Confessions of a PYP Teacher

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back my friends to Confessions of a PYP Teacher. This is Lu Gerlach with thinkchat.  Today, I'm focusing on chapter one of Experience and Education by John Dewey, which is the second episode in the series. This chapter focuses on traditional versus progressive education. Just a reminder: this text was originally written in 1938. Ninety years ago, my friends. It's...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to confession number 167. My name is Lu Gerlach from thinkchat. This episode is starting a new book club series, because you know I love a good book club.  This summer, while traveling, I've been diving deep into podcasts and books that have genuinely shifted how I see the world. I've found myself captivated by figures like Marcus Aurelius, who, despite being one...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Confessions of a PYP Teacher and the fifteenth episode in our well-being series. As we come to the end of this series, we have spent time sitting with some heavy, but very real parts of learning and teaching. We have explored worry, fear, panic, anxiety, stress, burnout, boreout, and trauma. We have looked closely at what they can look like in our classrooms, and h...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Confessions of a PYP Teacher and the fourteenth episode in our well-being series. I’ve been waiting to talk about our next topic for awhile, because it is quite heavy.  But I would be remiss to skip it, because it makes me feel uncomfortable.  If you haven’t guessed, it is trauma informed teaching.  We have already gone in deep on all of the areas that make us feel...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Confessions of a PYP Teacher and the thirteenth episode in our well-being series. Today, we are continuing our exploration of boreout, this time from the learner’s perspective. If teachers can experience boreout, is it possible that our learners can too? In a PYP classroom, this can be easy to miss because everything might look like it’s working. The tasks are gett...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Confessions of a PYP Teacher and the twelfth episode in our well-being series. As I am writing this episode, I can’t help but to reflect on my last year in Brussels.  I met so many people who had worked at the same job and complained of burnout and boreout.  This is not a criticism of them, but rather that system that they work in that could bring it about.  These...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Confessions of a PYP Teacher and the eleventh episode in our well-being series. I have been curious about learner burnout as I watch my five-year old niece.  She is a neurodivergent thinker who has ADHD, but also struggles with speech delay. For most of her life, she has been unable to articulate herself and her needs.  I have personally witnessed her frustration t...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Confessions of a PYP Teacher and the tenth episode in our well-being series. Fatigue is the silent pandemic of modern life that happens when repeated stressors, small or large, grind us down over time. It’s the constant, everyday pressures that compound until you wake up one day unable to face them anymore. This is called Burnout. In this episode, we will discuss t...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Confessions of a PYP Teacher and the ninth episode in our well-being series.   So far, we’ve looked at fear, worry, panic, and anxiety. These are internal experiences of threat;  the ways our mind and body respond when we anticipate danger, whether real or imagined. They’re signals that the nervous system is on high alert, scanning for what could go wrong. But ther...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Confessions of a PYP Teacher and the eighth episode in our well-being series.   We have already unpacked all the ways that anxiety can manifest itself.  I don’t know about you, but it made me slightly anxious just talking about it!  No pun intended.   Now, we are going to examine the anxiety disorders that may be afflicting many of our colleagues, familiies, and le...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Confessions of a PYP Teacher and the seventh episode in our well-being series.   This week, we are going to explore the big kahuna of well-being, which is anxiety.  As I was researching this condition, it was interesting to see the contrasting points of view.  Some stated that worry, fear, and panic were on a spectrum of anxiety.  While others stated that they were...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Confessions of a PYP Teacher and the sixth episode in our well-being series.   It’s been interesting going through this well-being series, because it has really stretched my thinking about how we are supporting our own mental health and that of our learners.  As I was unpacking panic, it really hit home to me.  Although I don’t have regular panic attacks, I do expe...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to our podcast and the fifth episode in our well-being series.   In this episode, we are going to lean into panic and how it can impact our well-being.   We’ve all experienced those moments of panic and our brain temporarily shuts down.  According to our friend Mo Gawdat, it’s because we believe a threat is imminent and there’s no time to act.  This makes sense when w...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to our podcast and the fourth episode in our well-being series. In the last episode, we examined the power of fear in our lives.  We are all struck with fear many times in our lives and there is no shame attached to it.  In fact, we might have to worry if everything is perfect all of the time.   Fear is a natural response to tension in our lives, real or imagined, tha...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to our podcast and the third episode in our well-being series.  This is the most vulnerable I have been in some time.  Fear is our mind’s early warning system. It shows up when we sense a threat (whether real or imagined) and while it can protect us, it can also quietly hold us back. Susan Jeffers, author of Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway , offers a powerful reminder:...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back, my friends, to Confession 153.  This episode is framed by this quote by Mo Gawdat,  "Worrying is praying for what you don’t want." Mo frames worry as a form of negative visualization. Rather than focusing our energy on what we want to grow, worry channels our attention toward fear and imagined threats. When we do this consistently, we reinforce anxiety. We...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back, my friends, to Confession 152. Today’s episode marks the beginning of a brand-new series on something that’s been quietly knocking at the door of my consciousness for a while now: well-being. If I’m honest, I used to push that topic aside. It just didn’t feel academic enough; too soft, too personal, too invisible in our talk about developing unit planners and learner...

Send us Fan Mail Hello my PYP family, this is Lu Gerlach from thinkchat.  Welcome back to Confessions of a PYP Teacher as we explore confession number 151, which is a challenge for our essential specialist and supporting teachers.  Over the past episodes in our specialist and supporting teacher series, we have explored some power topics, including The learner profile attributes International minde...

Send us Fan Mail Hi friends, it’s Lu Gerlach from thinkchat, and today is a BIG one. Episode 150 . One hundred and fifty episodes.  It's the longest episode to date. Can you believe it? Because honestly, I’m sitting here with a cup of tea and a full heart wondering how we got here. What started as a passion project for me with a microphone and a head full of ideas has become a place of connec...

Send us Fan Mail Hey friends. Welcome back. It’s been a minute or two since we last connected, but here we are—episode twelve of our specialist and supporting teachers series. And this one? It’s a big one. Today, we’re diving into what I believe is the beating heart of deep learning in the IB: conceptual understanding—and more importantly, how it shows up in your space.  This is the question I hea...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to the eleventh episode of our specialist and supporting teachers series.  Today, we are focusing on how we can further explore international mindedness in our practice.  This requires some deeper thinking and collaboration to make it happen. In the last episode, we explored how to unpack international mindedness through local and global contexts and projecting across time...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to the tenth episode of our specialist and supporting teachers series.  Today, we are focusing on bringing about more international mindedness in your classrooms with authenticity.  There are so many possibilities of exploration with the focus of international mindedness.  One of the most common might be to embody an international mindset by exploring new ideas, meeting ne...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to the ninth episode of our specialist and supporting teachers series.  I’m super excited to talk more about the learner profile attributes.  This is one of the most underused tools alongside the approaches to learning in the IB programmes.  This is a bold statement to say, I know. I’m just tired of people using the learner profile attributes as character traits.  They are...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to the eighth episode of our specialist and supporting teachers series.  We are going to spend our time unpacking the learner profile in a new way.  Oftentimes, the learner profile are reduced as a way to connect with behavior and they are much more than that.    As specialist and supporting teachers you have a possibility to use the learner profile as a set of skills that...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to our seventh episode in our series for specialist and supporting teachers.  This has been a passion project that has been frequently delayed with my return to the classroom, a school-wide adventure camp, International day, the IB global conference, a trip to London (my favorite city in the world like so many others), and a workshop in Dubin, Ireland with the Nord Anglia...