PYP Coordinator Community Update
The PYP Community has been busy during the Autumn term. At the start of the school year we sent out a poll to determine the best days and times to meet and what educators were hoping to get from our meetings. As a result of this we found out the following:
The best days for us to meet are Mondays and Thursdays.
The best times for us are between 2pm and 4pm.
People responded to say they were interested in a mix of sessions: ones led by teachers as well as presentations from experts, sharing sessions about what we are doing in our schools and some office hours where people can come and ask questions.
Hot topics requested for our meetings are:
Assessment (already done)
Early Years (planned for the Spring term)
Transdisciplinary learning
Approaches to learning (already done with a guest speaker)
Other areas of interest include action, learning environments, the PYP Exhibition and inquiry.
In our live monthly Zoom sessions we have had a Q&A session, a session about evidencing learning and one on the approaches to learning with speaker Sharyn Skrtic who is currently based in Ireland.
Many resources have been shared on the platform. In particular Luke at Bearsted has shared all his Learner profile assembly slideshows - Thank you Luke! There is also an ongoing survey about children’s authors called “Broadening the Bookshelf” - please do take the time to share this survey among your teachers as the organiser is hoping to get 1,000 responses from teachers in English-speaking countries. The results will be shared when the survey closes. The survey is organised by PYP teacher Chris Baker who works at a school in Geneva - he is interested in what can be done to get more children reading for pleasure. The survey takes only 5 minutes and you can win books for your school or class.
It’s great that we are back to face to face workshops again. These have taken place at a number of our schools, as well as a couple of PYP workshops at the University of Warwick. It was good to see teachers from our PYP Community schools at both Making the PYP Happen: Implementing Agency in October and at Evidencing Learning in November. These workshops have given us the opportunity to expand our PLCs to other schools in the UK and also overseas.
The PYP Community is a great platform to ask questions - there is always someone with a suggestion or who is able to share resources from their own school. For more information about the PYP Community, please contact ibsca@oxfordcoursemanagers.org.
Maggie Hos-McGrane
PYP Community Lead