SIMPLIFYING APPROACHES TO TEACHING & LEARNING

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About the Author

Pepy is an IB Diploma Programme Physics and Mathematics

teacher, with an MA and PhD in Education. She is currently a Post

Doctoral Researcher in teachers’ education and also teaches at the

University of Patras. As the Educational Consultant at 100mentors

she empowers educators to turn theory into practice with

educational technology solutions.

Pepy MeliEducational Consultant, 100mentors

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Contents

About the Author

Introduction

How Inquiry-based teaching improves student Research Skills

How to focus on Conceptual Understanding while practicing student Thinking Skills

How teaching developed in Local and Global Contexts enriches student Communication Skills

How teaching focused on Teamwork empowers student Social Skills

How to Differentiate Teaching for the advancement of student Thinking Skills

How teaching informed by Assessment fosters student Self-Management Skills

Unifying teacher Strategies and student Skills - Infographic

How to Get Started

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Explore the 100mentors Simplifying Approaches to Teaching and Learning Series to get a clearer perspective on educational theory vocabulary, direct tips for implementing teacher-friendly techniques, and get the most out of educational technology.

As IB educators, we know that we have to bring Approaches to Teaching and Learning (ATLs) to our classroom as an integrated tool that enhances our lessons and serves the IB mission. The 100mentors Simplifying Approaches to Teaching and Learning Series suggests ways for teachers to seamlessly combine each instructional strategy with the best-fit student skills so we can satisfy both teaching and learning requirements at the same time.

Through this series, discover how to apply each strategy for a fully focused lesson on a specific teaching-learning goal during a contact hour, but also how to mix and match these techniques to offer a well-rounded course to your students throughout the school year. And don’t forget: you are dealing with digital natives, so integrate educational technology to make instruction appealing, relatable, and

meaningful to them.

Simplifying Approaches to Teaching & Learning Series

I NT R O D U CT I O N

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How Inquiry-based teaching improves student

Research Skills

C H A P T E R 1

Question formulation • Media-literacy

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How Inquiry-Based Teaching Improves Student Research Skills

CHAPTER 1

You’ve probably already heard a lot from your IBDP coordinator about the Approaches to Teaching and Learning (ATLs). Most likely, these concepts came up suddenly during a meeting for the upcoming 5-year-review, and you nodded your head like you were familiar with them. Believe it or not, you are. We bring ATLs to our classrooms all the time, but we may not do it intentionally. How can we go from IB guidelines to every-day practices?

The key is to think of ATLs as a tool, instead of an extra barrier. How we “approach” these Approaches in our classroom can make a difference in the teaching-learning experience and keep us in line with the IB requirements.In this first installment of our series, we will discuss how to improve students’ research skills through inquiry-based teaching. Practicing inquiry-based teaching and developing students’ research skills are two strands recommended by the IBO that suggest an application of Approaches to Teaching and Learning respectively. Here are 4 classroom-tested top tips for IB educators:

See your role as being to promote questions, not just to provide answers

Let’s start with the basics of inquiry: “Inquiry begins with the development and implementation of a plan to satisfy curiosity” (Chichekian & Shore, 2014). Within educational contexts, inquiry-oriented instruction involves both teachers and students “asking questions that do not necessarily have known answers” (Shore, Chichekian, Syer, Aulls, & Frederiksen, 2012). This strategy differentiates the “what” questions, easily answered by search engines, from the “why” questions that demand more sophisticated teaching and learning methods for their articulation and explanation.

A simple way to bring inquiry as a learning and teaching strategy to any given IB subject is to find an intriguing real-life topic that would activate the students.

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And by “intriguing”, I mean for them, and not necessarily for us. When choosing your discussion topic, keep its scope narrow enough to allow you to focus your instruction on specific content, closely connected to the topic. A distinct focus during the searching process is the first research skill we can teach our students.

Here’s the twist: Instead of posing the questions yourself, guide the students through a discussion that can lead them to formulate relevant and precise questions around this topic.

Act as a facilitator

Inquiry-based instruction expands the students’ and teachers’ role “beyond respectively receiving and conveying knowledge” and enables the students “to actively produce knowledge” (Chichekian & Shore, 2014). The constructivist approach, that the IB broadly adopts, suggests that students construct their own knowledge. Adopting this approach, we accept that the students mentally build a library of content in a personalized manner, not that the content itself should be personalized.

After all, there are specific things we try to teach them, especially in view of their formal assessment, but we can’t escape the fact that they will construct representations of this knowledge in their individual manner. The questions they pose give us some insight into their representations, which often leave us speechless – in good and bad ways. Through inquiry methods, we can improve the quality of questions students pose, thus improving the quality of representations they build. It’s the circle of inquiry going around and around.

The question a student poses reflects the student’s need “to know” (Home, 1983). It’s a process of students reaching out to the established scientific theories or practices we teach. We can start from a question, work as facilitators for the construction of new representations, while also helping them re-construct their prior knowledge that may not align with the taught content.

You can also stress to your students how valuable their questions are, and embrace this thought. Their questions are the beginning and end of the inquiry process.

The posing of a question itself gives us a great opportunity to illustrate the role of inquiry for the development of a specific area, refer to the respective research methods, and make connections to the Theory of Knowledge (ToK).

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Ensure that students actively engage with learning

Making our way through knowledge via inquiry sets a real-life example for the students. In order for them to take maximum responsibility for their own knowledge, 21st-century research skills are required – the ones that make students more active learners. We’re dealing with digital natives, so we can practice some information and media-literacy skills through our inquiry-based instruction.

Although students are familiar with technology and the internet, probably even more so than we are, it is necessary that they have guidance for browsing, searching, monitoring and awareness for the most reliable information they can collect – and from whom they collect it. For a given topic, identify and appraise sources that are likely to contribute to the students’ learning journey. As an educator, select tools that will help students benefit, like: learning from an expert in their field, or getting and authoritative perspective in a few well-chosen words.

This job challenges our research skills, too. Instead of “getting lost” in the variety of material online, aim for educational technology (edtech) tools that are made for the purpose of teaching and learning.

This will actively guide you and the students in a more specific context to practice research skills with fruitful opportunities for learning.

Support students in assessing resources

Inquiry-oriented instruction involves both teachers and students sharing and reviewing the outcomes of their research process (Shore et al., 2012). Successful research often leads to multiple results, so narrowing them down is the true challenge for all inquirers, promoting valuable research skills. Let’s wrap up this post with the most important part of research: teaching students to assess resources.

With your students, choose different answers to the questions you’ve helped them pose, and discuss their relevance and value.

This is the perfect opportunity for them to evaluate the precision, the plenitude and other quality features of each research outcome. It is also a proper context for discussing the Academic Honesty Policy, which always needs a reminder.

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Debating on contradictory sources is at the core of the constructivist approach as the students express and put the scientific validity of their representations at risk. To continue the productive conversation, just keep in mind from the beginning: restrain the content of the conversation to your chosen topic since debates among students can get off track.

For an all-inclusive implementation of your plan, here’s how you can use the 100mentors app:

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How to focus on Conceptual Understanding while practicing

student Thinking Skills

C H A P T E R 2

Concept mapping • Dynamic knowledge

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How to Focus on Conceptual Understanding While Practicing Student Thinking Skills

CHAPTER 2

In the first chapter of the series, we started with some basics about Approaches to Teaching and Learning (ATLs) as an integral component of the IB curriculum. For the implementation of these Approaches in the classroom, we discussed how to improve students’ research skills through inquiry-based teaching. Depending on the features of the topic you deal with, it is necessary to modify your Approaches so they serve your different teaching goals, expand your students’ abilities, and give you a change of pace.

This second installment in our series addresses how to practice student thinking skills through teaching focused on conceptual understanding. Focusing on conceptual understanding during instruction and enhancing students’ thinking skills are two strands recommended by the IBO that suggest an application of Approaches to Teaching and Learning respectively.

Identify central concepts in your lessons

“Conceptual understanding” is an IB catchphrase that is repeated often, but just as often without explanation. “Concepts”, “understanding”, and their combination for “conceptual understanding” have more than one definition in an educational context. But, as they apply to the IB Diploma Programme (DP), let’s stick to the framework adopted by the IBO.

• Concepts: “Broad, powerful organizing ideas that have relevance both within and across subject areas” (IBO, 2015).

• Understanding: Construction of an accurate and stable representation of any situation we encounter; it can be for something concrete, like an item or a phenomenon, or it can be abstract, like a notion.

• Conceptual understanding: Representations referring to a concept, as a group of ideas with regularities or patterns.

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Image Source: IBO.org“Teaching based on conceptual understanding”

Conceptual understanding is the penthouse of students’ knowledge building. Before getting there though, students deploy other forms of knowledge: declarative (knowledge about something) and procedural (knowledge of something) (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006). These forms of knowledge are meant to work collaboratively so students manage to interrelate concepts (conceptual knowledge) with content (declarative knowledge) and skills (procedural knowledge).

When you organize your lesson for a specific unit, spend a minute or two to create a “conceptual outline” with the central concepts implied in your instruction, as keywords for each paragraph or section.

Classifications and categories, principles and generalizations, and theories, models and structures, make up the components of conceptual knowledge (Krathwohl, 2002). Students at the DP level need to acquire complex thinking skills in order to comprehend, connect, and use these components not only in the classroom but for their personal projects too, such as the Extended Essay. Before introducing our students to conceptual learning, we first should be focused on conceptual teaching.

Even if you have your material already prepared, you can work backward: take a look at your notes of theories and exercises and find the key concepts that are hiding behind them. This process may help you change your perspective and make new connections, reorganize, add or delete things.

Encourage students to use tools such as concept maps

Now you have your targeted concepts all ready to go. How can you turn the focus of your class to conceptual understanding and give rise to valuable thinking skills?

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For a given topic, launch a mind-map by asking your students to pose related questions. Write down the main ideas, connect them to create several “concept-hubs” and identify the most prominent among them.

See if the central concepts that your discussion with the students brought up match your original conceptual outline. You can make adjustments to your plan or suggest some modifications to the students’ mind-map.

The construction of the conceptual map activates students’ thinking skills. Remembering (recalling), understanding (comprehending), applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating (synthesizing) are all part of the cognitive process (Krathwohl, 2002) and a conceptual map can bring them into play. Differentiating between ideas, organizing them into concept-hubs and generating a mind-map of central concepts put into practice their analytical and creative thinking skills.

Give opportunities to students to draw links to other subjects

The initial ideas proposed by students for the construction of their conceptual maps probably derive from another school subject or from their personal experience – this is a good sign that they’re making connections. “According to this cross-domain transfer hypothesis, to acquire a new central idea in a target domain X, the learner must first acquire that idea in some source domain Y… and then transfer the new idea to X and build a new understanding of X around it” (Ohlsson, Moher, & Johnson, 2000). This learning hypothesis is in-line with the IB guidance for linking across the subjects, including the Theory of Knowledge (ToK).

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We can’t “turn off” prior knowledge, so we’re better off making it work for us, not against us. Prompt the students to express ideas connected to central concepts and make them realize the source of these ideas, whether it is another subject or a real-life example.

Adopting ideas from one domain and utilizing them in another can be a tricky business for us, and we usually discourage students from doing it. As educators, we work toward a clear distinction of the concepts within our subject, but we often turn a blind eye to students’ prior knowledge. Keep in mind that for almost every concept, regardless of how abstract or elusive this may be, they have a representation already formed long before entering our classroom.

Instead of trying to eradicate students’ initial representations of concepts, use them as the ground floor, and build upon them.

Instead of dismissing these representations as irrelevant to your subject, meet your students half-way: identify the common ground between their original ideas on a concept and the ones you want to teach them. They will be more confident to approach the new perspective of the concepts and more open-minded towards the discrepancies.

Students pose real-life examples of concepts that mainly come from personal experience. These are particularly difficult for us to work with because they have very long and strong roots.

Thinking skills related to the evaluation will be called into action: checking and critiquing the new framework they’re building on a familiar concept can expand students’ initial knowledge, and bring it into harmony with the fresh one.

Pose a variety of different types of questions

By clearing the fog around central concepts, you minimize the interference of other subjects and experiences and set your framework on a solid base.

Unfold the content and the skills you want to teach them around the concepts at hand.

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This is a feature of the constructivist approach: the several elements of your instruction have a common thread that makes sense to students because your material is now connected to the mindmap they constructed and explored. Encourage students to pose inquiry questions on the material you presented, while keeping in mind the purpose of different types of questions:

• Factual questions indicate the activation of lower-order thinking skills, like recall and comprehension.

• Conceptual questions demand higher-order thinking skills, such as analysis and synthesis (Bloom, 1956).

Provoke the formation of debatable questions that link facts and concepts, and use them as starting points for homework assignments.

These assignments give students the opportunity to advance all forms of knowledge (procedural, declarative and conceptual). As an inquiry exercise, you can organize group activities for the design of mini-instruction plans. For a concept of their choice, they should include both content-driven and skills-related activities that they will present to the class.

Here’s how to organize these assignments with 100mentors:

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How teaching developed in Local and Global

Contexts enriches student Communication Skills

C H A P T E R 3

International mindedness • Global learning

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How teaching developed in Local and Global Contexts enriches student Communication Skills

CHAPTER 3

In the first two chapters of the series, we introduced inquiry and focused on conceptual understanding as (Approaches to Teaching) that can improve the students’ research and thinking skills respectively (Approaches to Learning). While these instructional strategies would make a great fit for many topics within your subject, every now and then you want to shake things up and hit additional teaching and learning goals.

This third chapter addresses how teaching developed in local and global contexts enriches students’ communication skills. If you have Middle Years Programme (MYP) experience, note that there is a different approach of teaching through contexts in the Diploma Programme (DP). In MYP, “global contexts” involve broad concepts with a universal impact that the students should embrace. In DP, “local and global contexts” are used in a more literal way. Students’ local contexts can be their family, school, community or even their country, while global contexts refer to international or universal frameworks.

The IBO traditionally connects the instruction throughout different contexts with the development of students’ thinking skills (contextualized learning) (IBO, 2015). We can go beyond that and take advantage of the cultural contrast that occurs within and across these contexts to challenge students’ communication skills, regarding both the content and form of the conveyed information. Here are 3 context-oriented instructional strategies you can try in your classroom:

Help students to appreciate the complexity and uncertainty associated with an idea

Let’s tackle the most prominent issue: what are “communication skills”? We tend to confuse them with “social skills” because communication is strongly linked with our interpersonal relationships. However, communication is not merely an ability that connects us with others, but also a virtue that allows us to understand a variety of written or oral forms and contents in different contexts.

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This is a huge issue for our students, but we usually sweep it under the rug. Think of all the written examinations in which your students responded incorrectly because they didn’t fully comprehend the questions. Think of all the spoken instructions you have given for a task and students didn’t follow. Do these situations occur again and again just because of our students’ ignorance or laziness?

We may hesitate to accept this for students at the DP level, but these recurring incidents may reflect a lack of communication skills. Statistics for the general population of 15-year-old students indicate low performances in basic abilities. “About 20% of students in OECD countries, on average, do not attain the baseline level of proficiency in reading. This proportion has remained stable since 2009” (OECD, 2018).

And, on the other side of communication, we often reprimand them for not expressing their views with clarity. Their oral and written responses may not always reflect their level of understanding, but whatever they deliver should be assessed as it is. And here comes students’ most famous argument for claiming marks: “You know that’s what I meant…”. Instead of trying to read between the lines to justify one or two extra marks, how about enhancing their communication skills?

Give a written or verbal stimulus (problem, graph, document, song, movie abstract…) that leaves room for multiple interpretations and walk them through a discussion for the information it communicates.

Point out the most prominent elements that they all need to comprehend and make a list with the students’ suggestions for the rest.

Use this process to show your method for breaking down the information received. If there is complexity or uncertainty in the piece you presented, the different approaches will activate your students. You can make this challenge more interesting if you begin from local contexts and expand to global ones. The forms of communication can be diverged and draw your students’ attention.

Encourage students to be globally engaged

Prompting our students to develop their inquiry in local and global contexts, especially if they can be linked with real-life issues, can challenge their pre-existing representations on several matters and concepts, which helps them to reorganize their understanding on the basis of a more universal, internationally-minded perspective. This is a core aspect of the constructivist approach: “Knowledge is seen as dynamic, ever-changing with our experiences” (Bada, 2015).

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As IB learners, it is important that students develop their skills through a universal perspective, one goes beyond the information that their textbook – or Google and YouTube – provide. When your teaching is developed in both local and global contexts, you show students the different forms of communication needed as we move from a personal, local or national perspective to an international or global one.

As a homework assignment, ask students to work on a subject-specific topic from two different standpoints: locally and globally. They have to discover their personal viewpoint but also try to walk in someone else’s shoes for tackling the same task.

Students approach this task interculturally: from their own “local” perspective, and by adopting an alternative “global” view. How would a teenager from a cultural background face this topic? What are the possible similarities and differences between the two contexts? In this framework, even the formulation of hypotheses demand serious research skills and open-mindedness, so welcome any students’ suggestions.

This is an excellent opportunity to integrate “international-mindedness” into our instruction. This is another concept that we may come across every now and then without clear instructions about how to make it work in the classroom. In the IB wheel, it is placed in the outer circle because it characterizes (or should characterize) all the elements included in the program. The components of international-mindedness are multilingualism, intercultural understanding, and global engagement.

Although the term seems a bit one-sided, international-mindedness is not about degrading local contexts in expense to the global ones. On the contrary, it attempts to harmonize them by encouraging students “to learn more about their own culture and national identity as well as to be respectful and understanding of others, thus becoming global citizens” (Belal, 2017).

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Have them present their work in written and oral forms, but let them choose the educational technology tools most appropriate for their tasks. We deal with digital natives, so they will probably surprise you with the use of blogs, interactive software and other forms of instant communication.

We should encourage such initiatives because they can give our students a safe place to build upon their communication skills. They should work with a variety of sources, before adjusting information in their final product. During their presentation, they will have to effectively communicate their material and perspectives to the class and be the key participants in a discussion, which may include many debatable questions.

How about “testing” their ideas with a person who comes from a different culture? Introducing such testimonials would definitely add value and impact to their assignment.

Promote opportunities for students to see an issue from multiple perspectives

These assignments can be expanded as reflection activities, by including third parties in students’ projects. Your students have taken one familiar (local) and one “strange” (global) approach to their topic and have argued about them in the classroom. This suggestion is directly connected with another important goal you can set in this instructional framework. I refer to “global learning”, “a student-centered activity in which learners of different cultures use technology to improve their global perspectives while remaining in their home countries” (Gibson, Rimmington, & Landwehr-Brown, 2008). This concept integrates technology in the learning process, as a mean for global reach for the discovery of global perspectives.

To achieve this universality, you don’t have to find an Aboriginal Australian with an internet connection (although that would be cool). What matters is simply the addition of a voice outside students’ daily locality. For example, when discussing the solution of a problem in math or science, a Japanese teacher may suggest a diverse course of action due to their student-centered problem-solving approach. And if you are debating human resource strategies, a Finnish educational administrator may surprise you with their proposals based on hiring only those applicants that have genuine interest for the job (Crehan, 2016).

For this communication to be successful, our students have to master a range of relevant skills. First, before reaching out to an expert, they must have acquired a sufficient understanding of their sources. Then, when contacting the person they’re curious about connecting with, they need to be ready to articulate a coherent and meaningful question. Finally, they should be able to interpret the answers received and expand on them, during a dialogue in the classroom or for a homework assignment.

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If you think this process might be a bit time-consuming, consider this: you work on the improvement of students’ communication skills while you go on with your content, but now your content is enriched and your class is motivated. This investment will pay off during the next examination and beyond, including when composing a sound Extended Essay, coping with the assessed tasks of Theory of Knowledge (ToK), and establishing connections with Creativity-Activity-Service (CAS) projects.

Use the 100mentors app to bring the world in your classroom, and make the global feel local:

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How teaching focused on Teamwork empowers

student Social Skills

C H A P T E R 4

Collaboration • Cooperative learning

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How teaching focused on Teamwork empowers student Social Skills

CHAPTER 4

In the first three chapters of the series, we discussed several issues related to inquiry-based teaching, teaching focused on conceptual understanding, and teaching developed on local and global contexts as different, yet interwoven, Approaches to Teaching. Within these instructional strategies, we have integrated tools for the advancement of students’ research, thinking and communication skills respectively, as suitable Approached to Learning.

The fourth chapter of our series covers how to empower students’ social skills through teaching focused on teamwork and collaboration. Instruction based on teamwork and collaboration is a strongly recommended strategy for a variety of educational settings and it actively employs students’ social skills. How can we maximize the efficiency of these Approaches? Here there are 3 tips for making teamwork compelling for all:

Provide opportunities for students to assume shared responsibility for collaborative work

Including group activities in your classroom or in homework assignments to students is part of most educators’ lesson plans. Students get their space to socialize while they learn, we teach while coaching the teams, and everybody has a pleasant time in comparison to the usual teacher-centered or individual-based approaches. But you can definitely obtain much more from collaborative work.

No matter what student skill we try to advance, they all lead to the basic goal of learning. And in the case of teamwork, we try to use cooperative learning as an opportunity to challenge students’ social skills. “Cooperative learning represents situations in which teachers structure group work with the aim to maximize both social and cognitive outcomes” (Buchs & Butera, 2015). And as lovely as that sounds, it is not so easy to actually accomplish it.

The problem is that not all groups and, by extension, not all group activities, are truly cooperative, just because they are social. There is a useful classification for the groups’ (more or less) effective learning (Johnson & Johnson, 1999):

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• Pseudo learning group: students have no interest in working together; they hide information or mislead their teammates; they would achieve more working individually

• Traditional classroom learning group: students accept working together; they will be evaluated individually; they seek each other’s information, but they have no motivation to teach each other; some may want a free ride; the more hard-working students would perform better working alone

• Cooperative learning group: students work together to accomplish common goals; they will be evaluated as a team; they exchange information and explain the material to each other; they encourage their teammates and regulate the team’s performance; all students perform higher

• High-performance cooperative learning group: students meet all of the criteria mentioned above for the cooperative learning group; they outperform all reasonable expectations given the group’s membership

I hate to admit that I usually fall into the second category. I plan a variety of group activities and yet I don’t promote cooperative learning, because when the time for grading comes, I fear that I will be unjust in individual assessment. I have trouble facing the teams as groups of students that will share the responsibility for the outcome, aka… “The Grade”. So this is the “encrypted” message that I convey to my students: no matter if you are working within a team; in the end, you earn your own grade.

One may wonder: is this so bad? After all, it is “every student for themselves” during the final examination. Consider this: is it possible that cooperative learning would have helped them perform better in their exams (and personal projects)? And, in a more broad context, is it possible that working effectively in a team will prove extremely beneficial in their future educational and working environment?

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Plan group activities such as debates, role-plays or group projects

At this point, a rhetorical question arises. What comes first: the teamwork or the social skills? Like the chicken and the egg, there is no right answer to this. Social skills are a prerequisite for collaboration and collaboration nurtures social skills.

An all-encompassing definition of social skills describes them as a reflection of “the interpersonal perceptiveness and the capacity to adjust one’s behavior to different situational demands and to effectively influence and control the responses of others” (Ferris, Witt, & Hochwarter, 2001). There is no general consensus on a list of social skills, but we may agree on leadership, decision-making, trust-building, communication and conflict-management (Johnson & Johnson, 1999) as desired skills for our educational purposes and beyond.

Many of our students have already mastered some or all of the above skills and some may never get a grasp on them. Our goal is to cultivate them and empower them, so the main focus is on teamwork instruction. How do we handle it?

Before announcing a collaborative activity to students, we should work in advance on a strategy that will ensure meaningful teamwork at all levels, including assessment.

Planning ahead your students’ collaborative tasks is a good start towards quality teamwork instruction. Regardless of the form of these tasks (projects, debates, performances, etc), here are some steps we can take (Johnson & Johnson, 1999), with the proper adjustments according to the type of the task:

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Each step includes elements that are more or less familiar to you, and you probably have many ideas for putting them into practice. However, maybe there are some aspects that you haven’t yet considered in detail. For example, how do you make decisions on the members of each group and role assignments? What can you do to upgrade positive independence and individual accountability within the group? What are the guidelines you provide on peer-assessment and reflection?

When deciding on the composition of each team, begin with the intention to provide all students equal opportunities for cooperative learning.

A promising team requires the synthesis of students’ abilities and personality traits. Letting the students choose their teammates reduces diversity, and we sometimes overdo it with it. The keyword for effective team formation? Balance.

You need to consider two things: students’ abilities and personality traits (Rhee, Parent, & Basu, 2013). Regarding ability: keep in mind that team performance is the sum of individual performance and proportional to the average of individual contribution (additive and compensatory tasks). Also, successful team performance can be achieved if all members contribute, even if at some minimal level (conjunctive tasks). The final outcome is affected by the best achievements of any of the team members (disjunctive tasks).

In social sciences, the Five-Factor-Model (FFM or “Big Five”) is commonly used as a taxonomy of personality traits and aligns with the research on collaborative work. The proposed traits are extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness (Srivastava, 2019). Each of these traits is correlated with students’ performance within a group, as individuals and as teammates.

Try to be more of a “meddler in the middle” than a “sage on the stage”

Once you have the groups set up, one crucial step is for all members to pursue both positive interdependence and individual accountability; you can’t have one without the other anyway. “Positive interdependence” refers to the perception that a student’s success is directly linked to each teammate’s success and the group’s success. “Individual accountability” is each student’s responsibility towards their personal goals and the team’s goals (Johnson & Johnson, 1999).

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You can use this individual-group assessment pattern in different ways: assign complementary roles to all members for the execution of a task, or have each student present their own work in the context of the team’s work.

One further step you can take to upgrade students’ collaboration is the introduction of peer-assessment and teamwork reflection. Both individual accountability and positive interdependence are in line with these activities. Each student should get feedback on their performance as a team player, and the team should openly discuss their high points and low points.

There is strong evidence that “the application of peer feedback may be one useful tool to support the development of student teamwork skills” (Donia, O’Neill, & Brutus, 2018), especially if students are repeatedly exposed to this practice. In addition to this, reflection as teamwork standard procedure “serves as a starting point for teams to engage in discussions about best practices and alert faculty to potential problems” (Mckenna & Hirsch, 2008). How can you coach related activities on a practical basis?

Prepare a closed-type questionnaire on cooperation, conceptual contribution, practical contribution, and work ethic that all students can fill for their teammates. Then provoke an open discussion between the members of each group for their team’s overall performance.

A straightforward way to achieve this is to give each student an individual test or task and then award (or not) bonus marks according to their team’s overall performance.

Having these two concepts in mind, we not only teach our students how to collaborate effectively but also pave the road for a guilt-free individual and group assessment.

This is a full teamwork instruction, beginning with the planning of group activities and ending with the assessment of students’ collaborative efforts. How can you utilize educational technology (edtech) throughout this process for the maximum empowering of your students’ social skills?

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Here’s how to organize your teamwork instruction with 100mentors:

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How to Differentiate Teaching for the

advancement of student Thinking Skills

C H A P T E R 5

Flipped classroom • Learning ownership

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How to Differentiate Teaching for the advancement of student Thinking Skills

CHAPTER 5

In the previous chapters, we have shared ideas on instructional strategies that allow the simultaneous implementation of Approaches to Teaching and Learning (ATLs). These combine your teaching methods to students’ skills empowerment: inquiry and research, conceptual understanding and thinking, local-global contexts and communication, and teamwork and socialization.

This fifth post addresses how differentiated teaching can advance students’ thinking skills. In a previous chapter, we discussed a few aspects of thinking skills in the context of conceptual understanding. In the current installment, we will see how a cluster of specific thinking skills, that are put forward by both the IBO and contemporary educational research, can surface through differentiated teaching.

Acknowledge your students as individual learners through differentiated instruction

I distinctly recall my first, although remote, encounter with “differentiated instruction”. It was during a meeting with the Head of School for the discussion of my annual evaluation after he had observed one of my IB classes. I was confident that his report would be a good one until he asked me something like what measures do you take to support talented students?

My instant thoughts were: “Should I do something special for such students?” and “I don’t have the time for this anyway.” My actual response was about the different levels of difficulty in homework assignments, which is more than common in everyday practice, but can hardly be considered a “special measure.” I don’t know what he wrote down in my file, but at least his question was thought-provoking for me.

In general education, where the IB Diploma Programme (DP) belongs, we have to teach “students with learning difficulties, gifted students, and students with no identified exceptionality” (Altemueller & Lindquist, 2017). We can’t turn a blind eye to this learning diversity in our classroom. On the contrary, we must consider it a top priority while we do our best to meet the curriculum goals and fulfill the overall DP mission.

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“Differentiated instruction” is perhaps the most prominent of those strategies we know we should use, but we are reluctant to do so. It might scare us away because we think it relates to special education for students with particular needs and abilities, for which only a few of us have official training.

And if the strategy addresses all students individually, it seems extremely time-consuming to prepare all-embracing lessons throughout the year. In the context of the constructivist approach, “differentiated learning” takes place beyond our control. Every student processes the content, the skills and the concepts we teach in a personalized way, whether we like it or not. What calls for deliberate differentiation is our own teaching, in order to effectively meet all students’ learning needs. How do we achieve this within our limited time in the classroom?

“Differentiation” doesn’t refer to special education. It addresses the approach of every student’s needs, but this doesn’t mean that we will turn our class into private tutoring lessons.

Promote an environment that welcomes all learners

If you are using a teacher-centered teaching approach, it will be markedly harder or more time-consuming for you to pursue differentiated teaching. “Differentiation puts the focus on learners and it is a learner-centered approach that is aimed to help students succeed regardless of the differences” (Bajrami, 2013). Any student-centered technique will definitely give you an edge, but it’s not always clear how you can focus on every student without neglecting the rest of the class as a whole entity.

The answer to this riddle can be the “flipped classroom”. This is an innovative teaching methodology that has drawn the educational community’s attention during the last decade. The term seems self-explanatory, but it is actually misleading. The “flipping” doesn’t refer to the exchange of roles between the teacher and the students; it reflects a completely different instructional approach that can accommodate your plans for all-inclusive teaching.

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The implementation of the flipped classroom suggests this model (Abeysekera & Dawson, 2015):

Taking the traditional time-consuming lectures during a class period off the table gives you plenty of time to focus on each students’ needs.

To make this work in practice, you have to guide your students towards valid resources that will allow them to grasp the necessary information in advance of an upcoming lesson. This way, when you meet with them you can skip the traditional “one-man-show” and proceed immediately to activities that will clarify and deepen the material they covered on their own time. As for homework, they should elaborate on the in-class assignments and then proceed to the next course.

It may already be visible how this inquiry cycle (inquiry-action-reflection) throws the ball in the students’ court. They now have the freedom and the responsibility to process their learning at their own pace. To them, you are no longer an instructor but a facilitator who walks them through their educational journey.

At the beginning of each session, you can offer a range of tiered activities of increasing difficulty and prompt the students to work with those that make them feel most comfortable and productive. That will give you an insight into their learning engagement and room to provide further support according to their needs.

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This process can be supported by teamwork. If you have a big class, form groups with partial homogeneity in their chosen activities so you can focus on two or three students at once, plus make use of their collaboration with their teammates productively. The weaker students will benefit from your exclusive attention and the more advanced group members can act as “teacher’s assistants.” Students with sufficient understanding push themselves even further when you prompt them to share their knowledge, and afterward, you can turn your focus to them to discuss more difficult tasks.

Enable every student to achieve personal learning goals

From the teaching point of view, the flipped classroom allows us to differentiate instruction in regard to our students’ abilities. Meanwhile, from the learning point of view, each student works with the pace and material most appropriate for achieving their personal learning benchmarks. This is a win-win because students are involved in a process that actively enhances their thinking skills.

Beyond classical taxonomies of thinking skills, educational reform towards constructivism focuses on the promotion of three major student “thinking constructs:” critical thinking, metacognition, and reflection (IBO, 2015). In a few words, these elements refer to students’ knowledge of their thinking resources, management of such resources, and willingness to enact on them. These are in perfect alignment with the inquiry process in the flipped classroom. However, we shouldn’t think of these constructs as “stand-alone” goals; it is their mix and match that counts (Ford & Yore, 2012).

When you let the students in on the upcoming topics, you aren’t revealing your professional secrets. In fact, they are entitled to know what’s coming next and prepare for it, both mentally and psychologically. If they have access to the upcoming material, they can control their own learning: watch or read something repeatedly, form specific questions, and do their research – all the actions they need to take in order to be “ready to go.”

Perhaps you are thinking: how is this different from any homework assignment following the traditional class? Homework is used for practicing their knowledge of the topic you have delivered. Sometimes, for reasons inexplicable to us, students consider it as “optional.” Most of the time, it is related merely to assessment.

In the flipped classroom, on the contrary, students’ prior work is mandatory and strongly connected to the upcoming lesson. Either students do it, or they are wasting their time at school because aren’t prepared to participate in what their teacher and classmates are talking about. It also has an immediate, self-evident, impact on their grade.

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It is important to remember why we implement the flipped classroom in the first place: to create realistic conditions for differentiated instruction.

The time spent in the classroom will be way more meaningful for them if they have worked hard to construct a representation from scratch for the new material – on their own terms. Activating their unique prior knowledge, following their personal thinking pathways and focusing on the things most challenging for them will completely reform the way they see your class. It will give them ownership. These elements will comprise the base on which you can build your differentiated teaching during contact hours.

You can assign homework on the covered lesson, along with preparative activities for the upcoming one. Keep an eye for the reasonable extent of each lesson, so students have the capacity to study both the previous and the next one sufficiently. Their tasks can be closely related to the work done in the classroom: from the list of tiered activities, challenge them to uptake a task from the next difficulty level. This way, your differentiated instruction follows them home.

Make the lesson attractive, accessible and relevant to your students

What makes the flipped classroom an attainable educational strategy is our access to technology. In fact, the initial definition of the flipped classroom specifically referred to video lectures as the learning source for the upcoming lesson (Bergmann & Sams, 2012). However, just a few years is a “long time ago” in the context of evolving educational technology.

Back in the day, educational videos were the teachers’ recordings uploaded online; now you can find dozens of good captures that suit your specific IB topic or chapter. But now we have a variety of asynchronous tools that can work as preliminary sources – and far more interactive than videos, so you can draw your students’ attention.

We don’t use the flipped classroom to penalize our students; we use it to pass on the torch of responsibility regarding their personal learning goals.

Resources can come in a diverse range of content difficulty and software formats. Interactive pdf files, simulations, and e-quizzes can begin to serve our goals. But, we also have to consider what suggests attractive hardware for our students – and meet them there. As far as I know, in most technologically developed countries smartphones have become an extension of their hands. With each student’s learning needs in mind, why don’t we suggest some additional ways they can use the technology that pushes them to create rather than consume?

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During their preparation for the next class or when expanding on the tasks given as homework, they can discover related content through mobile apps, thus combining relevant software with accessible hardware. Differentiated learning is seamlessly facilitated if students find answers to their particular questions. They can be the first who pose them or not; what matters is to receive personalized answers from valid sources that contribute to their personalized quest of learning.

Here’s how to organize the pre- and post-class tasks with 100mentors:

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How teaching informed by Assessment fosters student

Self-Management Skills

C H A P T E R 6

Feedback • Resilience

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How teaching informed by Assessment fosters student Self-Management Skills

CHAPTER 6

This final chapter covers how to cultivate students’ self-management skills through teaching informed by assessment. Assessment is a very hot issue for both teachers and students and the disputes over this educational component are more than common. In fact, sometimes teachers are so overwhelmed by this that they feel like there is no other purpose in their teaching than to assess the students. How can your students benefit from assessment in a more learning-oriented way with the enhancement of their self-management skills? Here are 4 steps you can take:

Model positive self-management skills

We devote a lot of our time, during and beyond classroom hours, working on students’ summative assessment: putting together quizzes and tests with diverse content and proper grading, creating rubrics for the granulation of internal assessment criteria and responding marks, organizing group activities for bonus marks and the list goes on. Going through all these arrangements makes us forget that our goal is not assessment for the sake of assessment, but for reinforcing students’ learning and self-management skills.

A kind of summative assessment is required in all IB educational programs. “The aim of summative assessment is generally to report on students’ level of learning at a particular time” (Dolin, Black, Harlen, & Tiberghien, 2018). All teachers are familiar with this educational component, and most of them have actually mastered it.

I would love to say that all this effort is about enhancing students’ performance, but it mostly addresses one thing: grading – semesters, examinations and, most important of all, predictions. Hundreds of hours, inside and outside the classroom, are spent in order to ensure that the grades will be accurate and fair: we don’t want to be unjust to our students, nor to expose ourselves and, by extension, our school.

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But, this surely isn’t our main role as a Diploma Programme (DP) teachers – the people that just distribute (fair) grades. In the IB mission, it is stated that the IB is “more than its educational programmes and certificates. At our heart we are motivated by a mission to create a better world through education” (IBO, 2005a). This mission molds the IB learner profile, which “describes a broad range of human capacities and responsibilities that go beyond academic success” (IBO, 2005b).Teaching in the IB, and in any curriculum, involves many more responsibilities towards our students beyond fair grading.

However, we can’t escape the fact that students are fixed on final examinations – and for good reason. We have to turn this everlasting concern to genuine learning opportunities and advancement of their self-management skills that will be priceless during their tertiary education… and for a lifetime. Time-management, mindfulness, and self-motivation are prerequisites for successful studying, yet our students could use our support to mastering them.

Students usually complain about a lack of time, but it is actually control over their time that they are lacking. In fact, educational research suggests that the more the workload (but reasonable nonetheless), the better they cope with it (Kausar, 2010). When students have a considerable amount of duties, with specific guidelines and deadlines, they usually rise up to the challenge. On the other end, when they are confident that their work requires just a little of their time, they become overly comfortable. What makes the difference for them?

When they have many things to handle, they are forced to employ some serious organizational skills: planning in advance, breaking down assignments, and forming study timetables. And then, they stick to their own arrangements, using affective skills: focusing, overcoming distractions, and aspiring to meet their goals.

If your students continue complaining about being short on time, together, work out which skill they need help with to manage their workload better.

The effort they make is weighted more heavily when it connects directly to a summative assessment task, like an official test. Although such tasks can be motivating for some of them, it can also work as a source of great anxiety. For them, assessment is a judgment rather than an opportunity for further learning or change of strategy. How can you turn this around?

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Add a formative assessed “mock test” halfway to expand students’ preparation period for an upcoming official test.

Create an atmosphere where students don’t think they have to get everything right the first time

There is another, more student-friendly, type of assessment that we can use: formative assessment. This is another card we hold, that we may neglect to address, given that it is more “optional.” This form of assessment can be used as a tool, but it serves our instructional goals better when it is also perceived as a process. “This ‘constructive’ use of formative assessment hinges on the ability of the teacher (or another provider of feedback) to actually give recommendations that are relevant and effective for improvement” (Dolin et al., 2018).

There are many different ways to integrate formative assessment in your classroom, but let’s be realistic: at the end of the day, we will end up with the grading deriving from the summative assessment. But, there’s a way to seamlessly combine these two forms of assessment.

For specific content, book dates not for one, but for two tests within a period no longer than a week. Ask your students to put all their efforts into the preparation for the first test. It is up to you if you want to let them know from the beginning that this test will be assessed in a formative way, and that there will be a follow-up test for their summative assessment. I suggest not sharing your intentions the first time you apply this method, because it may seem overwhelming; next time, the request will come directly from your students.

Give students feedback on their approach to a task

The purpose of this strategy is to use the mock test as a tool to promote learning by giving feedback. The formative test identifies the distance between reality and goals, regarding students’ knowledge and performance. Feedback is the means for reducing this distance so students can attain their standards (Grosas, Raju, Schuett, Chuck, & Millar, 2016).

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If you have the time, make comments on the mock papers and spend one or two contact hours to discuss students’ questions. This is a good investment of your in-class time, since it works as a differentiated session, meeting all students’ needs for revision.

Under-performing students may seek amends from us, but what we should offer is a discussion on the advantages of self-awareness, responsibility toward their own learning and, most of all, resilience.

If you have scheduled the mock test and the official test very close together, your students can gain from self-assessment. It is most effective to provide scripts with the correct answers, so they can give themselves some feedback through comparison. Self-assessment improves self-regulated learning, namely the students’ skills to generate “thoughts, feelings, and actions that are planned and cyclically adapted to the attainment of personal goals” (Panadero, Jonsson, & Strijbos, 2016). So, even if you don’t provide feedback yourself, they still can reap benefits from their mock test.

One way or another, feedback leads to self-reflection. It allows students to realize the missing knowledge components and calls for the application of new or advanced self-management skills to reach their performance goals. Your students improve their learning and skills with an immediate impact on their grades: two birds, one stone.

Help students to learn from failures

We take measures to enhance our students’ learning progress and self-management skills, but we have to make peace with the fact that we are merely their facilitators. Whether they take the opportunities we provide and how they make use of them is up to them. Thus, giving them their grades is not about punishment or celebration; it is just a metric of their efforts for a task or a period of time. The best we can do is encourage them to celebrate their successes and learn from their failures.

Firstly, let’s deal with those students that didn’t meet their expectations. I’ve seen a range of low grade-related emotional displays: from rage to tears and from accusations towards everyone to self-pity. Initiate a calm conversation with each of them. Your goal is to walk in their shoes, help them realize what went wrong, and suggest a solution for achieving better results in the future. The problem may lie in poor self-management skills or a lack of thinking and communication skills.

Receiving feedback from you gives students a head start in their reading at home, and draws their attention to their particular learning needs.

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Resilience refers to “any behavioral, attributional, or emotional response to an academic or social challenge that is positive and beneficial for development (such as seeking new strategies, putting forth greater effort, or solving conflicts peacefully)” (Yeager & Dweck, 2012). A personality trait that gives a boost to resilience is the appreciation to change. Our students must embrace the thought that their intelligence and personality are not fixed for life. It is always up to them to turn things around – for better or worse.

Keeping this in mind, we don’t neglect to praise each of those students that worked well and performed accordingly. We can pay tribute to them without putting the rest of the class down or making comparisons. Acknowledgment of their achievement empowers them to go on with their efforts and sets a good example for those who have room for development.

With this simple strategy of consequent formative-summative assessment, your students can grasp the opportunity for a spiral learning progression that leads to their best performance. After discussing grades, as a different follow-up activity, you can use edtech to connect your students with role models all over the world for valuable insights on dealing with success and failure. Students can also discover how self-management skills relate with accomplishments in studies and career. Here’s how to organize this unique reflection activity with 100mentors:

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