ATL as the GPS of understandings

Unedited image taken from: electronics.howstuffworks.com

Culminating projects are a big deal, and since big deals are meant to be treasured and remembered, this year we want our PYP students to have even greater reasons to be proud of their achievements. In this particular occasion we want them to be fully aware of both the skills required for a successful completion of the PYP exhibition and the skills they already possess in their ‘toolbox’, so that they have more toys to play with as they make their own decisions and design their inquiries.

Source of image: http://www.shopbuy.org

As a result of the explicit introduction of Approaches to Learning (ATL) in the Diploma Program, at Ecole Mondiale we want to start the journey in PYP so that the MYP serves as pathways for enhancement and consolidation of this series of skills that allow us to strategize what we can do with what we know, and that can enable us to devise opportunities for action in our surroundings by observing what skills are needed to solving problems. Clearly, the curiosity and thirst for knowledge that exist in students’ biological age as they move from primary to secondary serves as our best friend in this journey.

The awareness that will be reaffirmed through this initiative will hopefully help MYP teachers to engage students in a special kind of dialogue that will allow students to explicitly refer to the skills needed in each learning experience of core task, so that they can manage their own learning and aim for self-regulation. Likewise, this explicitness will hopefully assist the teachers in figuring out how best to design learning scenarios that welcome and promote the employment of these approaches to learning.

The aims of the session were:

• Develop awareness of the clusters and skills that each ATL category includes.
• Involve students in categorising and mapping the essential ATL skills in the exhibition.
• ‘Cube’ (represent in a conceptual model) the significance of the exhibitions through 6 specific lenses:
  1. Description
  2. Comparison
  3. Association
  4. Analysis
  5. Application
  6. Reflection.
• Synthesize the essence of their personal contribution / project in the exhibition.

The following video documents our session on ATL & the PYP exhibition.