Teachers Teaching Teachers

With each learning experience, the TIIP team was equipped with knowledge and strategies to pass on at our school site. So, in addition to attending conferences and workshops, we organized learning opportunities and provided on site consultation for the entire school staff to help increase our knowledge and capacity on specific areas of inquiry and the IB Programme.

Book Club

The Farmdale TIIP team organized and facilitated three Book Club cycles over the two years of the TIIP Project. Book Club group members, comprised of teachers and staff members, gathered together once or twice a month to read and discuss the selected book(s). Approximately 20 members attended the first cycle and 12 attended the second and the third cycles. There, we had the opportunity to deepen our understanding of inquiry-based instruction as well the IB Programme. We were able to collaborate with each other and apply our learning from the readings and discussions to refine our IB Planners and improve our classroom practice. Below are the professional texts read for each Book Club cycle:

• Cycle 1: Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century by Carol C. Kuhlthau, Leslie K. Maniotes and Ann K. Caspari
• Cycle 2: Making the PYP Happen: A curriculum framework for international primary education published by International Baccalaureate Organization
  
• Cycle 3: Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction for the Thinking Classroom by Lynn Erickson. 
  

         Book Club Members digging into the texts                              Carmelo guiding the discussion                                    

Summer Professional Development Sessions for Our Farmadale Staff

For two consecutive summers, the Farmdale TIIP Team organized professional development sessions for interested staff members, that focused on the IB Primary Years Programme (PYP). Farmdale TIIP Team members were fortunate enough to make a connection with a presenter, Leah Delafield, at the Texas IB training we attended the first year of our project. We asked Ms. Delafield to help guide us through our IB journey and fortunately for us, she agreed!

Our summer sessions consisted of the following:

• Three Day Session Summer 2012: Choosing a conceptual lens and creating central ideas and lines of inquiry for our units of inquiry
  
• Two Day Session Summer 2013:  Creating and refining summative and formative assessments; making a strong connection between the summative assessment and the central idea

Below, is a Farmdale staff member's reflection on her experience participating in the Summer Professional Development Sessions and our last Book Club cycle. Ms. Francia is a seasoned Dual Language teacher that joined our Farmdale Family in the summer of 2012. She was new to Farmdale's Dual Language and IB programs.

Banked-Time Teacher-Led Professional Development

Exhibition Project: The entire school staff was involved in helping 5th graders develop and produce their own inquiry project from start to finish. Students selected a real world issue or problem and set out to investigate, research, and present findings of their topic. At Farmdale, the focus of exhibition has been on Sharing the Planet, sharing our resources and access to equal opportunities. We were able to use our Tuesdays to train staff members about Exhibition concepts, build consensus regarding essential agreements on how we would implement the program at our school, and follow-up on progress, successes, and challenges that groups were facing.

Mmm... Doughnuts or Making [Math] Concepts Transdisciplinary: Inspired by our Texas IB workshop on math and our visit to Gourdough's in Austin, TX, Christina and Mark decided to lead a PD about doughnuts. We thought it was a topic that the staff was very familiar with and could really dig into. So, using the concept of "doughnuts" as the common thread, we thought the staff could make connections across disciplines to help make content more comprehensible and provide real-life context to tasks, which are normally presented abstractly in the classroom. The staff was concerned with making our units more transdisciplinary, so we thought we could use some ideas from Texas to help them through the process, and they could later apply them to their grade-level Inquiry units.

Here is a sample of what they came up with: