The PYP ‘provides schools with a curriculum framework of essential elements — the knowledge, concepts, skills, attitudes, and action that young students need to equip them for successful lives’ (IBO, 2017). It provides a framework, which ensures our teaching is collaborative, transdisciplinary, inclusive and inquiry-based.

The knowledge component of this framework is taken from the Western Australian curriculum, which includes the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) for our kindergarten students. It sets out the mandated curriculum, guiding principles for teaching, learning and assessment and support for teachers in their assessment and reporting of student achievement (SCSA).

In the final year of the PYP the boys participate in a culminating project, the PYP exhibition. This requires that each student demonstrate engagement with the five essential elements of the programme— knowledge, skills, concepts, attitudes and action. It is both a transdisciplinary inquiry conducted in the spirit of personal and shared responsibility, as well as a summative assessment activity that is a celebration and rite of passage, symbolic and actual, from the PYP into the middle years of schooling. As a culminating experience it is an opportunity for students to exhibit the attributes of the International Baccalaureate (IB) learner profile that have been developing throughout their engagement with the PYP.

As students engage with ICT across and between the transdisciplinary themes and subject areas, they come to a deeper understanding of its relevance and applicability to their everyday lives. Appropriate attitudes and behaviours concerning the use of ICT are also important. The focus of ICT is not only on the use of technology for its own sake, but to enhance learning throughout the transdisciplinary programme of inquiry, across the subject areas, the IB learner profile, and the essential elements of the PYP.

ICT in a PYP school should be about more than using hardware and software. Its purpose should be to develop a combination of transferrable skills and understanding so that students can actively participate in a digitally connected world. Schools should be aware that many students are confident users and explorers of ICT. Teachers should find out what students already know and can do, so that they can teach appropriate knowledge and skills and develop students’ understanding. This will enable the students to be discerning producers and consumers of content and tools. Therefore, ICT should support specific learning opportunities such as:

• Investigating and carrying out a purposeful inquiry
• Creating and innovating
• Communicating and exchanging information with varied audiences using a range of media and formats
• Collaborating by actively participating in creating and sharing knowledge
• Organising and understanding that ICT systems can be used in various ways
• Becoming responsible digital citizens who make informed and ethical choices, while acting with integrity and honesty.

Both the traditional subject areas and the transdisciplinary themes provide focuses for students’ inquiry. These inquiries allow students to acquire and apply a set of skills known as the Approaches to Learning (ATL). These include Social Skills, Communication Skills, Thinking Skills, Research Skills, and Self-management Skills. These skills are relevant to all learning, formal and informal, that goes on in the school, and in events experienced beyond its boundaries.

In order to ensure these skills are targeting the needs of students across the year levels from Kindergarten to Year 5, we have mapped the ATL skills to specific outcome indicators found in the Western Australian curriculum. Staff can access these outcomes, see their elaborations and work samples in order to ensure they can accurately report, assess and provide feedback to students about their progress and what they need to focus on in order to improve.

The ATL skills can be taught explicitly as skills for learning, be used as effective self-assessment tools and as learning intentions and/or success criteria for larger units of work. The teacher decides which method suits a particular learning experience and all examples are linked back to the inquiry cycle in order to ensure the learners see the connection between the ATL skills and the units of inquiry.

As a parent of a PYP learner:

• Have an understanding of the purpose and requirements of the PYP
• Support and encourage your son throughout the process of inquiry
• Be informed by reading newsletters, attending meetings, checking school websites, talking with students
• Help him to access resources— including people, places, media and information
• Act as a mentor as required or appropriate during the PYP exhibition
• Seek opportunities to reflect with your son and provide feedback on his learning process, particularly in relation to his reading skills
• Look at what your son is learning, how he is demonstrating that learning, and whether he can make connections between that learning, life at home and life in the wider world.

Inquiry, as the leading pedagogical approach of the PYP, is recognised as allowing students to be actively involved in their own learning and to take responsibility for that learning. Inquiry allows each student’s understanding of the world to develop in a manner and at a rate that is unique to that learner.

Inquiry, interpreted in the broadest sense, is the process initiated by the student or the teacher that moves the student from his or her current level of understanding to a new and deeper level of understanding. Inquiry takes place at the knowing/not knowing intersection (Wells Lindfors 1999) and can take many forms, including:

• Exploring, wondering and questioning
• Experimenting and playing with possibilities
• Making connections between previous learning and current learning
• Making predictions and acting purposefully to see what happens
• Collecting data and reporting findings
• Clarifying existing ideas and reappraising perceptions of events
• Deepening understanding through the application of a concept
• Making and testing theories
• Researching and seeking information
• Taking and defending a position
• Solving problems in a variety of ways.

The PYP curriculum model is dependent on a commitment to a particular belief about how children learn, encapsulated most clearly in the constructivist approach. It is acknowledged that learners have beliefs about how the world works based on their experiences and prior learning. Those beliefs, models or constructs are revisited and revised in the light of new experiences and further learning. As we strive to make meaning of our lives and the world around us we travel continually on the cyclic path of constructing, testing, and confirming or revising our personal models of how the world works.
“Generally speaking, constructivists, including Vygotsky, Piaget, and Dewey define learning as the creation of meaning that occurs when an individual links new knowledge with … existing knowledge” (Williams and Woods 1997: 29). Consequently, when planning to teach it is important to ascertain students’ prior knowledge, and provide experiences through the curriculum and the environment that give them opportunities to:

• Test and revise their models
• Make connections between their previous and current perceptions
• Construct their own meaning

The PYP provides a framework for the curriculum, which includes eight key concepts that are transdisciplinary in nature and help to increase coherence across the curriculum. The concepts provide a structure for the exploration of significant and authentic content, and help to inspire the teacher- and/or student-constructed inquiries that lie at the heart of the PYP curriculum.

The key concepts are:

Form: What is it like?

Function: How does it work?

Causation: Why is it like it is?

Change: How is it changing?

Connection: How is it connected to other things?

Perspective: What are the points of view?

Responsibility: What is our responsibility?

Reflection: How do we know?

The programme defines transdisciplinary themes that identify areas of shared human experience and have meaning for individuals from different cultures and ethnicities. These themes are part of the common ground that unifies the learning in all IB World Schools offering the PYP. They provide the opportunity to incorporate both local and global issues in the knowledge component of the PYP written curriculum— what we want students to know about. There are six transdisciplinary themes:

• Who we are
• Where we are in place and time
• How we express ourselves
• How the world works
• How we organise ourselves
• Sharing the planet

Through acknowledging and struggling to meet the diverse needs of the student—physical, social, intellectual, aesthetic, cultural—PYP schools ensure that the learning is engaging, relevant, challenging and significant.

The prime objective of assessment in the PYP is to provide feedback on the learning process.

Teachers need to select assessment strategies and design assessment instruments to reflect clearly the particular learning outcomes on which they intend to report. They need to employ a range of strategies for assessing student work that take into account the diverse, complicated and sophisticated ways that individual students use to understand their experiences. Additionally, the PYP stresses the importance of both student and teacher self-assessment and reflection.

The assessment strategies and instruments—rubrics, anecdotal records, checklists, anchor papers, continuums, port-folios of work—proposed by the PYP are designed to accommodate a variety of intelligences (Gardner 1993) and ways of knowing (Bruner 1986). Where possible, they should provide effective means of recording students’ responses and performances in real-life situations that have genuine problems to solve. These authentic assessment strategies may be used in conjunction with other forms of assessment, such as standardised tests, in order to assess both student performance and the efficacy of the programme. ​

For further information, please visit the IBO website: http://www.ibo.org/programmes/primary-years-programme/