The Essential Elements in the PYP consist of knowledge, concepts, skills, attitudes and action. In Making the PYP Happen, it states that a balance is sought between them through delivery of the written curriculum. I’m not sure if the Essential Elements were arranged in that order intentionally (knowledge, concepts, skills, attitudes and action) or if they just happen to be naturally prioritized that way in most classrooms. But casual inspection of Essential Element preference in most PYP schools would indicate that there is a gap between the first three (knowledge, concepts and skills) and the second two (attitudes and action).
Photo Credit: Dhammika Heenpella / Images of Sri Lanka via Compfight cc
Although walk-through observations of many PYP classrooms would exhibit frequent teacher references to attitudes and action, there is often a lack of visible celebration of them by students. Generally, they operate as invisible forces working through students, either mentally and emotionally in the form of attitudes, or physically in the form of actions. When they could be detected, attitudes and action often (and positively) occur outside our field of vision.
Through no fault of their own, most teachers are faced with making evaluative decisions in an attempt to find balance in an overloaded curriculum with the time constraints they have. Due to this, the Essential Element wedge is opened and most teachers choose to focus on the first three Essential Elements (knowledge, concepts and skills) while putting the last two (attitudes and action) on the backburner. Teachers place an emphasis on knowledge, concepts and skills, and therefore, so do their students. The problem with this is that it again leaves attitudes and actions often standing on the sideline watching the other Essential Elements get more play time. Despite our best efforts to directly instruct attitudes and action, take advantage of teachable moments to reflect upon them or simply model and allow mirror neurons to do their thing, it’s still not enough. We need to get students more actively involved and empowered with the PYP attitudes and the action cycle.
Enter Padlet, a very simple-to-use and free website that provides an opportunity for students to create and take ownership of their own “walls” to showcase evidence, understanding and transference of these attitudes and actions. Here is how it works:
In our class, students have created three Padlet walls within their account: PYP attitudes, Action Wall and Learner Profile traits. Since the Learner Profile (LP) traits are the foundation of all IB programmes, we included a wall for them as well, as they are referenced just as much as the attitudes are in our class.
We have linked these Padlet walls to the student blogs, which also act as an online portfolio for their learning. With one click from their personal blogs, students are taken to the Padlet wall they wish to post on. The beautiful thing about Padlet is that, so often, the LP traits, PYP attitudes and especially action take place outside of school hours. Padlet can be accessed from any computer in the world, as long as the students know how to find their personal blogs off our class page.
What this means is that students and parents can easily contribute a photo or video that demonstrates their engagement of these holistic practices at any time from anywhere in the world. All they need is their mobile device. Is your son taking a risk while on vacation? Post a photo of it. Is your daughter serving others at an orphanage on the weekends? Post a video of it. Are your children finally appreciating each other’s company? Celebrate it! And post it. Many elementary students now have their own mobile devices where they can initiate the posting when they realize they are acting out LP traits or PYP attitudes in their home lives. The Padlet wall can serve as a digital portfolio for who they are not only as learners, but also as people.
Inside the classroom, we are working on a renewed metacognitive shift of awareness of the PYP attitudes, LP traits and action. Although students are exposed to the attitudes and traits every day, they frequently do not recognize when they might be enacting one unless prompted to reflect. Each morning, upon arriving to school, students select a descriptor I have written for each of the LP traits and PYP attitudes out of a large bucket. They then have to find the LP trait or PYP attitude poster on the wall that the descriptor matches to. This attitude or profile trait becomes their “Word for the Day,” which they then should try to reflect upon and practice when an opportunity arises. This sixty-second welcoming to the classroom each morning not only opens students up to further exposure of the LP traits and PYP attitudes vocabulary, but also expands their limited notion of what those words could mean or entail. This practice provided a foundation for increased referencing and identifying of LP traits and PYP attitudes in class reflections, but student engagement with them still seemed passive and lacked ownership.
In order to try to provide more ownership of metacognitive recognition of their action, attitudes and traits, we are affording more opportunities for students to interact with their Padlet walls. To begin some lessons, I give the students a reminder that if at any time, they recognize they are practicing one of the PYP attitudes, LP traits or taking a form of action, they make take a photo and post it onto their Padlet wall. They start off by giving their iPad to a friend to capture a reenacted photo of them doing the trait, attitude or action that set off that metacognitive realization. Then, students go onto their virtual wall, post the photo, identify the attitude or trait and write a caption that describes how they were showing it. We’ve timed the whole process and it takes less than four minutes. Shortly thereafter, they are back to the independent or collaborative activity they were previously engaged in.
Other lessons, if the students are very focused and we don’t want to break their cognitive momentum, my academic assistant and I will grab their iPads and take photos of them engaged in their learning. Later, we will tell them that they have some photos waiting for them in their camera roll in which they can identify LP traits or PYP attitudes they were practicing during that engagement. If some of the attitudes or traits are too obvious in a learning activity (creativity, communicator, cooperation, respect, caring), I might prohibit identifying them on their walls for that day to encourage acquainting themselves with lesser-known traits and attitudes.
Photo Credit: Michael Matti via Compfight cc
If students take action somewhere around the school and let me know about it, I encourage them to take a classmate with them to that location and reenact the choice they reflected upon. When students bring in learning resources from home they would like to share with the class or have voluntarily extended their understanding outside of school hours and would like to present new data, a classmate takes a photo of them. When they are done speaking to the class, they put the photo up on their action wall as a form of furthering their own (and others’) education.
Although this undertaking is still in its infancy and there are flaws with this approach (like its propensity to serve as extrinsic motivation for some students), we find that its rollout thus far has been successful in celebrating students’ holistic growth and evolution. This Padlet wall endeavor will not bring the PYP attitudes, Learner Profile traits and action cycle onto equitable terms with the heavyweights of knowledge, concepts and skills. However, it has the potential to shift the scales a little more favorably into balance.
Recent Comments