Professional Development at The British Schools

Last February, our Junior School teaching staff had the opportunity to work with workshop leaders from Chile, USA, UK and Mexico on Assessment, Assessment in the Early Years, The Role of the Arts in the PYP and Transdisciplinary Learning.

These series of IBO-PYP workshops are part of the Professional Development strategic focus we work with in The British Schools. Members of the Pedagogical Middle Management Team, Early Years and Junior teachers shared the experience of attending these two Assessment workshops offered in the school campus. This workshops helped the staff to understand the role of assessment within an early year’s constructivist classroom, and to learn about the connection between assessment and concept-driven learning.  Identifying what students know, understand, can do and feel at different stages in the inquiry process requires careful gathering and analysis of information about student performance.

A group of representative members of the Junior Arts Department attended a workshop at Washington School in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The experience of collaborative practice with passionate and like-minded educators was very enriching. This workshop aimed to empower Arts specialists by gathering them together as one to engage in opportunities for deeper inquiry and reflective practices, and to continue to build their Arts knowledge.

Taking a step further to improve the Programme of Inquiry, our Spanish and PYP Coordinators participated in a workshop on Transdisciplinary Learning at Colegio San Ignacio de Recalde in Lima, Peru. This provided an extensive framework for designing and achieving transdisciplinary teaching and learning. During this workshop they looked at tools to map local curricula against the PYP documents.

We are looking forward to sharing more PYP news during the year.