9 IB PYP: "Yeah, We Do That"

Change and reform have been on my mind lately (see previous blog post) and it will probably continue to be a recurring theme here.  As I've been reading articles about change and ed reform lately, something has repeatedly come to my attention.  After reading article after article and post after post listing the things that the US education system needs to include to improve, I find myself saying "Yeah, we do that!" when thinking about the IB PYP curriculum at my school.


Consider this post from @angelamaiers who is well known for her approach to "passion based" education.  She mentions using relevant experiences to build knowledge outside school, allowing student negotiation of the curriculum, and teachers being balanced models for their students as some of the tenets for her approach.  Thinking of the IB PYP framework, I can say "yeah, we do that!"  We use relevant topics, constructivist approaches and negotiate learning experiences with students keeping them at the center of our instructional approaches.  We also believe that all people involved in the learning community are models of the profiles of the program from teachers to students to school staff.

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Or what about this article from @edweek where Anthony Cody mentions, "Great teaching is about provoking curiosity among our students, and then using that innate inquisitiveness to drive learning in a discipline. " He goes on to mention that good teaching also includes "scanning the environment for hooks that we can use to catch student interest."  At the end of his blog post he laments over the fact that the current standardized testing environment makes content learning the focus, instead of these elements of "great teaching" which develop thinking skills in our students.  My response? "Yeah, we do that!"  The IB PYP framework is based on inquiry as the central pedagogical approach for learning and the inquiry process is prompted through provocations to engage students in the topic at their level of understanding.


And finally, this post from Lyn Hilt which highlights the TED talk from Kiran Bir Sethi.  Beyond doubt this is an amazing talk with an even more amazing story and message attached.  Sethi makes it clear in her video, if you want a school community to change you need to infuse learning with purposeful real world learning opportunities where the students are in charge of their learning and how they will share that learning with others.  Well, "Yeah, we do that too!"  Action is one of the essential elements of the IB PYP program and like Sethi suggests in her model Feel-Imagine-Do, the PYP encourages Reflect-Choose-Act.


While I could go on and on with more examples of articles and posts listing the ways in which they are similar to the IB PYP framework, I will instead jump to the point.  Why doesn't the Department of Education consider looking into ways that they could use or adopt the IB framework for the educational reforms that everyone is calling for? The framework has all of the elements that the experts are asking for from social skills and real world learning to values education and personalization.  Couldn't we save a lot of time by starting where the IB PYP has begun rather than come up with various ways to reinvent the wheel yet again?  As I mentioned in another blog post, twitter is one of the best resources for educational reform resources and the #ibpyp hashtag has a number of great educators with blogs that highlight the amazing learning that takes place in this program. There is also a list of IB contacts (including High School and Middle School) from my account of twitter users to follow.


If you are in a IB PYP school, do you often have these same thoughts? Do others believe that the IB PYP framework could be a good starting point for educational reform?  


Jessica :)


Photo Source: kylemac