Unpacking How We Organize Ourselves

Last year, as we discussed how to unpack our How the World Works unit, I came across this lovely blog post. The teachers led the students first through an inquiry into the actual name of the unit: how the world works. Students brainstormed about ways they know that the world works. What comes to mind? What have we seen in the world and all its workings?

So now, totally addicted to simple foundational inquiries, have decided to make sure I go back and start from the beginning. I like going slow and then picking up the pace as needed. I’d rather start from 0 then start at 7 and realized 2, 3 and 5 are wobbly.

In my experience with teaching the IB PYP, I noticed that gaps come up through the students with regards to the language and understanding of how units of inquiry might work or what they have in common across grade levels. I assumed by fourth grade they would have a solid understanding of the learner profile attributes, central idea, ATLs, etc. But no! I think adults are also equally shaky about these concepts—and that’s the point! They span across disciplines and look differently not only every year, but every unit, and honestly every day.

An on-going goal is to get myself familiar with this language and these concepts and make sure my students are also using it. I’m not a stickler for following things to the T, but building a common language, especially for English language-learning students, is such a strong foundation that builds on itself and opens up for inclusivity and success.

This year, we began to unpack our unit and I asked students first and foremost to contemplate some clipart. This was part of a free download slides deck from slidesgo.com (one of my favorite sites).

Here is the slide I used to get students talk:

We dug a little deeper with some more levels of vocabulary and understanding about what an inquiry is. A lot of students are still wobbly about what an inquiry is, so I used this as a simple example to start them thinking.

The obvious came up: they’re building a puzzle! I countered back, how do you know they’re building it? What if they’re taking it apart? Silence.

What if they’re fixing their broken robot friend? I said to some laughs.

“Well, they’re puzzle pieces!” I said aha! Of course they are. But have you ever seen a puzzle that big? Silence again.

Some ideas began to bubble: maybe it’s an art exhibit. Mmm the gears are turning, the summer cobwebs clearing.

How can we find this out? I posit to them. There was a lot of “look it up on your phone!” So I agreed. Okay maybe we can search ‘puzzle art Beijing park outside’ and see what we get!

We can also talk to them! We can watch them! The gears and wheels spinning.

I ask another curveball: what if they’re trying to steal the pieces and they’re fighting over it.

“Well… but… I….” Some inquiries are without answer, we just do the best we can!

We continued:

We agreed as a team to sort of lead the students into thinking about organizing ourselves in terms of decision-making as a community through the lens of school, so I had students start to focus on what organization looks like in school.

I love the “my feelings”!

After this brainstorm, I wanted to pre-assess students’ writing by doing a little quick write about one of these topics.

I had to explain a few times that I was interested in the how we organize what they wrote about, not just that it is organized. We know that it is organized, but how? What happens to it? Who does what? When? Where?

They had some great ideas and understanding of how things are organized, maybe at a fairly superficial level. The topics are pretty simple, so a next step would be to bring up bigger things that are organized at school. We discussed doing a dive into our classroom schedule to bring in math elements about elapsed time and reading clocks. This could lead into an inquiry to me about how I design the class schedule and could be a branch out to students to step up and try to make decisions and organize the schedule for us!

There’s lots of ways to take this, but we’re focusing now on who makes decisions and why as well as how values influence our decision making. A further step would be to start incorporating why communities (who share values) make decisions to then solve problems and see what is the impact of these decisions. Is the problem solved? Who was represented? Who has the responsibility to make that decision in the end? It’s a lot for fourth grade maybe, but we got time and space to let these ideas percolate.