The primary years programme is the equivalent of kindergarten and primary school of the IB, which means it focuses on students from ages 3 to 12. It is fundamental for the IB to mold their students from an early age as a way to stimulate curiosity and the impulse to learn more, which is then applied to other subjects and global matters as students reach elementary school . The PYP aims to shape students differently to how the regular school system does. It wants students to actively participate in their own learning and assume responsibility for how far they go, which is done by letting them work at their own rhythms and therefore comprehend the way the world works by developing their own criteria. In order to achieve an international mindset, the PYP makes use of units of inquiry, central ideas, key concepts, related concepts to place everyday learnings into issues, ideas and movements from around the world. This article entails the basics to knowing what the PYP is and offers and a brief retelling of my experience in it.
What differentiates the PYP from other programs?
The PYP is an inquiry based programme. This means that investigation takes a key role in how students understand the world. It is based on students asking themselves questions that can take them further than they would by just taking the first thing that is presented to them. By creating their own methods and pathways towards the desired outcomes, students will be able to reach their own conclusions and therefore evaluate how well said process worked out for them. In an interview with PYP teacher Susan Powers, she said that “We are teaching children to be international minded and to question. Do not believe everything you see or hear. Go deeper with it.” (Powers, S. 2023)
The PYP highly differs from other school programs in the way they prepare their students, as the former shows students how to open their minds to other perspectives. Since there is a higher focus on inquiry, students are encouraged to ask questions about what they are researching about. As a way to explore, reflect and question how the world around them works, teachers want students to “ask all of those questions that are going on rather than just taking things at face value” (Powers, S. 2023). By looking at education through inquiry based learning, students’ curiosity is promoted so they can look at the world through more than just one angle. Through observing at more than one angle, students will be able to create transdisciplinary connections that can bring past and present learnings together for a broader understanding of the subject.
The PYP’s curriculum is based on:
- Knowledge → meaningful knowledge that students can explore and connect experiences and previous connections.
- Concepts → ideas between areas that can connect between each other
- Skills→ what needs to be developed to achieve goals
- Attitudes → the ways in which students show conviction and devotion about learning itself
- Action → proof of learning and understanding through responsible actions.
It can be seen that students are given an opportunity to learn more independently and take in as much as their curiosity can hold. The PYP itself guides students to look at the world and take an open-minded approach to how they are going to understand what is going on in the world. (Powers, S., n.d.) This is why the IB created ten attributes that describe the profile of an IB student.
The IB learner profile attributes:
- Inquirers: By investigating the topic at hand, curiosity of said topics is cultivated and creates enthusiasm to learn more.
- Knowledgeable: Students develop their comprehension by exploring through various subjects and points of view.
- Thinkers: Through their knowledge, students develop critical thinking that analyzes complex problems.
- Communicators: Students collaborate among them to listen to others’ perspectives to express and receive ideas.
- Principled: By acting with integrity, students understand the responsibility they take for their actions and consequences.
- Open-minded: Listening and taking into account other people’s ideas, students value different perspectives and what can be learned from them.
- Caring: It is based on showing empathy towards others and committing to help others and the world around them.
- Risk-takers: Students work individually and collectively to take on new challenges that can bring new ideas and knowledge.
- Balanced: By balancing academic, physical, mental and emotional aspects of themselves to recognise themselves individually and as a community.
- Reflective: Evaluating the world and students’ principles brings forward new perspectives of their strengths and weaknesses.
Units of Inquiry
Units of inquiry guide the focus of the current 6 or 8 weeks of the school year. The concepts primarily handled are transdisciplinary concepts, this means that they can intertwine between subjects and therefore give students various approaches towards learning. These themes can be easily related to our everyday lives and are relevant on a worldwide scale, hence giving students an international connection (Smyth, S., 2023). The units are:
- Who we are: This unit plans on establishing the nature of one’s self. This way students will be able to understand personal and interpersonal relationships, what it means to be human and their relationships.
- Where we are in time and space: This unit talks about the history of humanity and how relationships between people have led to the exchange of perspectives and the modeling of their present society.
- How we express ourselves: This takes an approach towards how our ideals, learnings, nature and feelings shape the way we see the world around us. This leads students to create personal, unique conclusions.
- How the world works: This unit focuses on the interactions between human societies and nature. This includes how their developments can cause an impact on themselves and the environment.
- How we organize ourselves: This looks at the relationships that are created inside a community and how they can create a societal structure. By taking this approach students will be aware of consequences and impact of their actions.
- Sharing the planet: In this unit, the focus is to understand the responsibilities we have to the environment and other living beings. This includes both ethical and environmental implications of their actions.
Each of the units has a specific central idea that focuses on a specific aspect teachers want to develop for that period of time. By narrowing this down, they can make more progress in their education. This then relates to the Key concepts, which consider the different ways of thinking and learning that can amplify the perception of what they learn. The key concepts are:
- Form: Aims to observe, identify and classify fundamental characteristics.
- Function: Aims to analyze the function and behavior of objects around us.
- Change: Aims to understand the value and meaning of ever changing objects.
- Cause: Aims to look for the “why” of things and recognize their impact.
- Connection: Aims to consider the effect of our actions in systems we take part of.
- Perspective: Aims to focus on various interpretations that can create a bigger picture.
- Responsibility: Aims to cultivate the will to accept responsibility and act on the consequences of our actions.
- Reflection: Aims to examine methods and results that can develop a recognition of what was learned and what could have been learned.
These concepts were chosen as a way of presenting key questions that will be able to push students towards investigating these subjects as a desire to learn more. Since PYP is based on inquiry as a learning tool, questions using these concepts molded by teachers will guide students into a deeper understanding of the curriculum. These questions are not necessarily the only things that can be asked or answered, but rather serve as a focus tool to look at new scopes of deeper information.
The PYP Exhibition
The PYP ends with the PYP exhibition. In this event, groups of students present a project in which they prepare a global topic based on the perspective that was planted by the programme. In this project, students chose a topic that interests them and investigated how that issue is affecting their society. This is done by looking at various perspectives, the cause-effect, connections to other events and by looking at who they are listening to.
This project is a full demonstration of how the IB lets students venture into the topics that they are researching about. Since they are responsible for their planning and content of their exhibit, students are able to wholly plan the way in which they want to show it. Whether that means using interactive activities or just laying out the facts themselves (Inspiring inquiry, n.d.). The important thing is that the students are in charge of a collaborative form of investigating and communicating what they have found about a meaningful and relevant issue in their society.
My experience
It was not until I was investigating the specifics for writing this article that I realized how much PYP helped model the person I am today. Even though it feels as if I’d taken the entire thing, I only took a couple of years of the program. The PYP at first felt weird, especially because I came from a traditional school that had us memorize things as our only way of learning. The school where I took PYP was the one that brought the IB to Mexico, so they were proficient in this programme by the time I entered.
By themselves, the classes would normally go as such: they would introduce us to each unit of inquiry and the concepts we were to be focusing on and then we would apply them to the selected topics for each class. We would then make an activity that was specialized in the topic we were seeing and then practice specific topics independently. We would use apps that would help us understand and repeat at our own pace so that we could make our own progress as we went on. These activities, whether they be physical or digital, allowed the classes to be more dynamic and at least helped me process a lot of subjects more easily. Every time we made a big project or writing, I remember we would try to look at the most amount of things possible (even if it at times meant diverting to unnecessary aspects) and in the end reflect on how it was related to our unit of inquiry, key concepts and which IB learner profile attribute we developed. Even though at first it seemed tedious, relating those core PYP concepts to everything that we were doing helped me amplify the scope of understanding I had.
What I remember the most was the PYP exhibition in which my team was in the “Economy” sector, as each of us would choose which area to investigate. It was in this project that me and my friends chose to talk about inflation and how it would affect people’s way of living. We gave a keynote presentation about the role taxes played in our current society (2018) including how inflation had been behaving lately and therefore affected people in middle and lower classes. After that we had a demonstration of our other works we made during our classes to help us better understand these topics. At the end of the PYP programme, we made a parody of monopoly we called “Taxecopoly” in which players would be affected by inflation depending on what they bought and where they landed.
In general, I believe it was an important experience for me, as PYP helped me become more self reliant and develop my investigative skills so that my work could entail a complete view of the topic. By letting me work at my own pace at times, I was able to determine how I learned more effectively, even though its fruit would be more evident in the future.
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