This week’s guest post is from Gayatri Mehta, MYP and DP Economics and Theory of Knowledge teacher from Pathways School Noida, India.  This article seeks to explore the dynamic, rapidly changing discourse of what really constitutes authentic student voice.  Mitra’s (2006) pyramid of student voice places ‘being heard’ at the lowest rung of the ladder for students . This is therefore the most basic expectation, followed by ‘collaborating with adults’ and ending with ‘building capacity for leadership’ at the highest rung.  In order to ‘hear students,’ ‘collaborate’ with them and ‘b ..read more

By Mayura Tiwari This is the first guest post from a reader. Meet Mayura Tiwari, who teaches Language and literature at an IB World School. For Grade 6, we’ve just finished the first summative of the academic session. The task was to create a product to convey a message of culture of acceptance. And they have come up with beautiful and meaningful products. Yes, and we often recited this line from a Sioux prayer in class, “O Great Spirit, keep me from judging another until I have walked in his moccasins.” But for now, let’s go back to the beginning when I walked into class and arbitrarily divi ..read more

“When there is no enemy from within The external enemy  Can do you no harm.” African proverb When a school wants to enact a system-wide change in the ‘ways we do things around here,’ the traditional answer has been to hold an in-service workshop. Schools bring an expert on campus for a couple of days, and jumpstart teacher learning with 15-45 hours of current, practical knowledge. Workshops, especially if the facilitator is knowledgeable, engaging and skilful, do provide inspirational sparks that may improve teacher practice. I say ‘may’ because like the general population, there will be ..read more

Have you ever thought of sharing all the awesome things you do…but you don’t want to start a blog? Now you can reach a global audience of thousands every month and create an impact by sharing your teaching and learning…right here on The Learners Toolbox. I am opening up this blog to any educators who would like to use it as a platform to reach colleagues around the world, one idea and one blog post at a time. You can check out the posting guidelines here ..read more

Tweaking systems and structures to develop coherence is sometimes challenging for teams. When some people ask, Why are we doing this? That may be an indication that how we do things does not make full sense to people in the organization. This is not an insurmountable problem and there are ways we can develop more coherence in our program and in our school. The use of time is one of the challenges of coherence.  When teams are unclear about what their specific goals they want to achieve in a school year, often the time that they allocate for implementing those goals might be taken away. It ..read more

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where…” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland In a conversation the other day, a teacher asked a rhetorical question, Why are we doing this? The answer resides in the minds of the people in her school. One of the advantages of being a careful spectator of patterns in organisations like schools to see the systems at work is that there is the privilege of seeing whether the organ ..read more

“Behavioral scientists have discovered that one of the most effective ways to create an enjoyable experience is to stack the painful parts of the experience early in the process. Psychologically, we prefer experiences that improve over time.”   This productivity advice from Atomic Habits author and blogger James Clear is not just useful in hacking day to day life in a fast-paced VUCA world. The advice is also useful when we are starting the transition to a program like the MYP. Last time, we looked at being careful with parachuting in program bits without pondering the why. Why this matte ..read more

Coordinating the MYP is an open-ended task. Faced with a lot of structures, systems and practices that need to be in place, it is very tempting to take little bits from other existing programs and parachute them as they are into place. It is almost comforting to think that as these parachutes drop down gently upon an empty space, there will be something that will exist that did not, before. Although the generous sharing of colleagues around the IB World is one of our community’s greatest resource for support and ideas, we might reflect on the contextual needs of our own program and the learner ..read more

Margaret Heffernan in her 2012 TED talk cites the female physician Alice Stewart, who applied patterns to epidemiology. Dr. Stewart was interested in why children were dying of cancer, about 25 of them succumbing to the disease each week. This was in the 1950s. Dr. Stewart found the patterns in the data. It was the strongest correlation between cancer in children and their mothers who had been x-rayed when they were pregnant. It was 25 years before the medical establishment faced the relationship between childhood cancers and x-raying pregnant mothers of those children. “The data was out there ..read more

This is the last in a four-part series on ATL skills implementation. In Part 4 we will look at how we can create partnerships within our programme to strengthen ATL skills development. Structures and systems in a school sometimes seem independent in their function. The teacher-librarian takes care of information management, media and operations of a resource hub. The counsellors and advisory teachers create ways to provide social-emotional learning. Service learning roles like the CAS or service learning coordinators takes care of this co-curricular function. An administrator creates the timet ..read more