Confessions of a PYP Teacher

Send us Fan Mail 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, vi...

Send us Fan Mail 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 hom...

Send us Fan Mail 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 anot...

Send us Fan Mail 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/ Thanks for list...

Send us Fan Mail 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 l...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 t...

Send us Fan Mail 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/ Thanks for listening!  Please join the epic learning journey at lugerlach.com Join our Confessions of a PYP Teacher Face...

Send us Fan Mail 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 ch...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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/ Thanks for listening!  Please join the epic learning journey...

Send us Fan Mail 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 a...

Send us Fan Mail 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 l...

Send us Fan Mail 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:...

Send us Fan Mail 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 thinking Modeled:  teacher provides all of the activities and the students do i...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail Building international mindedness in ourselves and in our learners takes time, because it is a process that can't be rushed. Through multiple years of exposure, students begin to better understand cultural differences, ways of doing things, and belief systems.  They may not always agree with varying viewpoints, but they are able to demonstrate respect.  In this episode, we wi...

Send us Fan Mail The number one mistake I made as a new coordinator was building the curriculum framework first.  If you are a coordinator, please heed the call.  Do not follow in my footsteps, because it cost me at least six months and polarized my staff. Here’s what I’d do instead.  If I had to do it all over again, I would ignore the pressure from my school leadership to begin building the curr...

Send us Fan Mail There is no magical tool to stop undesired behavior, just love for your students.  When you don’t like your students, they know.   This episode, we will examine ways to guide behavior using the learner profile attributes.  We will explore:   How to build relationships with our students that are meaningful and real, so they will share more ownership of the learning experience. How...

Send us Fan Mail Now that we’ve established the learner profile in our school community, we can take the next step of explicitly teaching it in our units of inquiry.  Let’s take a look at how we can wrap the attributes around the content areas to make it more meaningful.   Attributes in literacy Attributes in science and social studies Attributes in math For a written blog post and other resources...

Send us Fan Mail Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family and friends.  For many Canadians and Americans around the world, today is a special day we celebrate to honor our past and reflect on our many blessings.  Canadians celebrate their holiday on the 2nd Monday in October and Americans on the last Thursday in November.  I would be remiss on this particular Thanksgiving to take a moment to shar...

Send us Fan Mail You’ve unpacked the learner profile attributes, now what?  Do you just use them whenever time permits or can you plan with them in mind?  In my personal observation over the past twelve years, I’ve noticed that most PYP teachers use them as behavior attributes.  So our challenge is to look at the learner profile in a new light and try to consider them as a teaching tool.  Here are...

Send us Fan Mail The learner profile attributes are one of the tools you can use to get students to make transdisciplinary connections with your content.  In this episode, we will look at the ways to maximize the attributes in your daily practice. Unpack the attributes by connecting the attribute descriptor with the concepts in the transdisciplinary theme and content.  Use the wall of fame to fram...

Send us Fan Mail The learner profile attributes are sometimes overlooked or misunderstood in our units of inquiry.  Some people look at them as a list of character traits to be a better human.  This is partially true, but they are more than that.  They are thought processes that lead to deeper action.  In this episode, we will examine the relationship between the learner profile attributes and act...

Send us Fan Mail The PYP curriculum framework can be compared to the structure of a house.  There are many different layers that make it withstand the test of time.  The layers:  the foundation, floor, vertical beams and walls different levels/floors roof and attic Together, this house holds of up the PYP program together to create learning that is dynamic and real. For a written blog post and oth...