The Exhibition Online PD - The PYP exhibition in the SharingPYP Blog

Post 1: Using local leaders to launch the PYP exhibition

Comments/Questions:

Having experts from your local community to come in and inspire the students is a great idea! We have just carried out something similar within my own school in the lead up to exhibition - For many of our students the significant role that scientists play in our lives remains hidden.  The purpose of the speaker series therefore was to expose students to the world of scientists and technologists. To give our learners an opportunity to hear about the work that people in these fields are engaged in - including the skills they employ, the challenges they face and the impact of their work. Through this the learners gained a better understanding of how scientists see the world and interact with it and the experience sparked curiosity about the impact of scientific thinking on society and the planet.

I am also curious to know more about the workshops that you run in the lead up to exhibition - How does this work?

Post 2: Making the exhibition happen

Comments/Questions: I love the idea of Authentic transdisciplinary tasks. These give the students a purpose and all work towards the same goal. This is something that we are currently working towards at my school. You mentioned the students learning in Maths, Drama, Spanish, English and Art. Do you have different teachers for these areas? Does this require a lot of collaborative planning prior to beginning the exhibition process?

Post 3: Re-thinking the exhibition presentation

Comments/Questions: Thank you for sharing your students awesome presentations! This is often something that we struggle with and I look forward to sharing some of these ideas with my own students. I agree that planting the seed of creativity early is important and that students should be thinking about and planning how they will share their inquiry with the wider school community throughout the exhibition process.

Finding One - Workshops:

In the post ‘Using local leaders to launch the PYP exhibition’ I read about running a variety of mini-workshops that focused on useful areas of the PYP exhibition, including: collaboration, identifying concepts, taking action and thinking about all of their interests. This interested me as we often run workshops in Mathematics and Literacy to encourage students to be self-regulated learners but it is not something that we have trialled during exhibition. I think that being able to opt into workshops like this throughout the exhibition process would really benefit our students.

Finding Two - Exhibition Presentations:

As we are just starting the exhibition process with our students looking at different ways to present/share the exhibition process with our community is very relevant and timely. In the post ‘Re-thinking the exhibition presentation’ I read about how to get the students to convey the passion and excitement that they have for their inquiry. I hadn’t thought of challenging the students by removing all student work, displays etc. from the walls and telling the students that they were to think of their classroom as a blank canvas on which they would be designing their exhibition inquiry and eventually their exhibition presentation experience. Getting the students to think of their presentation as an ‘experience’ where the audience interacts with the facilitators is something that I am looking forward to trying.