The 6 approaches to teaching are at the heart of how we plan and design our authentic units of inquiry. In this blog, I will highlight some key sentences from the IB official documentation related to the approaches to teaching. Let’s start.
Based on inquiry
These two sentences from the Inquiry section in Learning and teaching are my favourite:
“Play, problem-based learning, collaboration, experimentation, and explicit teaching all have a place within well-considered inquiry-based learning experiences.”
“Inquiry can range from teacher guided to completely open inquiries (Bonnstetter 1998). The PYP emphasizes guided inquiry as a leading pedagogical approach.”
These two sentences answer many of your questions. Inquiry and explicit teaching are not in contradiction; inquiry has different types. Use what is suitable for you and for your learners. You don’t need Project-Based Learning, Problem-Based Learning, STEAM, STREAM, or all the other educational trends to be added to your timetable or curriculum, they are already embedded as you noticed if inquiry is really implemented.
Focused on conceptual understanding
Concepts and conceptual understanding are key in the PYP. If you don’t teach using concepts, you are locked in space and time and you are not teaching in depth.
“Conceptual understanding creates opportunities for learners to make connections, transfer and apply skills, knowledge, and understanding across, between and beyond subjects.” (Learning and teaching, Conceptual understanding)
Develop local and global context
This is the beauty of the PYP, you will not teach topics or lessons not relevant to the students or connected to their prior knowledge. You respect the host country. You have a personal, local and global perspective to your units.
“Framing the programme of inquiry, the PYP transdisciplinary themes provide a starting point from which learners can engage with local and global issues and opportunities. Taken together, the transdisciplinary themes provide learners with authentic, relevant and transformative learning experiences that go beyond the boundaries of subjects because local and global issues transcend boundaries.” (Learning and Teaching, Transdisciplinary learning)
Focused on effective teamwork and collaboration
This is key for a successful unit, I have seen in many schools, when you have 3 classes of grade 3, one class teacher prepare the math lessons, one class teacher prepare the language lessons and one class teacher prepare the unit of inquiry lessons. This is not collaboration.
In the learning community, collaboration section you will find these two sentences:
“A collaborative approach involving sustained dialogue and reflection helps teachers to grow as professionals. They reach deeper levels of understanding together as they inquire, reflect on and make decisions about the process of learning.”
“Supporting transdisciplinary learning requires time and a commitment to collaboration. This includes students, classroom teachers, subject-specific teachers, librarians, media-specialist teachers, inclusion specialists, and so on.” Check my previous blog
Remove barriers to learning
In the guide “Meeting student learning diversity in the classroom, 2019” the term inclusion is defined as follow:
“Inclusion is an ongoing process that aims to increase access and engagement in learning for all students by identifying and removing barriers.”
And the document highlights the importance of designing a curriculum for all the learners:
“It is important to proactively design to create optimal learning environments for all students. Consider students’ needs, preferences and strengths through a proactive, intentional design process. Develop knowledge of UDL to move from differentiated instruction for some students to a proactive design of the curriculum for all students.”
Informed by assessment
Assessment in the PYP is an ongoing, purposeful process of gathering, analysing, reflecting on, and acting upon evidence of learning to inform next steps in teaching and learning. It is a collaborative practice in which teachers and learners work together to monitor, document, measure, report, and adjust learning over time. Learners are active participants: they reflect on their progress, engage with feedback from peers and teachers, and use it to feed forward into future learning. A strong assessment culture is built when all members of the learning community develop assessment capability and share responsibility for learning. Learning goals and success criteria are co-constructed and made explicit, ensuring clarity and ownership. In the PYP, assessment values both the learning process and the learning outcomes.
“Monitoring, documenting and measuring conceptual understandings focus on how learners make connections, transfer and apply understanding of concepts across, between, and beyond subjects through a range of learning experiences. Skills are monitored and documented for growth over time; they manifest at different points in time and in different ways, are closely interconnected and are open to interpretation. It is, therefore, important that teachers allow for flexibility to monitor and document conceptual understandings and skills over time and through a range of experiences.” (Learning and Teaching, Assessement)
The IB PYP documentation as you notice is grounded in research, data, and years of global implementation. The learner, learning and teaching, and the learning community, along with the standards and practices, are essential for every PYP educator. Yet I often notice that many teachers haven’t read them. I ask myself, how can that be? How can you be a PYP teacher without reading the PYP guides?
I still remember, in my previous school when I was the PYP Coordinator, we spent a whole year as a team reading and unpacking these documents using some visible thinking routines. You could spend your whole career learning about the PYP to create a truly holistic learning experience.
Let’s enjoy the journey of being lifelong learners, learning from mistakes together as a community of learners. It’s the process that matters, not just the end product.
It’s time to stop and rethink: Are we simply following trends and buzzwords in education? Or are we going deeper by becoming curriculum designers who create relevant, engaging, challenging, and authentic units for our students?