​As I finish this series on local and global inquiry, I couldn’t forget my early years friends.  Oftentimes, there are many strategies presented that are beyond the scope of what our little people can do.  I wanted to honor your special role in making learning come alive too.

In connection to the Crafting Inquiry conference, I was inspired by the ideas of Kimberly Mitchell about asking deeper questions with our learners.  She posed this question that made me think.

Kimberly gave some concrete reasons for why educators do not ask a wider range of questions.  I’d like to explore further and apply them to making local and global connections.  Her ideas are…
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• Fear
• Apathy
• Ignorance
• Culture
• Time

One of the most crippling things that educators face is fear.  In the current political climate of many educational systems, particularly in my home country, there are many that oppose our learners from exploring the world around them.  As a result, many educators are afraid of going beyond the required curriculum.  To those in this situation, my heart is with you.  There are still ways to honor local and global inquiry within your context without upsetting the systems around you. 

Early years learners are naturally curious about the world and they are continuously seeking patterns to create generalizations in the world.  One way to explore the world around us is through, “What if” questions and the PZ visible thinking routine, “What makes you say that?”.  It allows for more depth of exploration and lets the learners come up with the ideas, instead of you. This opens up the conversation to connecting to other places in your home country and around the world.

​For some educators, there are no constraints in making local and global connections to their curriculum.  They just aren’t interested in doing it.  There is no sense of ownership of the process, so they just don’t do it.  I understand this feeling when there are no systems in place to make inquiry thrive in your current culture.  But, you can still be a shining light in a dark space.  It does require extra effort on your part, which is why so many feel apathy. 
How do we turn this around?  Find a thought partner within or outside of your community that you can bounce around ideas.  My people are Vidhya, Denise, Misty, and Mondrea.  They let me ramble on for hours about my thoughts and give me some critical feedback on how to improve.  In moments of stress or disconnect, these people help to reign me back into the light of what I am doing. Usually, I walk away with new ideas that I had not considered. 

Why is this so important for me as an early years teacher?  You are laying the foundation for all other knowledge that is acquired through elementary/primary school.  This is a huge mantle on your shoulders, but it’s also not celebrated enough.  When upper primary grades reach amazing scores on standardized tests/annual exams, it’s because of all the work that has been laid in early years.  Without you, it wouldn’t be possible. Remember this when you are feeling apathy when working with your littles. 

Something I do with early learners to get them out of apathy is build experiences that touch their hearts.  We all want to connect to our own experiences, so I allow them in a scaffolded, guided process. 

• Prompts:  I use a lot of prompts to provoke thinking and get learners talking.  These prompts come in the form of pictures, film clips, music, portion of a picture book, etc. 

• Model:  I model the language of thinking…I think, I connect, I infer, I wonder.

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• Reflect:  I ask learners to think about how the ideas we are exploring connect to their own world

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• Stretch:  I ask them to make predictions of how they think it looks in other parts of their country and the world.  We draw our predictions and take a look at real examples and compare. We look at examples that evoke an emotional response, so it inspires action.

​We’ve all had our fair share of experiences within the teaching field, even if this is our first year.  I can clearly picture colleagues who didn’t want to know about inquiry, because then they would have to change their practice.  No matter how much I tried to show them, they would turn their backs to best practice.  This prompted a question in my mind, “Why are they resisting good teaching practice?”  Every time, the answer would be the same, “If they learn about inquiry, they will have to change their practice and they don’t want to change.” 

Living in ignorance is something many teachers do well.  They blame it on availability of resources or access to quality professional development.  This might have been true prior to the pandemic, but now it’s a completely different story.  You can join virtual book clubs, webinars, courses, conferences, to name a few.  There are so many more options now that our argument of staying ignorant is invalid.

So how do we get out of our ignorance?  Consider joining online chats and forums like #pypchat on Twitter.  Every two weeks, a group of educators get together to chat about all things PYP, which includes local and global inquiry.  It’s free and only costs a bit of time to read and respond to question prompts.  It has been the singular best professional development I’ve participated in the past two years, because it requires me to reflect on my own practice and own where I am on my learning journey. 

No matter the setting, time is the number one issue for most teachers.  How do we battle the time crunch when there are so many expectations during the day? We bundle our time. 

Bundle our time?  What does this mean?  In the PYP. we embed the learner profile attributes, approaches to learning (ATL), and concepts within the content.  This is a more powerful way of teaching as learners are understanding ideas within context and replicating skills as they are demonstrated in the real world.  

Here’s an example in an early years classroom

Yesterday, we talked about what it means to be a risk-taker.  It’s a person who doesn’t stop doing things, because they are scary or too hard.  A risk-taker knows the scary and hard things will help them to come up with new ideas and help them to grow. 

Today, we are going to learn more about being a risk-taker when reading.  For some of us, reading is a scary thing, because we mix up ideas when telling what happened in the story.  To help us, we are going to learn a new thinking skill called sort and categorize. Does anyone know what it means to sort and categorize?  It means that we put them in order to make sense to our brain and put a title on it.  (I have already taught what a title means)

We are going to use picture cards and sort them in order.  Let’s do it together.  (Pictures are on the whiteboard with magnets)

• Which picture shows the beginning?  
• What comes next?  (repeat)
• What is the last picture?  

Once the picture cards are sorted, ask these questions.

• Who can tell me the story in their own words?  
• How did the characters show they were a risk-taker?  
• If we sort the pictures again, how will that change the story?

Next, we are going to finish looking at this story with our hearts.  We remember our learning if we connect it to ourselves, our community, and the world. 

• Who has made a connection to the story from something that has happened within their family, friends, or school? 
• How about in your community (sports teams, clubs, church, after-school program, friends outside of school)?  
• Do we know of another story that is similar to the one we just made? 
• Can we connect to a television show or move?
• What is something that has happened in the world that is the same?  (show an example)

Tomorrow, we are going to look at a new story and practice the same skills.  I wonder what story we could use in our class that talks about _________ (unit topic)?   Allow learners to choose from a variety of texts that you have displayed.   You will use pages from the picture book as sequence cards to scaffold the process of reading from a book. 

There are numerous ways to look at local and global inquiry.  It’s about exposing our young ones to different ways of thinking and doing. 

Thank you for participating in our local and global inquiry series.  To continue this path, we are going to focus on our next book club, The Expert Effect by Grayson McKinney and Zach Rondot.  Be sure to listen to this series for more ideas. 

At the Crafting Inquiry Conference, I had the chance to pal around with a new friend, Denise Kraft.  She is a PYP Coordinator in Middletown, CT, which is about 1.5 hours from New York City.  Denise and I met each other when I led a virtual PYP exhibition workshop for Rice University.  Over the past couple of months, we were reunited and she has become a thought partner. 

While reflecting on Day 2 of the Crafting Inquiry Conference, we began chatting about my podcast.  She told me how much her teachers appreciated the ATL series being separated into early years, primary, and specialist and supporting teachers.  She told me her specialist teachers rather appreciated the examples related to their roles, because they often feel left out of the planning and development experience when looking at available resources. This made me sad and more committed to specialist and support teachers for each of my series.  

From now on, I commit to always laying the foundation of the learning and then exploring from the lens of my specialist and support teachers.  I get distracted and sometimes forget to consider your role.  I’m sorry for providing support for some ideas and not others. 

To make up for the shortfall, I am going to have a podcast series just for specialists and supporting teachers.  Think about the topics we have already explored..  Were there ideas that interested you, but you needed more support in applying it to your practice?  Be sure to jot your ideas and questions as you think of them and send them to me at @thinkchat2020 on Twitter and Lu Gerlach on LinkedIn. 

For now, we are going to explore local and global inquiry from your roles and see how we can make deeper connections to what you do. Sounds like an awesome plan to me!

On the second day of the conference, I was able to spend most of the time with Trevor MacKenzie.  His unique focus was on inquiry and assessment, but I think it still applies to your roles.

Trevor asked, “How do we assess with optimal in mind?”  He provided some interesting things to consider when answering these questions: 

• Nurture assessment (inquiry) capable learners
• Value learning mode (learner ownership of the process)
• Honor the mess of the process
• Take risks to test failure (to learn from our mistakes)
• Recognize performance mode (assessment of learning)
• Explore a student-centered assessment practice

These ideas really made me think about how we are exploring inquiry in specialists and supporting classes with fidelity and nurturing these ideas above.

​Let’s deconstruct Trevor’s ideas and apply them to local and global inquiry in your context.  

Wondering:  How do we use local and global inquiry with optimal in mind? 

We nurture inquiry capable learners & learner mode
As teachers who support learners in short segments within a week, how can we honor inquiry capable learners?  Here are some possible suggestions. 

• Ask a variety of open and closed questions
• Allow for learner choice with the use of activities
• Encourage learners to manipulate materials to create something new

Example in action

• In an EAL pull out session, learners are asked a variety of questions to bring about their creative and critical thinking in the primary and second languages.  There are two activities planned and the learners are able to choose which one they would like to explore.  The teacher asks the learners to create a new activity with the same materials, so they can transfer their learning to a new situation. 

We honor the mess of the process
Due to the limited time period, we often want to create learning experiences that are short and contained within one session.  The problem with this mode is that learning is limited to short increments that don’t often connect together.  Checklist teaching, rather than making meaning and connections to other things.  Here are some possible suggestions: 

• Break apart different elements across several lessons
• Have learners to compare/contrast, sequence, or cause/effect of elements
• Think of connections between parts and how they work together as a whole
• Make connections to how ideas are expressed in the local culture and ways it looks the same/different around the world. 

Example in Action

• In Art, learners create pieces that indicate varying tone using light and dark colors 
• After creating several pieces, have learners examine them through the lens of patterns and relationships
• Highlight various artists within the local and global community who express themselves through a certain use of color
• Allow learners to express themselves through the same lens

We take risks to test failure (to learn from our mistakes) and explore student-centered inquiry practice
One of the most difficult things to do is allow our learners to make mistakes.  We take risks to test failure, so we can grow.  It’s through our mistakes that we learn the most.  Here is a way that we can put it into practice no matter how we support learners.

Example in Action

• Co-design a learning engagement with your learners, so they are clear of the expectations, but they have a say in the process and product.
• Allow learners to choose their own materials.  For this to happen, materials need to be organized for optimal usage, labeled, and a picture is on each container. 
• Encourage learners to test out their ideas without it being reflected in their grades, so they feel free to create without consequences.
• Showcase people who tested out their ideas expecting to fail and how they turned their journey into a success.  First highlight local and national individuals and then go globally. 

As you can see, there are many ways that you can make local and global connections within your curriculum.  Start small and work your way deeper.  Here are possible question starters to think about. 

• What events have occurred that humanizes the content? 
• Who are the people locally and globally that help to make the ideas relatable? 
• How can I go from a topic to something that my learners care about?
• How can we bridge the content to everyday life? 

I know you will take these ideas and give them new life in your practice.  Please share your ideas on Twitter @thinkchat2020 and LinkedIn @lugerlach