Relection About “Making the Pyp Happen”

a) Ideas:1- The PYP try to form international students by paying attention to them (how are they supposed to be) and what they learn (the written, the taught and the learned curriculum). We have to have and make clear what we want to teach (written curriculum), how we teach it (materials, activities, resources…), and the way the students learn and work.2- The written curriculum: the contents of our program have to include concepts, knowledge, skill, actions, attitudes. The concepts are what students have to understand and they have to be carefully selected based on these ideas form, function, change, perspective, connection, reflection and responsibility.

The knowledge is what we want the students to know about and has to be significant, relevant, engaging and challenging. The skills are what we want our students would be able to do, and are social, research, thinking, communication and self-management, all worked transdisciplinary.The attitudes cover what we want our students to feel, and are quite diverse, like: empathy, enthusiasm, confidence, creativity or respect. The actions are about how we want our students to act using a circle process of act-reflection-choose.3- The taught curriculum: How best will we learn? The PYP says the program (the written curriculum) has to provide questions of inquiry and the teaching focuses on facilitating that inquiry. This inquiry is purposeful and engages the students in their own learning, which is the most constructive manner.

For the school, that will mean a change because a wide variety of teaching strategies and styles can be accommodated, if they’re driven by a spirit of inquiry and a clear sense of purpose, and the more substantial innovations of recent years can flourish. And for the teachers, this change will require to examine and modify their current practice: good use of language, variety of strategies, involving students.The teacher’s role is to create an educational environment that encourages students to take responsibility for their own learning. - The good language practice is when we consider and deal with Language as a key factor in the development of international understanding and has a major role in a PYP classroom. The PYP classroom values and supports the mother tongue and the language of instruction and also aims to extend the students’ access to other languages. The good mathematics practice is when we look at mathematics not as a fixed body of knowledge to be transmitted but as a language and a way of thinking.

The good science practice implies treating Science and technology as a vehicle for teaching critical thinking skills and a way of exploring the world: developing ways of investigating and using evidence enables students to interact with the world around them. The good social studies practice means that our students learn to plan, collect, organize, interpret and present their findings, and as a result, they will later be able to chose between and among political alternatives and make economic choices. - The learned curriculum: how will we know what we have learned? Thanks to assessment.Assessment is central to the PYP goal of thoughtfully and effectively guiding students through the five essential elements of learning: the understanding of concepts, the acquisition of knowledge, the mastering of skills, the development of attitudes and the decision to take action. Assessment informs every stage of the learning and teaching process, and requires the teacher to translate the purposes of the unit of inquiry into outcomes of the students’ learning.With these purposes and outcomes in mind, activities and resources are planned and selected.b) The PYP try to form international students: This reading has helped me to understand more the idea, meaning and implications for an international teaching practice and a constructive learning based on a PYP planner, and the next time that I will have to work in a planner I’ll try to apply it’s criteria to make my program an instrument of inquiry and learning self-construction in place of a mere list of contents and methods.