Episodes
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For this episode, I thought I would do a deeper dive into the IB documentation to get a better gauge of the ATL structure. To be honest, I’m still developing my understanding of these valuable tools. Prior to 2018, I was selecting one of the ATL categories (thinking, research, communication, social, and self-management) as the focus in the unit with little plan on how to execute it. I struggled as a teacher to make them come alive and find practical ways to make them accessible for students. Then, the enhancements happened and a light bulb went on in my head. The IB decided to provide specific ways to teach each of the categories and my eyes became hungry for ways to use them more authentically.
We will explore the different categories, sub-skills, and sub-skill criteria for each ATL and how to use them with our content standards.
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
Welcome to our new series on the approaches to learning. My brain is a bit toasty after the transdisciplinary challenge, but don’t you feel pumped? I really enjoyed going through that experience, because it really helped me think differently about transdisciplinary learning. I hope it helped you too.
Now, we are giving our brains a slight reprieve. I shouldn’t say that, because you may think our next series is going to be easy peasy. You should know better by now that my easy is usually someone else’s medium hot!
I'm excited to explore the approaches to learning or ATL more in depth. This episode will provide an overview of our role in making the ATLs come to life in our classroom.
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
Missing episodes?
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In this episode, we will wrap up our transdisciplinary challenge and provide suggestions on how to plan for next steps in this school year and beyond.
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
Welcome to the fifth and final transdisciplinary challenge! Wahoo, you made it!
Evaluating Transdisciplinarity
Every process becomes better when we regularly evaluate its effectiveness and areas of growth. Through continual feedback, we are able to see clearly the path towards the next steps. This has always been the goal of assessment. Now, we will apply this to your transdisciplinary program of inquiry.
In this week’s challenge, you will perform a SWOT Analysis to examine the effectiveness of transdisciplinary learning at your campus. This process emerged from the business sector to examine the effectiveness of an organization in sales, market share, and productivity. Since education is our business and our niche is transdisciplinary learning, I found it only fitting that we should apply the SWOT analysis to our final process.
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
In this final transdisciplinary challenge, we will focus on evaluating our practice even deeper.
To prepare for that experience, we are going to explore simple steps to evaluate your daily practice. If you are not ready to complete an entire school or grade level evaluation, these may be easier steps you can take to reach your goal.
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
Welcome to the fourth transdisciplinary challenge! Only one more to go!
When we are trying to make transdisciplinary connections, we often leave out the specialist (Art, PE, etc.) and support (EAL, Special Needs) teachers from the process. Since transdisciplinary means across all disciplines, we should be incorporating everyone into the process, not just our content from the homeroom classroom perspectives. How can we do this authentically?
In this week’s challenge, we are going to dig deeper into your program by zooming at a single unit of inquiry. I would choose one that your team agrees needs to be changed, so you receive less resistance when presenting proposed changes. Thinking smarter, not harder.
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
Welcome to the fourth transdisciplinary challenge overview!
We can’t chat about transdisciplinary learning without connecting to the specialist (PE, Art, ICT) and support (EAL, Special education, etc.) teachers. Transdisciplinary learning is all about learning across disciplines, so why are our specialist and support teachers often left out in the process? Aren’t they also another discipline?
In my experience, specialist and support teachers are often on a lonely island on their own, since most homeroom teachers plan while their students are with their teammates. When planning with the specialist and support teachers does occur, it’s often framed on how they can support the homeroom teacher, when it really should be a 50-50 relationship. So how do we move forward to a better way?
Let’s take a few minutes to look at ways to strengthen transdisciplinary connections with specialist and support teachers.
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/
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Welcome to the third transdisciplinary challenge!
In this challenge, we are going to further examine how to make connections with our standards or guidelines by transforming them from subjects to categories. This is one of the biggest challenges so far, so be sure to join us!
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
Welcome to the third transdisciplinary challenge introduction.
One of the greatest challenges as a PYP educator and coordinator has been making transdisciplinary connections using our standards. Whatever school situation, it has felt like a tug of war between the standards vs. the PYP. What many people don’t realize is that the standards drive the learning in the PYP, but we look at their relationship differently.
We will explore content learning in a traditional and transdisciplinary classroom.
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
Welcome to the second transdisciplinary challenge!
In this challenge, we are going to examine the connection between the themes with your program of inquiry (POI). We will do this by analyzing how our content standards are connected with the concept families in the theme descriptors.
This challenge will have a differentiated task based on where you are on your PYP journey. Are you ready to dive into this challenge?
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
In this challenge, we are going to explore understanding and unpacking the transdisciplinary theme descriptors. It took me a long time to realize the importance of them, because my teams never talked about them. We didn’t make the themes a part of our unit planning, so they never got taught.
About my 10th year in the PYP, I wondered what would happen if I taught the students the meaning of the descriptors, so they could understand the bigger picture of the unit, Then, I began digging into the descriptors themselves and realized that they were families of concepts that were separated by semicolons.
Stay with us to learn about how to unpack the themes to get the most out of them.
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
Welcome to the first transdisciplinary challenge. We are delving into what transdisciplinary looks and feels like in our classrooms through the use of PicCollage. Join us!
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
Welcome to our new series on transdisciplinary learning!
Now that we’ve had a chance to look back and apply our thinking, it’s time to challenge ourselves again. You heard me...we are returning to where we started and creating a five session challenge! These episodes will help us to sharpen our skill set and reflect on how we can improve our transdisciplinary practice.
The challenge will have two parts to differentiate based on where you are on your PYP journey.
Part A: we will review the big ideas of each part of transdisciplinary learning, so everyone is on the same page. If you already have a solid understanding of that part of transdisciplinary learning, then feel free to skip it and go straight to the challenge.Part B: we will complete a challenge and post it in on Twitter @thinkchat2020 or Linkedin @Lu Gerlach https://www.linkedin.com/in/lu-gerlach-9721991a8/
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/
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Welcome to the third and final episode of our application series. If you haven’t had a chance to apply your learning of the learner profile and international mindedness, I’d suggest you do so before moving forward. It’s a great chance for you to synthesize and apply your understanding of the big ideas to your school/ unit context. This is our ultimate goal with any professional development to make meaningful application to what we are already doing.
As we know, agency and action take up a lot of space in our practice within the PYP. They shape everything we do, so we need to take time to apply their role into our practice.
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/
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It's time to apply our learning!
In this episode, we will look at our practice of building international mindedness in our classroom and schools and make tangible goals to make the practice come to life in our learning setting!
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
Welcome to our application series! What is the application series? It’s a time to reflect on all of the learning we have shared so far, reflect on our practice, and make concrete goals for the future.
Application and reflection are at the heart of the PYP. They help us to see where we’ve come and where we need to still go on our journey. It’s important for us to own our truth and not compare our journey to someone else’s. We don’t see their challenges, just their successes. Remember that as you apply your learning.
Our first few episodes began with an inquiry challenge that focused on our role and needs as an educator. This was a fun way to evaluate our journey so far and set the stage for new learning ahead. This helped to lay the foundation to learn about agency, action, the learner profile attributes, and international mindedness.
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
This episode, we are going to discuss the deeper connections we make when building relationships founded on international mindedness.
When we think about building relationships that lead to international mindedness, we naturally connect to building school culture. They support each other in building lasting relationships of trust where understanding happens. It’s difficult to lay a strong culture when community members lack trust in each other.
We will explore how to break down the barriers with other community members that think differently than ourselves.
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
In this episode, we will explore the power of a school mission statement in creating culture and shaping the learning and teaching. We will examine the IB mission statement and craft or tweak our own using simple scaffolded steps. There will be an unorthodox example shared to help you think broader about your mission statement.
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ -
Now that we’ve received some ways to incorporate international mindedness into our daily practice, how will we use them? Let’s go back to our agency continuum to gauge where we are in the process.
As a reminder, the agency continuum has four phases:
Teacher-driven: teacher is doing all the work and thinkingModeled: teacher provides all of the activities and the students do itGuided: the teacher provides the topic and the students design the process and productLearner-driven: the learner chooses the topic and decides on the process and productIn this episode, we will take a few moments to think where we are and where we'd like to be with international mindedness. We will examine different ways we can demonstrate agency when developing international mindedness and make goals for the next phase of the school year.
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/
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The second layer of the foundation in our PYP house is international mindedness. It helps to cement our school culture with building relationships with each other and others around the world. How do we do this in a practical way on a daily basis? I believe it is about how you lay out the physical space and intentionally planning international mindedness into our unit. Here are some examples of how to do this.
using multilingual and multicultural textsbringing families into the unit of inquiryreflecting regularly with scenarios
For a written blog post and other resources, visit: https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/ - Show more
