Nothing makes me happier than to see a learner create something with their own hands.  There is something magical about it.  

This past week was so joyful.  We had awards ceremonies, Genius Hour presentations, and a parent showcase.  Most of these experiences were very learner-driven, which is what made is so memorable. 

In particular, the parent showcase was something we will remember for a long time.  Our last units for math and language were on area and perimeter and animal research.  We decided to combine the two to create an animal sanctuary architectural plans.  In the picture above, my learners had already calculated the area and perimeter of each building and were in the process of measuring walls to house the animal enclosures.  This is where the ideas began to fly.

My learners wanted to ensure that the walls reflected the height in real enclosures to ensure all animals had the space they needed.  They carefully measured each side to to make sure they were equal.  

On the day of the showcase, the parents assisted in transforming the 2D plans into 3D structures.  This took their and brought them into life.  One parent commented that this is what architects do everyday, which made my learners feel very proud.  

​The morale of my story is that learners apply more by making and doing than writing.  This project was one of the favorites of the entire year.  When I asked my learners what was so impactful, they told me it was because they controlled the design.  There were so guidelines, but the look, the feel, and function were all up to them. 

This circles back to our prior discussions about learner agency.  When we give learners the opportunity to use their hands to make, it helps the learn to apply thinking differntly.  We call this kinesthetic or somatic processing.  We are processing ideas through physical use of our body and mind together. 

If this is how some of our learners process information, where is there opportunity for this to happen in our classrooms?

​We've heard alot about learning walls within the past couple of years.  It's only a natural response to making thinking visible in the classroom.  

I know my documentation process has come a long way, since I understood the process of learning.  The picture above is from a classroom I had over 15 years ago.  I like going back into my catalog of photos, because it reveals what we valued at the time.  

To be honest, I have always been a visual processor, so bright designs that have enough white space as been key.  This display gave me the anxiety when I was in it.  There is too many things on teh wall and jumbled together.  For others, this is perfect, because it is a display of learner's work.  On this note, I agree. 

Now, I am finding purpose for my walls.  What type of work is going up?  I don't have great work walls anymore...I know that is going against everything we were taught in teacher's college.  Instead, I have walls that speak to grounding concepts and guiding questions of my unit.  For those PYP teachers, I turn my line of inquiry into a question, because it is easier to answer and collect documentation. 

What transforms a space that collects work samples versus how learning happened is the intention.  What are putting it up for?  Who is it for?  I stopped collecting and posting work for my parents and school leadership along time ago.  Instead, I post it for my learners.  

I want my learners to see evidence of their learning joruney and how it has changed and progressed during a moment in time.  They help me put ideas together based on their knowledge and connections.  They decide what is worthy of being posted and what is not.  

As I have engaged in the conversations, everything has changed.  Are you willing to make the change with me?  

​In one of my school's we taught about the impact of coal, oil, and gas on the environment.  As we progressed through the unit, we discussed how people either harvested rainforests for their resources and burned them down to graze cattle.  We researched that the land that was once lush rainforest became a desert within five years due poor soil composition. 

This broke my little 4th graders hearts.  They couldn't believe that people would cut down beautiful rainforests to graise cattle.  When we explored the impact of methane gas, this took them over the edge.  

Shortly afterwards, I was contacted by an irate parent.  They did not appreciate that I told their daughter to become a vegitarian.  This comment stopped me in my tracks.  When had I ever advised anyone on their dietary requirements?  I was puzzled. 

The parent relayed a story where the young girl was so impacted by our learning that she made a personal boycott of all beef products.  When the family went through the McDonald's drive-thru, she refused to order anything.  She was becoming a vegetarian, because of the harm cows were putting onto the environment. 

This is the power of inquiry.  It provokes us to feel something to make lasting change that goes beyond the classroom.  This is what we hope will happen as learners leave our doors. 

How do we create these situations to naturally occur? 

We provoke.  We  compel.  We make our learners feel something so big that it cannot be contained.  Then, we go within and beyond our borders.  

As we are learning content, how do we get our learners to think about the issue or idea within their local community?  How do we take something like poetry and give it relevance to a third grader?  We get them to see where poetry lives in the world through songs, jingles, and other uses of figurative language.  We expose them to multiple versions of the same poem from people with different life stories and cultural backgrounds. This is where the voice of the poetry comes to life.  

Providing a single story of an issue, problem, situation, or viewpoint is boring.  The depth of learning comes when we are seeking out patterns. 

• How do others see this idea who are just like me?
• How do others that live in the same region as me express it?
• How do others who live in my same country feel about it? 
• How do others in neighboring countries show it?
• How do others in faraway places do it similiarly?
• How do multiple points of view help us to see it differently?

Now we are bridging from just my point of view to our shared perspective.  What will you do to invite local and global connections into your teaching?  Are you reading for an irate parent to call you to respond to your teaching? 

To be honest, it was a bit shocking, but afterwards it made me smile.  I had provoked a child to think and act on their own.  This is what teaching is all about. 

Are we teaching for mastery or to tick it off the checklist?  There is a big difference? 

Coverage is a completion task. Transfer is a design task. When a teacher teaches for coverage, the question driving planning is: what do students need to know by the end of this unit? When a teacher teaches for transfer, the question is: what will students be able to do with this understanding in a context I have not designed for them? These produce completely different results.

A sign of coverage is when learners pass the end-of-unit assessment, but three weeks later they remember almost none of it. Not because they were not paying attention. Because the learning was organized around the unit, not around an idea that matters to the learner. 

Transfer begins with identifying the concept underneath the content. Not the topic, but a big, transferable idea. A unit on the water cycle is not really about the water cycle. It is about systems, cycles, and interdependence. Those ideas transfer to economics, to ecology, to human relationships, to history. A teacher who knows that is teaching for transfer from the first lesson. A teacher who does not know that is teaching the water cycle.

Wiggins and McTighe call this uncoverage, which is going deep on an idea that transfers rather than going wide across the content area. This requires genuine intellectual courage, because it means leaving things out. Coverage anxiety is real.  Passing the end of the year exam is real. The argument is not that coverage does not matter, but transfer matters more.  Yikes, did I just say that?!  Yes, I did. 
​
Transfer in assessment asks learners to apply understanding to a situation they have not seen before. This means that they must solve a new problem in a different subject area with the same process.  There has not been any coaching by the teacher.  Let's be clear, it is not a harder version, just different.  It may feel harder to the learners, because they are being put into productive struggle withouth their knowlege.  This is how they remember and grow.  

Think of your next unit of inquiry or next term. What is the concept underneath the content? Where else in a learner's life will that concept appear? Design the last assessment first.  Make the context different than you have ever taught before.  If the learners can apply it, you know it transferred.   Good luck and comment here with your progress.

When I think of competence, I can't help to think of the word confidence.  This image is of a confident young person.  When I look at his smile, it reminds me of learners who know what they know and know what they don't know.  Even still, they are fine with it.  

​A skill is something a learner can perform when the conditions are right. This happens when a teacher sets up a task, provides the scaffolding, and tells the learners when it's time to use a strategy or tool.  They are growing in their understanding of how to use the skill with accuracy every time. 

A competency is something a learner reaches for independently when conditions are wrong, ambiguous, or completely new. Competencies are a combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes about the task or idea.  This is completely different, because the learning has gone through the process of meaning making. Building a competency requires something much harder: designing conditions where the learner has to decide whether, when, and how to apply what they know, without being told.

A learner who can write a beautiful literary essay in a structured writing lesson, but cannot construct a coherent paragraph in a science discussion is not competency. The skill was taught, but the competency was never built. We call this learning transfer.

To help our learners transfer their learning, it means we have to intentionally  design for it and not just teaching the skill hoping it carries over.  To be honest, this happens all the time.  I've been guilty of it, especially when time is crunched and I have little understanding of what is the purpose of the skill.

At these moments, we have to ask ourselves and our learners these questions:

• where else does this thinking appear?
  
• What does this look like in a completely different subject, situation, or problem?

If your assessments only measure whether learners can perform a skill in the context you taught it, you have never actually measured competency. You have measured recall under familiar conditions. This is a useful thing to measure, but It is just not the same thing.

In the PYP, educators regularly assess the difference between teaching approaches to learning skills as isolated items on a checklist versus genuinely developing them as transferable, self-directed capabilities. The checklist produces skill performances. The genuine development produces competent learners.

Take one skill you teach explicitly in your classroom. When did you last design a situation where learners had to decide for themselves whether to use it?

Playfulness is not something you either have or you do not. It is a cognitive disposition that can be practiced, developed, and deliberately brought into professional life.  Just look at any innovator in history and you can see that playfulness was at the center of their learning. 

The belief that playfulness is a personality trait is one of the most damaging ideas in education because it lets serious, skilled, deeply committed teachers off the hook for never creating genuinely playful learning conditions. It becomes: that is just not who I am. Parker Palmer would say: then look more carefully at who you are.

Playfulness is a process. Playfulness means approaching problems with curiosity, holding multiple possibilities, and finding genuine delight in not yet knowing. Those are cognitive skills. They can be taught and practiced.

A teacher who is genuinely playful tries things they are not sure will work. They make mistakes in front of learners and treat those mistakes as something interesting, rather than shameful. They bring genuine curiosity to their role, rather than performance of expertise. They design learning tasks that have no predetermined correct output. They laugh, because something is actually funny or surprising.

Stuart Brown's work on play shows that play deprivation in adults produces rigidity, depression, and loss of adaptability. Brené Brown connects playfulness directly to vulnerability and courage. Neither of them is talking about craft activities on a Friday afternoon. They are talking about a fundamental orientation to experience that either opens or closes the capacity to learn.

Take a moment to reflect:  When did you last try something in your classroom that you were not sure would work?  How did the learners react to it?  

Most classrooms have inquiry-shaped activities but not genuine inquiry. The difference is who owns the question. When the teacher owns the question and students investigate it, that is structured discovery. When the learner owns the question and the teacher's job is to resource, provoke, and get out of the way, that is genuine inquiry. These look similar from the outside. They feel completely different from the inside.

I chose the image above, because it makes me happy and sad at the same time.  There is a something within the child's eye in the upper left hand corner.  He is genuinely curious.  He wants to paint like everyone else, so he ventures to look around the group to see what everyone else is doing.  He is not creating for himself, but for approval. His teacher owns the quesiton and he does not have the answer. 
​
This means we have to take a step back, so learners can choose the pathway for their inquiry.  This is very difficult for us, because we don't want anyone to fail.  I get it.  I am have warm and fuzzy heart too.  But, the teacher who steps back from inquiry is really guiding from afar.  This is a chance for learners to really show us what they know and do not.  This is not about replication. 

What does this mean for you and me?  It means that we have to resist the urge to direct our learners when the inquiry goes somewhere unexpected, asking questions  and not answering them, making resources available without prescribing which ones to use, and tolerating the visible messiness of genuine thinking without tidying it into a neat product.

Teachers often make the mistake of stepping back in the moment the learning looks most alive.  They get fearful, because chaotic learning is messy, loud, and usually off course of curricular objectives.  What they don't know is this is the point where real learning happens.

When did you last let go of the set objective and allow your learners to create for themselves? 

This was one of my favorite experiences during the 2025-26 school year.  My class was in charge of hosting the monthly assembly and they decided to focus on holidays around the world with a common theme of light.  

As a class, we explored why so many cultures use light as a central focus, especially in the winter time.  They were surprised at how this was a common theme in religious practices and cultural hero stories. 

This group above learned about St. Martin of Tours, a 4th-century Roman soldier who famously shared his cloak with a freezing beggar.  This story resonated with them and they wanted to recreate it through a self-made dramatic play.  I helped with some of the writing, but all of the ideas were their own. 

I've never seen a group of boys so happy to act out a play before, especially Leo who was the horse.  Just like the legend, they shared the message that 
giving charity and warmth to others brings light into our own lives. 

As we reflected on this experience, they shared how much they appreciated the opportunity to create everything themselves.  It was their production, not mine.  This has stayed with me over the past year.  

There is no magic structure for designing agency in our schools.  It's about giving space to our learner's to make their own choices, testing them out, failing at times, and reflecting on the process.  This is how we grow as humans, so why should it not be the same in schools?

With this being said, agency is also about skill development.  Learner's need to have the prior skills to achieve the task or they get frustrated.  I had already taught about cultures usage of light in holidays, the magic of reader's theatre,  and the impact stories have on cultures.  From there, they were able to weave the pieces together to create something that was their own. 

How are you doing this for your learners?

Agency is something that is in all of us.  Sometimes teachers say, "You need to give them more agency."  This is close.  What they mean to say is, "You need to create the conditions, so agency can naturally happen."

But what happens when a school purposefully blocks agency due to their systems?  Now we have a problem.

When you look at the image above, what do you see? 

I see a school that is blocking learning agency from happening.  How can I tell in one picture?  It's written all over the space and the materials being used.  

• The walls are stark and professional looking, like in an office building.  There is no work on the walls. 
• The learners are sitting in rows, one behind another.  
• The desks are covered in a variety of notebooks.  At first glance, this looks like there are different tasks, but what I see is more of more.  
• There is no collaboration going on; everyone is working in silos.

A picture can tell you alot about what the school values and how they see their learners.  This picture tells me that the school honors compliance, achievement, and rankings.  The learning is focused on completing tasks, rather than illiciting honest learner voice.  

How do we overcome the block?  The answer is simple, get out our your learner's way.  They are smart and capable.  If the school system is blocking the way, advocate with your leadership team.  This is part of our role.  We can do this in simple ways.  Let's be innovative. 
​

Have you ever had those moments that when you opened your mouth and nothing changed?

This is how I felt about a particular student who still lives in my heart.  He was a quiet, lovable soul, but he refused to complete some of tasks presented to him.  I provoked, nudged, pleaded, scolded, and begged this child to change their behavior, but nothing worked.  

This reminds me of Parker Palmer's argument about learning is not about teaching techniques. It is about the person doing the teaching. His central claim is that good teaching cannot be reduced to method, because it emerges from the identity and integrity of the teacher. His catch phrase is: we teach who we are.

This moment made me reflect on who I was as a teacher.  I was practically begging this child to be the model learner, but I had yet to discover the reason behind his behavior.   This connects to Palmer's thoughts about identity and integrity. 

Identity is not your job title. It is the crossroads between the forces that have made you who you are: your lived experiences, fears, loves, wounds, and convictions. It is the self you bring into the room whether you intend to or not.
Integrity is not morality in the conventional sense. It is integration to the degree to which your outer life matches our inner one. A teacher with integrity is about being authenthic and is not performing who they would like to be to their students. 

This made me really think about myself.  Am I should show authentic identity at school?  Are my learners given the space to show their authentic selves?  

My learner was being his authentic self in my classroom and I was not honoring it.  Instead, I wanted him to act according to my identity and sense of integrity.  This awakening really had an impact on my behavior going forward. 

One of the things I began implementing was giving the learner two choices of activities. This was the hook.  Soon, he was creating more work than I had seen in several months, because he felt like he has some choice.  At times, he voiced how he wanted to do it and I let him.

The change was not in my learner, it was in me.  I had to let go of my identity of the learner and lean into his. 

I've been reflecting on my own learning journey this year and there have been so many wonderings.  A question that keeps popping up in my mind is:  what does it look like when a learner can evaluate their own choices honestly?

I chose the image above, because it speaks to me about the natural process of evaluating our choices.  This young learner knows that crossing the street safely has consequencs.  There are so many things to consider:  the activity on the sidewalks, the amount of traffic on the road, where is the best crossing to use to get to where I need to be.  All of these questions percolate in our minds as we are making our own decisions. 

Yet, what is happening in the minds of our learners who don't get to make those decisions.  How do they get to evaluate their choices if they don't make any at home or school?  This has been a condition that has been set by society, which trickles down into school.  Here is how it might manifest with a teacher with a fixed mindset about their learners. 

• In early years, they cannot possibly apply what they discover during play to their learning. 
• In lower primary, they cannot possibly design their own learning engagement to teach each other.
• In upper primary, they cannot possibly co-create their own success criteria and make learning goals to ensure their success. 
• In middle years, they cannot possibly create their own personal and community-based projects that demonstrate leadership. 
• In high school, they cannot possibly participate in creating school policies and showcase their entrprenuership. 

This type of fixed mindset is only benefitting the teacher. It limits what is possible in words and deeds in hopes that learners do not require teachers to be put in an unknown situation.  A space where they do not know how to guide what the learners want to do.  This is a teacher's nightmare. 

Yet, the moment choice becomes genuine self-direction rather than preference, it transforms a learner.  They begin to see that they hold the power to choose their own pathway and determine the outcome.  This knowledge is transformative.  As an educator, it is not my call to say if the learner can or cannot transform.  This is a basic right of a child. 

As I bring these ideas to light, I am not exempt from this conversation.  I've been reviewing my own thought process and actions this school year.  Some of the things that have happened were not my best moments.  Yet, I did try to allow agency to shine whenever possible.  The piece that I still need to work on is getting learners to self-assess their process.  This is a goal for next year. 

​How about you?