AISC 2024

The International Baccalaureate has renewed its focus on conceptual understanding, prompting our school to adopt a more concept-based inquiry approach towards the Primary Years Programme, in part inspired by the work of Rachel French and Carla Marschall. Despite being an established PYP school, we faced challenges in shifting students from merely sharing knowledge to achieving deeper, transferable conceptual understandings to prepare them for the future world. Over the past three years, we have implemented significant changes to our written and taught curriculum, embraced inductive teaching methods, and increased intentionality around the role of Conceptual Understandings. Our efforts aim to increase student voice, encourage intentional, conceptual questioning and increase engagement. We aim to elevate the prominence of concepts and create opportunities for real-world application, enabling students to generate ideas and take meaningful action now and in the future.

We will share our findings through a hands-on exemplar Unit to highlight some of the inductive teaching approaches we now utilise. You will also have the opportunity to see for yourselves how use of a tailor-made AI bot can support teachers in generating, adapting and evaluating teacher and student conceptual understandings.

Expected Outcomes:
*Approaches that bring student-generated conceptual understandings to the forefront of teaching and learning
*Ideas on how to evaluate conceptual learning through the use of AI
*An opportunity to reflect on our journey in order to make informed decisions about your next steps towards bringing greater conceptual clarity to learners