Timetables based on questions

As usual, I start my PYP-related blogs with the standards and practices and reference the recent IB documents.

Leadership 3: The school organizes time for learning and teaching that provides a broad, balanced and connected curriculum and serves the changing needs of its community. (0201-03)

PYP 1: The school implements a schedule that provides for the development of the required number of transdisciplinary units of inquiry. (0201-03-0111)

Learning in the PYP goes beyond the boundaries of traditional subjects. It uses knowledge, conceptual understanding, skills, dispositions, and actions to help students explore the relationships between disciplines (From Principles into Practice). 

Transdisciplinary learning is at the heart of the programme! As an IB PYP lead educator and consultant, I aim to find ways to make these relationships between disciplines stand out. While PYP schools focus a lot on transgressing the boundaries of academic subjects, most of us still organize our days using fixed compartments for our disciplines.

I have seen schools struggle to create balanced timetables. Often, schools schedule a specific time in their planners for ‘inquiry sessions’, ‘Unit of Inquiry time’, or ‘PYP sessions’, but aren’t students engaging in inquiry and PYP practices all day, every day?  We need to think of ways to make our days more ‘fluid’. My goal for this blog is to push your thinking and help you re-image timetables.

Let’s Explore this Timetable

This is an example of a weekly timetable. In this timetable, we see a balance between subjects, enough time allotted for in-depth inquiry, and specific time for collaborative planning by teachers. On any given day, this timetable meets the IB PYP requirement by ensuring a balance between disciplines and having in-depth time for inquiry. This team has also scheduled time for students to work on their passion projects during ‘My Time’, which provides another space for student inquiry and action and supports student agency.

Reimagining Timetables with a Conceptual Lens

Now let’s imagine a specific day in this school. On Monday, a student spends their day as follows:

I’m now going to reimagine this timetable to make it conceptual. I always recommend starting the day with the students by sharing questions. Using questions will help

1. Provoke the student’s curiosity; this is based on neuroscience. The human brain loves questions
2. Model for the students how we ask questions
3. Develop the learner profile attributes: “inquirer”

Monday could look something like this:

Let’s take this even further! What if we created mixed-aged classrooms and found ways to make learning personalized? What if we added optional subjects and gave students voice and choice from a younger age to choose these subjects based on interest? 

Time to Act

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed educators across the globe to be creative and develop innovative ways to make the PYP happen. Education does not look the same anywhere in virtual, hybrid, or in-person classrooms. I hope schools are now looking at new ways of grouping and regrouping students and a new way to embed online and face-to-face learning in the school timetable.

 So, how would you re-imagine your timetable?

This blog was published for the first time on Toddle.