Prac Teacher, Meet PYP planning session!

Wow.  I'm a dude, so what follows, (alluding to childbirth) is based on wild speculation rather than personal experience. 

Salvidor Dali probs nailed this idea.  I'm no lady, but pretty sure 'birthing' is like this.

'Birthing' a new unit within the PYP can be heart-wrenching at the best of times.  Tears have been known to happen. It's sweaty, messy and loud.  Ideas come and go with each panted breath. No-one can afford to be too precious.  The language used is not profane (heaven forbid) but it is heavily jargoned with PYP phrases.  'Birthing' sessions are fast.  They cover SO much ground in such a short time.  They take time to get anywhere significant, and almost suddenly they produce the goal... the light.. that beautiful first whimper of life.

In short - 'birthing' hurts, it can take time and if I were given the option, I'd TAKE the epidural.

Couldn't resist adding a picture of a newborn panda.  Today we didn't birth anything quite as cute.

We welcomed my prac student, Laura, into the birthing suite today.

Seems she still wants to be a teacher.  Good for her!  

What horrors we exposed a 3rd year prac teacher to:

 Today's session included: (by no means an exhaustive list)

• Crafting a Central Idea (Yes Jaggsy, we checked off the CI against the checklist)
• Agreeing upon the key concepts that we want driving the CI.
• Discussing at length which Learner Profiles and Attitudes would be our focus.
• Discussing how we could best incorporate new Australian Curriculum content and skills.
• Incorporating afforementioned content and skills into our Lines of Inquiry.
• Planning Backwards-By-Design-Style!  Hammering out a Summative Task for the end.
• Working backwards from the Summative task to figure out what Formative tasks (tied to our Lines of Inquiry) would up-skill our kids sufficiently for the Summative.
• Deciding what the specific Lines of Inquiry would be.
• Deciding what Transdisciplinary skills we would be focusing on throughout the journey.
• Discussing the difference between 'forces' and 'energy' to get it right in our heads.
• Ignoring Bruce's ongoing references to 80's supertunes.

About the stage where Bruce started to sing 80's classics to himself....

Yeah.  Welcome to THAT, praccy!

This afternoon, Laura didn't seem too phased by it all.  I think she'd was probably paddling under the surface of that water at a million miles an hour, but with a calm exterior, she decided that she'd like to start the Tuning In process as her first observed lesson.  We'll have only half the class, so she'd like to get the kids making collages from newspapers and magazines to show their prior knowledge.  Smooth.

We need to put epidurals in the staff fridge for days like today.  Not for the prac students, but for blokes like me who don't drop with man-flu as often as others, but who would love to feel nothing from the neck down next time we 'birth' a unit as a team.

Thanks for today to Team 4 (praccy included) who showed professionalism, patience and plenty of other positive attributes that I am sure could start with the letter P for alliterative purposes.