Inquiry Topic Blog Post 3: Developing a rationale for a lesson that incorporates ethos and system – what kinds of things need to be included to satisfy different philosophical, curricular, and pedagogical interests?
Unit title
Teacher(s) involved
Subject & grade level
Time frame and duration
Stage 1: Integrate Significant Concept, Area Of Interaction, and Unit Question
Area of interaction focus:
Which area of interaction will be our focus?
Why have we chosen this? (Approaches to Learning, Environments, Community and Service, Human Ingenuity, and Health and Social Education)
Significant concept(s):
What are the big ideas?
What do we want our students to retain for years into the future?
MYP Unit Question:
This is usually an open-ended question or idea to be discussed in class.
Assessment
What task(s) will allow students the opportunity to respond to the unit question?
What will constitute acceptable evidence of understanding?
How will students show what they have understood?
Which specific MYP objectives will be addressed during this unit?
Which MYP assessment criteria will be used?
Stage 2: Backward planning: from the assessment to the learning activities through inquiry
Content
What knowledge and/or skills (from the course overview) are going to be used to enable the student to respond to the unit question?
What (if any) state, provincial, district, or local standards/skills are to be addressed? How can they be unpacked to develop the significant concept(s) for stage 1?
Approaches to learning
How will this unit contribute to the overall development of subject-specific and general approaches to learning skills?
For example:
- Organisation: time management
- Communication: literacy- informing others
- Collaboration: accepting others, respecting each other’s points of view
- Information literacy: accessing information- selecting and organising information
- Reflection: self awareness- self evaluation
- Thinking: generating ideas
- Thinking: planning- inquiring- applying knowledge and concepts- identifying problems- creating novel solutions
- Transfer
Learning experiences
How will students know what is expected of them?
Will they see examples, rubrics, and templates?
How will students acquire the knowledge and practise the skills required?
How will they practise applying these?
Do the students have enough prior knowledge?
How will we know?
Teaching strategies
How will we use formative assessment to give students feedback during the unit?
What different teaching methodologies will we employ?
How are we differentiating teaching and learning for all?
How have we made provision for those learning in a language other than their mother tongue?
How have we considered those with special educational needs?
Resources
What resources are available to us?
How will our classroom environment, local environment and/or the community be used to facilitate students’ experiences during the unit?
Ongoing reflections and evaluation
In keeping an on going record, consider the following questions. There are further stimulus questions at the end of the “Planning for teaching and learning” section of MYP: From principles into practice.
Students and teachers
What did we find compelling?
Were our disciplinary knowledge/skills challenged in any way?
What inquiries arose during the learning? What, if any, extension activities arose?
How did we reflect—both on the unit and on our own learning?
Which attributes of the learner profile were encouraged through this unit?
What opportunities were there for student-initiated action?
Possible connections
How successful was the collaboration with other teachers within my subject group and from other subject groups?
What interdisciplinary understandings were or could be forged through collaboration with other subjects?
Assessment
Were students able to demonstrate their learning?
How did the assessment tasks allow students to demonstrate the learning objectives identified for this unit? How did I make sure students were invited to achieve at all levels of the criteria descriptors?
Are we prepared for the next stage?
Data collection
How did we decide on the data to collect? Was it useful?
I gather from this post that you are designing lesson structures that incorporates ethos and system into learning processes. I see lists of points to consider for various aspects of the learning process. However, I am not clear. Is this an adaptation of the IB learning system? Is it something you are designing yourself? Have you borrowed structure, categories, topics and approaches from other documents? If so, what were your sources? At this stage of the course, we were delving into the technological possibilities for enabling, enriching and enhancing learning. I know you are working on a broader challenge, of bringing your educational ethos into a workable relationship with colleagues ideas of educational systems. I’m not sure how this post fits with that challenge. It would be helpful to have some context by which to understand these points.