeper understanding of the essential elements. To help other educators with whom I work develop a similar deep understanding of the essential elements, I recently led colleagues through the following inquiry into the essential elements of the PYP:

1. Start with a concept.

To be successful, people must learn specific facts & develop certain skills, construct understanding of big ideas, and demonstrate attitudes that lead to the well-being of the individual and of the group. On the road to success, people must have authentic opportunities to put what they've learned to use.

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

What do basketball coaches want to teach their players?

After exploring our big idea (concept) in one unrelated context, I wanted to explore a concrete example closer to home, so I posed the question: "What do PYP teachers want to teach their students?"

3. Check for understanding.

Then, I asked the teachers, "What do you understand about the essential elements of the PYP? Make sure your response is Timeless, Abstract, Universal, and Transferrable."

I've included some of the individual responses here. I bolded and highlighted certain phrases to help me synthesize these responses. A synthesis of all the responses follows.

*I understand that the essential elements of the PYP help teachers identify what we want students to know, do, and understand.

*The essential elements are more than a list to dig up - they actually make logical sense in starting with what we want kids to understand KNOW - can they exhibit this and do it SKILLS - do they get the bigger concepts of who they need to be ATTITUDES - and that without an impulse to ACTION or putting into their lives what good is it? So essentially, these steps become more like logical steps to all we want to teach kids instead of a confusing list for PYP hoops to jump through.

*We use the essential elements to help us write our Units of Inquiry. We can start with knowledge - what we want the students to know. Skills - can be related across disciplines. Concepts - BIG ideas. Attitudes - these might be generated throughout the lesson. Action - give the students an opportunity to try/use these.

Deep-rooted and relevant learning is more likely to take place and evolve when PYP instructors purposefully and strategically include all of the essential elements in their daily instruction. 

*The essential elements of PYP are set of understands/characteristics/learning outcomes that encompass knowledge, skills, attitudes, concepts, and transfer of these to action!

*They are all equally important.

*All of the elements work together and are necessary to write and implement a good unit if inquiry. All of the elements lead to action and then reflection.

*The essential elements guide instructional and learning practices that reach the whole child, and intimately lead to action.

*The essential elements help organize all aspects of writing a unit. They guide teachers and students through an entire learning cycle. The elements are all the different building blocks needed to have a true understanding of a concept. They come together to help students build that understanding.

*I understand that the essential elements are "big picture" ideas and thoughts and frameworks that we want to incorporate into our lessons and guide our kiddos to use now and throughout their lives.

*We use the essential elements of PYP to write our conceptual unit of inquiries and to help us teach our students to be global learners.

*The essential elements provide a framework to ensure students are not only able to recite fact but to also understand and apply what they've learned. This provides them a base and opportunity to have deeper understanding of basic tenants and to become a more open-minded student. Seeing how all the elements support one another, could evoke higher-level thinking and processing. Concept, Knowledge, Skills, Attitude, Action.

*We hope all our work leads to action (it's the groundwork that leads to it).

*I understand that the essential elements are all necessary in order to develop a PYP learner. Through the essential elements, teachers can develop the students' skills related to a specific concept, help students to connect and apply their learning to life outside the classroom, and develop their overall self as a learner and a part of the learning community.

(which is)

*The essential elements of the PYP work together to make a complete lesson that is structured around a concept rather than a skill. Using a concept to teach a skill causes knowledge to become more meaningful. That allows students to demonstrate attitudes, knowledge, and understanding of the concept through the appropriate action. This authentic assessment helps make students more well-rounded and retain the knowledge and skills long-term.

4. Reflect on their thinking and decide next steps.

To better understand what we collectively think, I synthesized the individual responses into this one statement: 

The essential elements of the PYP are more than a list. We use the essential elements to help us write our Units of Inquiry purposefully and strategically. The essential elements of the PYP are knowledge, skills, attitudes, concepts, and action. They are all equally important and necessary to reach the whole child and to help students build understanding. The essential elements guide our kiddos now and throughout their lives to be global learners and to become more open-minded. All our work leads students to connect and apply their learning to life outside the classroom which is authentic assessment.

This statement represents a true understanding of the essential elements, which is much more sophisticated than a meaningless regurgitation of a set of lists.

Now, our next step is to see how we can apply our understanding of the essential elements when we create our written curriculum and put it into action (taught curriculum).

Visible Thinking ROUTINES

The book Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison is chalked full of thinking routines that can be used with students of any age, with any content to get their thinking visible.

Making students' thinking visible benefits everyone involved. When students are able to think about what's going on in their own heads (metacognition), they begin to actively take responsibility for developing conceptual understanding, instead of passively depending on teachers to provide them with information. 

Seeing students' thinking also is beneficial for teachers. When we are able to see how students are thinking about the key and related concepts of subject matter, we're able "to confront students' misconceptions and design experiences to advance their understanding," (p. 27 of M.T.V.). To confront students' misconceptions, we must give them appropriate, effective, and immediate feedback that will push their understanding further and deeper.

When learning about Visible Thinking Routines though, teachers often focus on the importance of making students' thinking visible and they miss the fact that these tools and structures are meant to be routines that should become patterns of behavior. On his site, Ron Ritchhart, defines Thinking Routines as "patterns of behavior adopted to help one use the mind to form thoughts, reason, or reflect. We see these patterns emerging as the routines that are used over and over, becoming ingrained in us, both teachers and students. Once these routines become second nature, flexibility can emerge."

One particular fifth grade teacher understands the importance of using a thinking routine over and over again. Recently, during the summer session, this teacher used children's books as a way to help students construct understanding of the PYP attitudes. To help make sense of what was going on in the texts, the teacher used the 4C's thinking routine (p. 140-146 in M.T.V.), where students read a text and identify connections, challenges, concepts, and changes (for more information about the 4C's thinking routine, check out this post dated May 1, 2014).

During the first week, the teacher read the text Officer Buckle & Gloria by Peggy Rathmann to the students and completed the 4C's as a whole group.

As the class continued to read about, investigate, and construct meaning of the PYP attitudes, they also continued to engage with the 4C’s thinking routine. It was the teacher's hope that the habitual use of the 4C's would allow the students to get used to the activity so that it would become routine.

After using the 4C's multiple times over the course of four weeks, the students collaboratively used the thinking routine one last time as they read The Lotus Seed by Sherry Garland, a text that focused on appreciation.  As they progressed through the 4C’s, the concepts section still seemed to be the hardest for the students to grasp, but the teacher was encouraged by the student work that was completed following the reading of the text.

After reading about how one class of fifth grade students used the 4C's thinking routine over and over, until it become ingrained in both teacher and students, how have you or could you use a routine over and over again until it became second nature to you and your students?

Step Inside

At a recent book club where we were discussing Paul Tough's book, How Children Succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character, someone pointed out that "Chapter 4 says these character traits are hard to teach as students get older and lack of motivation affects GPA for many students." He then followed up with the question, "Should character education start in elementary school and how could that happen and why is it important?"

After working in a Primary Years Program of the International Baccalaureate for the last three years, I feel that our school does a wonderful job with character education, since much importance is placed on students' development of the attributes of the IB Learner Profile and the PYP attitudes. To answer the question then, from the perspective of the book's author, I boiled character teaching and learning down to these three steps:

1. Teach character.
2. Expose kids to "child-sized adversity" and (sometimes) let them fail.
3. Let them make their own decisions.

Quickly though, I realized these steps follow a traditional teaching model. From an inquiry stance though, a teacher would inversely follow the steps above:

1. Let students make their own decisions in authentic situations.
2. Thereby exposing kids to "child-sized adversity" and (sometimes) letting them fail.
3. Teach character by providing students with feedback.

These steps don't just work for character education though. In a PYP, teachers are charged to teach this way all the time. In a blog post dated February 13, 2014, I wrote about the power of providing feedback to 4th graders on their personal narratives. I wrote about how Professor John Hattie found that providing students with effective feedback has a high influence over student achievement (for a summary of his findings, check out this infographic but to read more in-depth about feedback, check out pages 129-154 of Hattie's book, Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing impact on learning).

Paul Tough, Angela Duckworth (a researcher whose TED talk about grit is amazing), and MANY others have referenced Carol Dweck's research when discussing the key to students' success. Overly simplified, Dweck's idea is that a growth mindset involves believing that one's intelligence is not fixed and that growth and learning require effort.

Therefore, for students to be truly open-minded enough to receive the feedback Hattie is promoting teachers give, which will undoubtedly help them grow and learn their character AND their intelligence, students must adopt a growth mindset.

In order to investigate this mindset with students, I guided students through the thinking routine "Step Inside" multiple times. This thinking routine comes from Making Thinking Visible: How to provide engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison (p. 178-184).

During this thinking routine, students are asked to think about a person that is connected to what they are examining. They are instructed to "step inside" the situation to see things from the person's point of view. To do this, students answer the following:

1. What can this person see, observe, or notice?
2. What might the person know, understand, hold true, or believe?
3. What might the person care deeply about?
4. What might the person wonder about or question?

Following the simple inquiry cycle developed by teachers at my school, I first wanted to INVITE students into the inquiry by answering the above questions from the perspective of a person with a growth mindset.

I showed them this:

http://lanaalattar.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/mindset.jpg

Together, we created this.

The next day, we entered into the INVESTIGATE stage of the inquiry cycle. To investigate a growth mindset, I showed them this video:

http://youtu.be/hqh1MRWZjms

Again, we used the Step Inside thinking routine to dig deeper into growth mindset, coupled with Chalk Talk, another thinking routine from Making Thinking Visible: How to provide engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison (p. 78-85).

And then synthesized all their ideas into this:

Lastly, we entered into the DEMONSTRATE phase of the inquiry cycle, the step where learners are given opportunities to demonstrate their newly gained understanding.

To see whether or not they truly understood the concept of a growth mindset, I had the kids "Step Inside" themselves and record their thinking in their notebooks. Below are a few samples.

After reading about how sixth graders used the thinking routine Step Inside to better understand the perspective of a growth mindset and thus ready themselves to receive feedback which has proven effective at increasing student achievement and success, how could your students use the thinking routine Step Inside?

Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate

On Friday, March 28, 2014, I wrote about how first grade students made their thinking about rocks visible using the Visible Thinking Routine "Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate" from the book Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison. Here is the story of how second graders used that same routine to make their thinking about heroes visible:

For the last several weeks in second grade, students have been investigating how people influence the world. They have been inquiring into the characteristics of a hero as well as particular people who have made a difference in the world.

Throughout the inquiry, students continuously generated a list of influential people as they read, listened, learned, and discussed different heroes.

Toward the end of the unit, as a way to synthesize all they had learned, their teacher led the students through a learning engagement where students had to sort the influential heroes into particular categories that the students created. Some of the categories the students thought of matched categories we all would think of, when thinking of heroes: inventors, scientists, presidents, writers.

The students also sorted their heroes into less-conventional groups: risk-takers and speakers.

As students were grouping the influential people about whom they had learned, they started forming a group that they couldn't name. As the students struggled to identify a singular word that would help identify the unifying characteristic that all the individuals in the group shared, they came up with the phrase "Treated Unfairly".

However there were some "heroes" that students were planning on putting in that group, who weren't treated unfairly. That phrase described some, but not all, so they still needed another group! Students continued to struggle to identify a singular word that would help name that particular group of people, although they knew that there was something special about this group; they were all good people, hard workers, who tried to make a difference for other people, other humans. At this point, the teacher intervened and introduced the word humanitarian to the students.

As the students sorted their heroes into the categories they had established, they quickly realized that certain influential people easily belonged in multiple categories. Their teacher suggested they add those individuals to as many groups as was necessary.

Then, the class connected those heroes who showed up in different categories. On the lines that they used to connect the heroes in the different groups, the students wrote character traits, which often were the PYP attitudes (e.g. independent, confident, creativity) and attributes of the IB International Learner Profile (e.g. knowledgeable, thinker, risk-taker).

Now that students had generated a list of influential people, sorted those individuals into groups the students identified, and made connections between the groups with character traits, the teacher could invite students to continue learning about other heroes that might fit into those categories (elaborate).

"What other presidents could we learn about?"

"Are there other risk-takers that influenced the world that we haven't learned about yet?"

"Where could we find more information on different humanitarians?"

This invitation to students to reflect on their learning and to choose how they'll continue learning will increase the likelihood that students will engage in thoughtful and appropriate action.

After reading about how 2nd graders made their thinking visible about the heroes they were studying, how could you or have you had your students make their thinking visible with the Visible Thinking Routine "Generate-Sort-Connect-Elaborate"?

Thinking about the PYP Attitudes

In a Primary Years Program, we strive to provide our students with a well-rounded education; one that meets students' cognitive, intellectual, social, and physical needs. Whereas we work hard to promote the learning of essential knowledge and skills, we know we can’t leave the construction of conceptual understandings up to chance. Nor can we just assume that students will take independent, responsible action in response to their learning, without our guidance.

In the same way, we must provide explicit learning opportunities for students to develop particular attitudes. This does not mean that teachers are responsible for directly instructing their students on the specific dispositions that are known as the PYP Attitudes. Rather, PYP educators must set up learning engagements where students can meaningfully construct an understanding of the attitudes through the inquiry process.

Image taken from Time Space Education Blog. The attitudes - appreciation, commitment, confidence, cooperation, creativity, curiosity, empathy, enthusiasm, independence, integrity, respect, tolerance - are shown here as "roots" of the tree.

Recently, as second grade students were inquiring into how people influence the world in positive ways, they watched a film about Ruby Bridges, an African-American student in 1960 who was the first black child to attend an all-white elementary school in the South (New Orleans).

After, the classroom teacher seized the opportunity to investigate how the students were thinking about the central idea (people influence the world in positive ways) as well as to check for the students' understanding of the PYP Attitudes. The teacher posed the following two questions:

The students had been learning about, demonstrating, discussing, thinking about, and working with the PYP Attitudes all school year. To support their reflection on the attitudes demonstrated in the movie, the students used the front side of the school's PYP Essential Elements Mat.

Front side of the Essential Elements Mat

Back side of the Essential Elements Mat

In the examples below, it is evident that these 7 and 8 year-old students have an insightful understanding of the PYP Attitudes. Because the teacher gave the students very board prompts to think about the attitudes in the film, students were able to chose uniquely different ways of making their thinking visible. Some chose to reflect in a paragraph, whereas other students used bubbles or tables.

After reading about how 2nd graders made their thinking visible about the PYP Attitudes, how could you or have you had your students think about and reflect on the PYP Attitudes?