C109: Local and Global Inquiry in the Early Years

​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.

​What gets in the way of students (and teachers) from asking questions? 

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

​Giving into Fear 

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.

Feeling Apathy & How it Impacts Culture

​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.

Living in Ignorance

​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. 

Time​

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.