PYP around our school

PYP 

It is quite obvious that the last few months has looked and felt very different when compared to any other period in our lifetime. One of the things that I promised parents late last term, before the chaos of COVID 19, was that we would share the St. Columba’s programme of inquiry (POI) with you and that you would see this around our school. When we return to school our POI will be displayed and visible within our school. A POI is the curriculum map for our school. It shows the units of inquiry different year levels will be engaging in throughout the year and the order in which they will be undertaking these. It does not include all of our stand-alone English and Mathematics units but it does include our foci for the Sciences, Humanities, Personal and Social Education and RE. For us at St. Columba’s, we will need an even year and an odd year map to ensure that students are learning new concepts and developing new understandings each year and that over a two year period in a composite class students will have covered and gone beyond the Victorian Curriculum standards. Today, I am sharing with you our ‘even year’ POI created collaboratively by teachers during one of our school closure days in March. In doing this we really considered how could we create units of inquiry that are significant, relevant, engaging and challenging for our students? We asked ourselves how will we ensure a range of concepts are explored and how will these units of inquiry contribute to student’s knowledge and growth as a learner? We also considered how these units of inquiry we create inspire action and promote learner agency.

As I have stated before, in the PYP framework units of inquiry are organised under six transdisciplinary themes that have significance worldwide. Each year level explores different elements of each transdisciplinary theme each year. A central idea (sometimes called an enduring understanding in a non-PYP school) is written for each of our units of inquiry, which is what you can see in the POI images provided today. For a central idea to be strong it needs to have two or more concepts in a relationship, be true, be value-free, be worth exploring anywhere in the world, and invite a variety of perspectives. As we progress as a candidate PYP school, tweaks may be made to these central ideas to increase their complexity and relevance. We are, however, proud of the POI we are developing.