T&L strategies learnt on the hub day:
The most fascinating part of the day was the sessions delivered by two guest speakers- Susan Neilson and Gary Snapper.
Susan spoke about how to develop student autonomy, and how crucial it is to guide students to approach texts in a self-sufficient manner. She emphasised the role of discussion and creative writing, the impact of modelling reading together as a class community, and the use of using student-led agendas in order to cover the themes of a text.
Gary delivered an inspiring session on approaches to teaching poetry in the IB. He recommended starting discussions on poems about the entire text before breaking them down, in order to develop a practice of forming a holistic understanding of the poem. He also showed creative ways of analysing the structure of poetry through exercises such as altering the order of stanzas, which gives the students a new perspective on the poet’s authorial choices.
How these strategies have been implemented in my/our practice:
As IB teachers, we adopted a number of Neilson’s strategies, such as letting students create an ‘agenda’ of what they would like to focus on in particular texts. Some of us have used the likes of Padlet to do this in lockdown to good effect. In the literature course, we have adopted much of Gary’s advice in order to approach the Unseen Poetry component of their Paper 1 exam. Here, good questioning was key, ensuring that students communicated their reaction to the text as a whole before thinking how the author elicited that reaction.
The impact so far:
Unfortunately, due to the lack of exams this year it has been difficult to measure the impact of these practices in concrete terms. However, it has definitely made IB English a more engaged and student-led experience for our cohorts, and has garnered a more enthusiastic and self-sufficient approach for many in the DP student community.
T&L strategies learnt on the hub day:
I found the talk on ‘Thinking like a Geographer’ particularly interesting. As with most subject curriculars, the tendency is to stick with the required content and teach what is needed for the exams, however Karen Corfield introduced us to a number of resources that may not have been necessary for the IB curriculum, but would further broaden and strengthen our students’ knowledge of the wider world, allowing them to think more critically which would have a positive impact on their IB learning.
How these strategies have been implemented in my/our practice:
This could be implemented by creating reading/documentary lists for students to follow. Students could then complete reflections on what they had read/watched and link it with what they are currently learning at the time. Students could also complete mini research topics on current geographical events and affairs which may not necessarily be within the IB curriculum but would broaden their knowledge of the wider world and allow them to make links to what they are currently learning while also improving their critical thinking and research skills.
T&L strategies learnt on the hub day:
Our goal is to give students the kind of complex knowledge and arguments they need to succeed in IB history, and, following the IB Hub Day, it was clear to us that incorporating more historiography and more depth studies into our schemes of work will help us achieve this goal.
How these strategies have been implemented in my/our practice:
Historiography: We incorporated historiography largely through two mechanisms. The first came back to IA technique. Through our discussions with other schools, it became clear that many history departments focus their students on a historiographical debate for their IAs. This is an excellent technique because it allows students to frame their own arguments through a comparison of historians’ arguments, and it forces students to evaluate carefully two different perspectives on an issue.
We have also embraced historiography in our teaching of IB both through incorporating short snippets of historians’ work into most lessons, thereby showing our students that the topics we are studying are also debated by historians and that we want our students to join in the debate.
Furthermore, we’ve begun to incorporate longer pieces of historiography into lessons by assigning academic articles as part of the required reading for students. We feel this is important as these articles not only introduce students to different perspectives on our topics but also act as models for students in how historians write and build arguments. We have even started working this kind of task into activities for younger students from KS3 through activities like guided reading and using scholarship to answer enquiry questions.
T&L strategies learnt on the hub day:
On the agenda was a talk from Professor Karen Page on Voronoi Diagrams, a geometric construction new to the specification change this year. We saw a plethora of applications of a mathematical tool/construction to other subjects such as Biology (in nature and disease) and Geography (toxic waste dump problem). This gave us an opportunity to learn more about a piece of maths knowledge we have never taught nor ever applied!
The problem solving session provided strategies to develop students’ inquiry skills. The wording of the questions were “unusual” in terms of standard Mathematics questioning - showing us how to create problems by purposely missing information that the students would need - can they realise what information is important to answering a problem? Some questions didn’t have a question and teachers were encouraged to write the hardest question they could think of, given the information - a task harder than it sounds!
The session on implementing the Toolkit gave an insight into how to use technology to enhance learning and create depth of understanding as the new syllabus has a strong focus on use of technology. Tom Holmes gave a phenomenal presentation on how to use geogebra to model real life contexts - a powerful tool to show the dynamism of maths, and limitations of a model.
How these strategies have been implemented in my/our practice:
It’s been great to take some of the examples Prof Karen Page spoke of and plan them into lessons on the Voronoi diagram and show students the cross-subject use of them - they love seeing maths in different contexts! It’ll be interesting to see if any student has been inspired by these wonderful constructions to ask a question to explore using them in their IAs.
As Key Stage 5 Coordinator for maths the inquiry based questioning is something that we have been working on implementing in our new lesson planning for the new specification to create curious, problem solvers! It has also been great to plan lessons entirely dedicated to the toolkit with Geogebra, which the students have responded really well to as it’s something different to doing maths on paper.
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