While I have played witness to conflicts throughout my lifetime both at home and around the globe, the last 10 years working and living in Iraq, Turkey and Spain have challenged my worldviews significantly. As an international educator, I feel compelled to dig into concepts related to interculturalism, global citizenship and sustainability. We all experience the world differently given our own schema - funds of knowledge and identities. It is an ongoing endeavor to train my brain to listen for understanding as an open-minded observer: to understand other ways of seeing, hearing and doing as well as to accept these differences while looking for the commonalities. Then, it is our common humanity - human dignity that surfaces to the forefront for me. I can build cultural bridges for constructive relationship that work from a place of care and wisdom.  

My time in Iraq was impactful as I arrived during the war with DAESH. My students were daughters and sons of parents who had experienced the Baathist party's war on diversity, free speech and thought. This experience drove me to focus two of my research papers for the University of Bath doctoral program on Iraq so I could better understand the region, the constant turmoil that leads to waves of conflict and the history of my husband's Kurdish family. What I uncovered through touring the Kurdish north, teaching Kurdish children for 3 years during the ISIS war and then through my research is reflected in the image below.

To read more explore...

• https://halabjamemorial.org/ 
• https://www.newtactics.org/perspectives/amna-suraka-unexpected-place-healing/ 
  

In 2023, we immigrated to Spain for two years. My first trip to the Reina Sofia Art Museum, I got to spend time observing Picasso's work, Guernica (which I have now seen on 3 different occasions). I have to admit, at that time, I was ignorant about the Spanish history behind the painting entirely. The painting itself is massive with so much symbolism and I found it difficult to understand as I lacked the background knowledge. I knew quite a lot about World War II and had visited many memorials across Europe back in the 80's and later the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. I had read books and taken World History and Geography at the university. However, I had yet to understand the role of Spain, Franco and Spanish fascism during that time period as well as the history behind the Spanish Civil War. I had seen movies (in Spanish) that impacted me like Pan's Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno) and Butterfly's Tongue (La Lengua de las Mariposas). So like I have done in other countries I have immigrated to, I began to educate myself more about Spanish history by traveling and visiting museums to learn my host country's stories, perspectives and challenges.

 The Guernica Peace Museum [Museo de la Paz de Gernika], Spain
The trip to Gernika (Guernica) did not start as an inquiry into peace for me. It unfolded throughout the visit to the museum itself. It is a powerful museum that confronts the visitor with the concept of peace through an epistemological lens. Additionally, I made connections to my prior research that I did for my coursework at University of Bath as well as life experiences while living abroad.

​I spent a lot of time that morning slowly reading the various case studies highlight in the museum. These activists over the years who have fought for peace by advocating for freedom of speech (economic status, race, gender), equal representation (economic status, race, gender), an invitation to participate equitably in the legislative process and the access to equal rights for all. Provocative questions ran throughout the exhibition...

• What is peace? 
• At what cost do we (society) achieve peace? 
• Who pays the price for another groups’ peace?
• When peace is obtained at any cost, is it peace?
• What is the relationship between peace, participation,  representation and marginalization?

Then to experience the museum itself learning about the bombing experience, reading the stories of survival and loss. It provoked me in a good way. Since visiting this museum, I see the headlines and daily streams of news differently. I connect back to peace and then the macro-concepts of my research studies.

While there, I purchased this book by William Smallwood (pictured above) who was the first reporter to arrive and document the events from primary source survivors.

Hopes for a Sustainable World
As an international educator now for over 22 years, I have internalized a more global perspective that seeks to understand other cultures, countries and peoples rather than to categorize, label and de-value them through "othering" or by using a deficits-based lens. Over time, I have felt increasingly connected to the cultures and countries who have welcomed me to contribute to their society through residency. Now, I see the world increasingly intertwined, as interdependent sectors who can support and benefit from one another for a sustainable global future. I find myself fully aligned with the ideals of the United Nations as stated in these documents below:

​Universal Declaration of Human Rights
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Secondly, I recognize that I stand on the shoulders of so many women who came before me to fight for equal rights - the right to citizenship independent of a man, the right to vote, to own property, to have a bank account, to drive a vehicle, to travel independently, to determine a career path... it is a long list for certain.

Current global events challenge the very fabric of what I have taken for granted - the norms of honor, integrity, respect and global collaboration ever since the formation of NATO and the end of World War II. If we all have human rights, why do governments exclude demographics and excuse themselves from obligations to honor those rights with distinct people groups? Look at the following timeline:

• February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. I was in Turkey at the time and we received many displaced families. to our school. This war continues... and who knows what the outcome will be or when it will end. This war has put to test relationships within and between the EU, the USA and the NATO alliance in general at times. 
• October 2023, Israel went to war with Hamas, decimating the Palestinians of Gaza. This also continues with ongoing calls for humanitarian aid. It is heartbreaking to watch the suffering that is happening there.
• The USA by a sweeping majority, re-elected President Trump who took office once more in January 2025. Since taking office, there has been increasing polarization, threats, revenge tactics and a break-down in the democratic processes. I find the videos of ICE at work disturbing and upsetting.
• A glimpse of hope for the future of the USA in the election of a new mayor, Zohran Mamdani. He is an immigrant, a muslim, so intelligent, kind and a visionary reformer! He is showing the USA what democratic socialism looks like - when the government serves the people for the common good to make life easier. 
• There are widespread protests in Iran taking place that are resulting in many deaths.
• Now, January 2026, the rights of minorities in Syria including the Kurds (near and dear to my heart because of my husband), the Druze, Alawites and Christians. 

Global norms are shifting, cracking and begin to break down. The world as we know it may be changing beyond what Artificial Intelligence is changing. As an expat, it is hard to believe and accept. I am unable to accept the increasing rhetoric of hate as well as the ostracizing tactics that I hear coming from politicians in the country of my birth, the USA.

​What does one do in the face of polarizing political rhetoric?  Or the dehumanizing actions by government officials who we expect to protect us? Or the outright aggression that results in wars?​

The nagging in the back of my brain returns to the concept of peace. And the ways we can guide our students to be inquirers into the concept of peace. We cannot hide our students from what is happening in the world. One action international educators can take is to use the current events as points for an inquiry into peace. ​

Mathematics class was never a place where I felt curious, a sense of anticipation or even reasonably challenged within a zone that kept me motivated and mentally engaged. Memories of math class across K-12 do not bring warm, fuzzy feelings or a smile to my face. My relationship with numbers, problem-solving and equations was strained; it lacked joy and always struck feelings of fear and anxiety about incompetence and a lack of intelligence. When a colleague talked about math, my pulse would pick up immediately. Panic would start to set in. Every memory of elementary math class consists of rote memorization, a quiet classroom watching a teacher perform operations and then mimicking equations without any conceptual understanding of why. I really had no idea why we were doing some of these problems, what was their connection to my world and the purpose. We did math in the abstract. There was no reference made to relevance, a real life context or the ways in which I could apply that for real world problem-solving.

Over time math concepts and equations became increasingly inaccessible. Such that I could not access prior knowledge to make meaning. As a visual person, I know I understand something well when I can use visualizing strategies to synthesize my thinking. I found I lacked the knowledge to visualize representations (model) and reason through problems to find a solution. It was such a relief to listen to Dr. Jo Boaler describe math trauma as I realized I was not alone. Many others globally suffered the same feelings of inadequacy. K-12 math evokes memories of tears, arguments and extreme frustration for me. Because of my experiences with math, I determined that students in my care would not carry those same feelings. I determined to ensure my approach to teaching mathematics brought a spirit of joy, evoked curiosity and created motivation. I would do my utmost to ensure my students could access the concepts and make sense of the problems they faced. In order to do so, I had to unlearn and relearn so much of what I had been taught down to how I saw, visualized and comprehended numbers, digits, place value, and sentences. It was a messy process, challenging my efficacy, mindset and resilience but over time, I experienced the results. How it warmed my heart to hear my learners shout with joy because it was time for math on the schedule!

A door opens to a new approach...
Every class in the GMU postgraduate VA certification program framed its content around international education, the IB and the PYP. When I arrived in July 2013, one of my first three classes was Mathematics in International Schools. To be completely honest, this class utterly terrified me. I walked in to the first day of math class feeling highly anxious. Dr. Baker was the first person to introduce me to the idea that there are strategies for problem-solving. We spent 8 days together wrestling with problems in a constructive, psychologically safe classroom. I discovered I was not the only one feeling a deep lack of confidence which was comforting. Over 7 days, I learned math can be constructed, visualized, accessible and even fun. However, 7 days did not help me overcome my math anxiety from 16 years of memorizing and mimicking. It did not help me unlearn and relearn math strategies for Number Operations. I knew I had a long road ahead of me so I challenged myself to develop myself at a pace that I could cognitively process.

Assessment for Process Errors
Assessment in mathematics involves the process of solving a problem. You can see that the solutions we analyzed were all traditional algorithms. At this stage in my math journey, I found it  comforting to work with familiar problems. Our class analyzed student process to identify the error within the process that led to an incorrect answer. The idea is to use this information to map out the teaching and learning response to support the student to move forward. Years down the road, I will learn that reasoning through a problem for efficient, clever solutions uses a process but it does not have to be through an algorithm only.

Problem of the Day
Every day, Dr. Baker introduced the problem of the day as a contextual meaningful problem that we could all access and solve in the way that best suited us. We enjoyed these so much as a class! I took these back to Mexico and used them in a new after school club - Math club for grade 3-6. My students had not been exposed to math and over time, I found them looking forward to math club which gave me great joy! This was my first baby step towards becoming a math teacher and I celebrated the small wins.​

Returning to the Classroom to learn the PYP, August 2014
Halfway through my M. ED. program, I decided to take a courageous step to leave my home of 11 years in Cancun, Mexico. I was an empty-nester, separated and ready for a new adventure so I accepted a position as a PYP Grade 2 Homeroom teacher in Erbil, Iraq (the Kurdistan Regional Government) at İhsan Doğramaci Bilkent Erbil College. I left Cancun for Iraq just a couple months after the war with ISIS began in June 2014. Besides learning to facilitate transdisciplinary inquiry, this would be my first experience to teach math. In Mexico, only the Spanish teachers taught mathematics. However, I was determined to do well, so I rolled up my sleeves, invested the time and pushed forward.

At IDBEC, we had incredibly experienced teachers on our faculty who I collaborated with and learned from. Two of those math champions were Perico Pineda (IBEN) and Nicole Panoho on my Grade 2 Team. One thing I quickly realized about Nicole was how much schema knowledge she brought to her classroom. She had no math anxiety. On the contrary, she loved math and had learned to solve problems with a wide variety of strategies as part of her elementary and secondary education.

As our Grade 2 team leader, Perico brought a passion to differentiate for our diverse learners to ensure all our learners developed as mathematicians; he urged us to use our Team Teaching time to challenge learners at their appropriate levels. These two colleagues helped me to explore and use strategies to teach our learners. Together, we developed visuals as anchor charts to unify our grade level language so that when we were team teaching we were using the same approaches. These were really for me more than anyone else!! I used them to teach myself so I could model strategies for my students in small groups and coach them. 

What I did not yet understand: 

• the difference between strategies and models
• how to make math contextual
• teaching reasoning over simply explaining a procedure to follow (reliance on memorization)
  • using number talks to build reasoning skills without encouraging mimicking
• running a problem string
• the best way to use the tools or manipulatives in my classroom
• how to spiral mathematical themes to ensure everyone was challenged

Vertical vs Horizontal
Our faculty meetings rotated between classrooms where the hosting teacher presented a lesson or shared a best practice prior to the start of the agenda. One afternoon, Frank Lewthwaite (New Zealand origin), Grade 4 teacher, put an addition problem on the board as a vertical algorithm. He shared that his students found it impossible to solve problems unless they moved the numbers from a horizontal number sentence to a vertical addition algorithm. His talk challenged us to move beyond the vertical algorithm and wrote memorization to teach the children to see numbers flexibly. This short number talk played a role in shifting my thinking about problem-solving.

​Strategy Posters (more for me than my learners)

IDBEC Years 2 into Year 3
After the first year with my grade two, I began to make conceptual connections between number (visualizing groups & partitioning), multiplication, division, fractions and time. I decided to leave Time (Measurement strand) to the end of the year after we had a solid amount of experiences with partitioning and working with fair shares, equal groups or fractions of a whole (one item or a group of items). Because of this, I decided to experiment with spiraling the concepts. I created more activities that could serve as warm up or independent small group work. Students would practice visualizing a number they chose (usually rolling a dice or two) and then to move towards thinking about equal groups. I found these to be very effective and engaging. I would make sure they understood what to do in a small group and then reinforce in an independent group when I felt they grasped it. Because it was group work, my students always had support and felt empowered to get tools when needed or to ask for support from a classmate. By leaving the Measurement Strand of Time to the end of the year, I noticed it was much easier for my learners to grasp the concept. They could understand the 60 minutes divided up into chunks based on groups of 5 much better and learning to read a clock was easier.

VIS shared the evolution of their mathematics curriculum as it connects to the IP/PYP for an inquiry-based approach. Chinyelu's impression of VIS's approach to curriculum mapping moved her to share this with our PYP team. As a team, we agreed with her proposal to move in a similar direction.

​VIS mapped beyond knowledge, understandings and skills by including strategies for operations. This approach both scaffolds and spirals the strategies across the primary for complexity. It builds common language between classrooms and grade levels. The accessibility of the mapping supports differentiation and more targeted assessment. The alignment of approaches had the aim of bring about increasing consistency across the division. Below you can see an example of Grade 2. We created a map for every grade level aligning it to Ontario Standards which were more inquiry- based and easier to follow than the PYP Mathematics Scope and Sequence available at the time. The hyperlinks led a teacher to a visual example of the strategy specific to that grade level. These pictures were captured from classroom examples and stored in a folder on our Google Drive.

Because we had the math curriculum mapped out like this for each grade level, it was easier to see how to respond to assessment data so we could personalize the learning. For those working below grade level, a teacher could use the previous years overview; and likewise, for those working ahead, the teacher could differentiate by offering extensions from the next grade level.

Materials for Differentiation
We had many resources spread across different closets that were difficult to access.  Our teachers were working so hard (without a teaching assistant), I felt the need to make not only curriculum accessible but to ensure that tools and manipulative materials could be located quickly. So after getting a space approved, I invested the time to organize a room with shelves for shared materials. They were organized by discipline and then by strand. It was amazing to identify, organize and catalog so many resources that were available for scaffolding the learning. And, we freed up space in the homeroom classrooms by putting these materials in that shared space. Working with all the material in this way across the grade levels enabled me to see what kinds of tools are available and how we can differentiate more for our learners.

October 2019
A year prior to my arrival at IICS,  mathematics learning and teaching in the PYP had begun a transformational process under Rob Grantham, Greta Hazlett and Monica Hoge's leadership. Through the Curriculum Review Cycle, the IICS PYP team had identified mathematics as an area of focus for complete revision and ongoing professional development. Teachers were unhappy with the written curriculum as it was viewed as a long laundry list of knowledge to be taught and ticked off. They were more unhappy with the taught curriculum and the pedagogy of math visible in the learning community. There was clear room for improvement through an intentional alignment of beliefs, practices and knowledge. Professional Development faculty-wide to shift practices towards to teaching for understanding and reasoning was needed.

This led to a two-week Faculty In Residence program with math specialist, Johnnie Wilson, from University of California Santa Cruz. The entire PYP team participated in the residency. And the initiative continued forward driven by a team of motivated teachers committed to the aims laid out with the guidance of Johnie Wilson. The Math Task Force met regularly to develop the IICS approach to mathematics actively involving all teachers. What was the objective, their goal? 

• to create a mathematics curriculum grounded in current research and best practice
• to bring alignment between the program and pedagogy with the mission and beliefs about learning 
  • this manifested as 6 tenets to united the PYP team
• to prepare students for success as mathematicians; to shift mindsets based on a common belief that 'we are all mathematicians'

These teachers met regularly. It was a pleasure to join the team as an interim PYP Coordinator and jump into these meetings. I listened and observed eager to learn from my new colleagues. As a team, NZ Mathematics (now hosted by Australia) was selected as the program to follow because it was accessible, conceptual and strategies based without an enormous list of knowledge to teach. There was the added bonus of two teachers on the team who were thoroughly trained in the program. NZ Mathematics provided a scope and sequence, student profiles to track knowledge and skill development, teacher materials with lessons and assessment tools to track stages (GLoSS, IKAN and JAM). A Program of Inquiry for mathematics was organized to make all the information and resources accessible through a single document on Google Drive.

The Math Task Force lead the ongoing work, making decisions about curriculum, resources and professional development. Many teachers and students participated in an online YouCubed course by Jo Boaler on mindsets. The Task Force drew on the research of Drs. Jo Boaler, John Hattie, Jeremy Bruner, and Van Der Walle et al., as well as the framework documents of the IB PYP. The IICS pedagogical approach to mathematics was elaborated and shared with the wider learning community.

​NZ Maths Pedagogy was enriched with other resources: 

• Van der Walle Books K - 2 and 3-6
• Number Talks by Sherry Parrish
• Mathematical Mindsets Big Ideas K-6 by Jo Boaler
• Cathy Fosnot's Contexts for Learning 
• Rich Learning with Dan Finkel and the games in Math for Love
• Youcubed Tasks​
• Which one doesn’t belong?
• Would you rather?
• Estimation 180 - Great warm ups
• Visual Patterns
• Number Strings
• Choral Counting
• Math Visuals
• GFletchy Progression Videos
• Same or Different?
• Always, Sometimes, Never
• Open Middle - Rich Math Tasks
• Dan Meyer’s Three Math Acts - Rich Math Tasks
• Yummy Math
• Robert Kaplinsky Lessons - Rich Math Tasks
• Inside Problem Solving
• A+ Click Maths
• NRich Maths
• K5 Math Resources and Math Journals
• Math Learning Center - Apps
• Build Math Minds
• ​Math Strat Chat Collections: Follow Pam Harris on Social Media - StratChat - to solve the problem of the week
• Love Maths Games

NZ Student Profiles
These tools support tracking student progress through ongoing assessment. Maintaining one for each child allows the teacher to personalize the learning by keeping track of student progress.

Volunteering for Grade 6 Learning Support Math Groups
That same year, we had some students in grade 6 who needed math support in proportional thinking and fractions. There were knowledge gaps that prevented them from moving forward. I wanted to close those gaps and build confidence for reasoning proportionally. So I decided to participate in providing personalized lessons to get to know the students, the curriculum and build my math capacity. I used the data from the GLoSS Assessment to target specific knowledge and skills through inquiry-based lessons. Knowing my former colleague, Perico Pineda, was teaching grade 5 in Luanda, I reached out to him for some tips. He sent me images of some fractions lessons he was doing with his learners. These activities inspired me to work with my learners creatively and also build my own understanding of the ways of visualizing fractions.

Perico's ideas inspired the following activities that turned into lessons over the remainder of the school year even as we transitioned online with the arrival of the pandemic in March 2020. I used an inquiry-based approach to problem-solving to motivate these learners and they grew. They took risks, developed confidence to participate more actively resulting in more joyful mathematical thinkers. It was wonderful to see my students make improvements in proportional thinking when assessed on GLoSS. Closing those gaps enabled them to move forward.

Jumping forward a few years to 2024 when I was in the middle of Pam Harris' Developing Powerful Fractions 1 course, I believe I can see ways to spiral proportional thinking between fractions, decimals, percentages and ratios. Though, I still need a lot of practice to feel a strong sense of self-efficacy.

Equal Groups Activities
Some of these were designed for language learners to reduce the amount of language to read and through our math groups, we talked about the context together.
      For example, for 3 groups 6, we talked about the unit  - What will we draw? 

• children
• animals
• tools
• dots
• candy
• sports equipment

And then decided together so there was context built in through our math group. As the year progressed, many times I observed my learners giving context themselves as they chose how to visualize numbers. I recognize that by doing these kinds of activities to visualize number and solidify strategies, I was still not really teaching reasoning skills. I believe that came later when I began to take classes with Pam Harris. The way she models problem strings, and dialogue about reasoning is something I aim to develop in myself.

Unpacking NZ Stages - a deep dive analysis to understand assessment indicators 
Following a year in the classroom, I stepped back into the role of PYP Coordinator. I decided to take a deep dive in NZ Stages. I needed to unpack it all for myself so I could make sense of the program, the approach, the stages and the concepts. I needed to make sense each stage; what it meant in terms of knowledge (understanding & facts), skills and strategies for reasoning.

​In order to launch this, I reached out a former colleague from IDBEC, Hannah Moorehouse of New Zealand and who was back in NZ teaching and leading. She thought it would be helpful to look at some of the previous documents and pointed me to the NUMPA. She also pointed me to Twinkle where the NZ Maths Stages were available in a variety of forms such as Posters which I downloaded and posted on my wall.​

Unpacking NZ Assessment Tools
​Following a year in the classroom, I stepped back into the role of PYP Coordinator. I decided to take a deep dive in NZ Stages. I needed to unpack it all for myself so I could make sense of the program, the approach, the stages and the concepts. I needed to make sense each stage; what it meant in terms of knowledge (understanding & facts), skills and strategies for reasoning. 

I began to create a visual using a table to show:

• Stage
• Grade Level (which grade is targeting that stage for year end achievement)
• Expected problem-solving strategies for that developmental stage
• Basic facts and knowledge needed to apply problem-solving strategies at that stage

Once I organized the information this way, I hyperlinked supplemental resources so that this document could enrich the Mathematics Program of Inquiry. In the middle of this process, I continued my journey to unlearn and relearn math by taking my first courses with Pam Harris and Math-is-Figure-Out-Able. I could not resist after listening to two of my colleagues at the time. Lauren Graham and Breda Hayes (see picture below) would share their insights and enthusiasm for building their toolbox of strategies every time I had a chance to sit with them. Both Lauren and Breda inspired me to find my new worry free math self, to continue building my capacity and to relentlessly pursue the joy in 'mathematizing' (invented by Pam Harris). Kendall Jackson pictured with Lauren below inspired me to learn how to use the Rekenrek which I eventually did at Brewster Madrid using Cathy Fosnot materials as a guide. I value these people who inspire me to dig in for ongoing growth. Thank you!

I began with Pam Harris' free course, Developing Mathematical Reasoning. I loved this course so much, that I decided to take Building Powerful Multiplication. This led me to ponder more deeply about spiraling strategies across grade levels, and developing student capacity to become increasingly efficient, accurate and clever with using what they know to solve a problem without rote memorization. 

Unpacking NZ Assessment Tools
​So I then began to analyze the strategies and map those across the grade levels for common metalanguage. I wanted to show how the same strategy can be used on more complex problems while some strategies are stepping stones to more complex strategies. This personal inquiry helped me so much to engage with teachers about math as I felt I could speak their language and make connections to challenges they faced. 

One of these challenges was the assessment tool we used for our lower grades. The NZ JAM was organized in a way that felt inaccessible. Having previously used the SENA (see above), I felt the urge to rearrange the information for flow and accessibility. One major adaptation we made attended to the breadth of numbers to be assessed. Assessing numbers to 10000 in the JAM felt quite daunting for us so we decided to break the content into two separate assessments for numbers to 100 and then up to 1000 moving to 10000. A second adaptation we made attended to the order of the assessment content. We wanted to make it flow more developmentally so Early Years teachers could hone in on the concepts and facts that were more relevant to their age group.​

Personal Math Journal
Throughout all this time, I kept a math journal where I tried out problems and wrestled with strategies. I recommend having a notebook to keep as a reference point as you learn anything new. It is important to try out the strategies so you can own them - flex your math muscles and try out problems on your own. It is great to see the changes in my thinking and my ability to apply strategies that occurred over time.

At the launch of the Brewster Madrid campus, I had the opportunity to make critical decisions about the program. One of these was the decision to join the Concept-Based Inquiry Mathematics Pilot Project. While attending the CBI Lesson Labs Conference 2023 in The Hague, I listened excitedly as Rachel French unveiled the CBIM project. Now I had the chance to participate! I was drawn to this project a couple of reasons:

• It was aligned to the CBI in Action inquiry cycle: I proposed this inquiry cycle to our team and they embraced the idea so it was a natural alignment.
• It would serve as a tool to support capacity building for the team to become CBI facilitators. Everyone also had a copy of Concept-Based Inquiry in Action.
• Understandings for each strand and phase or grade level are articulated and developmentally appropriate. This means teachers could structure the class to support their students to generalize about mathematics.
• The unit flow for each strand was designed for accessibility of the user and easily navigated.
• The responsiveness of PLI over time - I believed confidently in Rachel's team at PLC to build a quality math program and respond to feedback from participating schools to make improvements.
• I was eager to participate in a math program that aimed at conceptual understandings with meaningful, relevant problem-solving through CASE STUDIES!
• I believed this program would in the end, make the life of our teachers less stressful. My previous schools had so much curriculum, it overwhelmed! I wanted to reduce for a less is more approach. I wanted to work with a sustainable math program that would provide a common metalanguage and process to spiral across the Lower School.

At the introductory call, our team met with Kelvin Sparks, the math specialist shaping the program. We shared our challenge of opening a new school with zero assessment data on anyone. We needed to know as much about our students as quickly as possible so he suggested we continue with the NZ Assessments. So we began to track NZ Stages while building our understanding of the CBI Phases. 

The decision to join the CBIM project turned out to be precisely what I had hoped for. All the reasons for which I chose this direction came to fruition with the seeds of CBI popping up on the walls, the digital portfolios, conferences and in learning conversations.

​An inquiry into Visualizing Groups: Subitizing Leads to Groupitizing, and then Unitizing
This idea of Visualizing Groups fascinated me as once again, I was keenly aware of how much I had missed in my own children for a rich math education. Charaine Poutasi, our Early Years 3-4 teacher at IICS, used ten frames and student pictures to take attendance each day. She stressed to me the importance of asking, 'What do you see?' over "How many are there?"  I watched how she organized her playful lessons to spiral around subitizing. The impact on these learners by the time they reached grade 1 was impressive. They knew so much about number by then from a deep sense of understanding, not from a place of habit, memorization or mimicking. This captivated me! So, I finally made some time to dig into this idea. I needed to understand it more deeply especially after Jo Boaler released Mathish. There she highlighted new research on the idea of groupitizing!

Subitizing
Kaufman et al. first coined the term subitizing back in 1949 (Guillaume et al., 2023). Subitizing means learners develop the ability to instantly recognize and see patterns. Humans naturally have the ability to see and group numbers (Boaler, 2024). It is “considered as one of the core systems of numbers since it allows the precise representations of distinct objects” (Guillaume et al., 2023, p. 1). “Subitizing plays a critical role in the development of numerical skills, mostly in helping young children grasp the meaning of the first number words” (Guillaume et al., 2023 p. 1). We begin working with learners through subitizing and patterns over counting from 1 by posing these types of questions:

• How do you see that?
• What do you see?

This emphasis sets the children's focus on what they see and not to habitually begin counting from one. Subitizing is a skill that begins in the early years and continues throughout primary school. It develops the mental flexibility to easily make ten which can then be applied to 100, 1000 and greater when we scale up or down to decimals. Subitizing opportunities can be organized using dots, or patterns with any kind of object as well as pointing out nature or and the patterns around us in the world. It is a skill that can be practiced all the way through fifth grade with disappearing pictures of groups on a slides at which point, you have probably moved your learners to groupitize. Build Math Minds provides many nice ideas for building this skill.

Groupitizing
McCandliss et al. first coined the word ‘‘groupitizing’’ to capture the idea of “capitalizing on grouping cues during enumeration” (2010; Starkey and McCandliss, 2014). Starkey and McCandliss refer to “a phenomenon in which enumeration speed is enhanced by the presence of grouping cues, especially those that cue the presence of subsets in the subitizing range” (2014, p 122). Pam Harris defines groupitizing as the ability to use strategic grouping to parse arrays into subitizing chunks (2024). Jo Boaler explains these as “powerful mental models that are visual and physical and also foundational for a rich and deep understanding of mathematics” (2024, p. 142). Boaler goes on to highlight the importance of developing learner ability to use visual representations both physically and mentally as this has been found to be a powerful indicator for high achievement on high stakes math tests (Boaler, 2024, p. 144).
 
This is a strategy we want to encourage as it supports visualization strategies for sense-making with numbers. When we work with seeing groups (subsets) inside of 2-, 3-, and 4-digit numbers visually, we are groupitizing. We may also be working with groupitizing when we begin to think about fair shares and equi-partitioning. Here is a subitizing/ groupitizing resource or in these slides. Youcubed and Mahesh Sharma of Mathematics for All also have some resources.

Unitizing
“Fractions are relationships: they are defined in relation to an implicit or explicit whole or unit” (Neagoy, 2017). While unit is the root word, unitizing refers to the flexible thinking students begin to attain when thinking about the unit and it usually begins around third grade (Neagoy, 2017). According to Neagoy, “unitize means to separate, transform or classify something into discrete units” (2017, p. 85). Susan Lamon explains it further, “Unitizing refers to the process of constructing mental chunks in terms of which to think about a given quantity” (2020, p. 109). Lamon illustrates this with a 24 pack of drinks: How do you visualize that 24 pack? As 2 twelve-packs, 4 six-packs or 1 whole pack of 24? The way students chunk that visually affects the way they think about the quantity (Lamon, 2020).
 
The term unitizing applies to how we see fractions in relationship to the whole - the unit. A fraction is a quantity or a value. It is not a whole number. It is a small portion of a proportion of something - the unit. It is when we identify the unit of measure or the whole; we always identify a fraction that represents a unit of a whole. It is very important to always understand through unitizing what that whole thing is. Is the unit referring to one granola bar or a group of 5 granola bars? This supports making meaning for the fraction identified.
 
“The concept of a whole underlies the concept of a fraction.” (Behr and Post 1992, p. 213)
 
Continuous units: time, length, area, volume
Discrete units: sets or collections
Composite units: single entities that contain within them a set of items (case of cokes, dozen eggs)
Fractional units: the unit itself is a fractional quantity (i.e. ¼ km, ½ hour)

References

​Behr, M. J., & Post, T. R. (1992). Teaching rational numbers and decimal concepts. In T. R. Post (Ed.), Teaching mathematics in grades K-8: Research-based method. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Boaler, J. (2024). MATH-Ish: Finding creativity, diversity and meaning in mathematics. Harper One.

Guillaume, M., Roy, E., Van Rinsveld, A., Starkey, G.S., Uncapher, M.R. and McCandliss, B.D. (2023). Groupitizing reflects conceptual developments in math cognition and inequities in math achievement from childhood through adolescence. Child development [Online], 94(2), pp.335–347. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13859.

Harris, P. (2024).  Building powerful fractions [Online]. Pam Harris Consulting, LLC. https://www.mathisfigureoutable.com/

Lamon, S. J. (2020). Teaching fractions and ratios for understanding: Essential content knowledge and instructional strategies for teachers, 4th ed. Routledge.

McCandliss, B. D., Yun, C., Hannula, M., Hubbard, E. M., Vitale, J., & Schwartz, D. (2010). Quick, how many? fluency in subitizing and “groupitizing” link to arithmetic skills, Poster Presented at the Biennial meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Denver, CO, USA.

​Neagoy, M. (2017). Unpacking fractions: Classroom-tested strategies to build students’ mathematical understanding. ASCD.

Starkey, G.S. and McCandliss, B.D., 2014. The emergence of “groupitizing” in children’s numerical cognition. Journal of experimental child psychology [Online], 126, pp.120–137. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2014.03.006.

Cognitive Load Theory and Time
And as I reflect on this 12 year Math Journey, which remains ongoing, I reflect on the time it has taken me to undo years of bad instruction. I still get nervous when someone mentions a math problem that I don't quickly understand, I have not arrived! But there is good news, I regularly now make ten mentally to solve problems quickly. I multiply and divide by ten to make the numbers more accessible. I think about larger chunks naturally. I have built a bank of strategies and models to use regularly and I enjoy working through problems, making mistakes, figuring out my error and moving forward. I have clear goals to continue building my own capacity as a mathematician.

I decided to share my Math Journey because I know I am not the only one and sharing our stories will help learn more about how teachers can overcome challenges. As I processed my journey, I began to realize something critical about resistance - there are hidden reasons for resistance and I am beginning to wonder if it is connected to cognitive load theory. The greatest lesson I am pulling from taking the time to articulate my personal learning journey is that this process took significant time. Content had to be made accessible to me over time in chunks. I could not process it all at the start. Going back to 2014 in Iraq, I remember the panic, the ringing in my ears moments where I mentally shut down. Panic would set in because of the extreme lack of self-efficacy as a mathematician. There were nights I would sit by myself and cry out of frustration, embarrassment and desperation.

Learning can be far from a neat, linear process. It can resemble a winding path with unexpected turns, requiring resilience and persistence to navigate. Each challenge and setback presents an opportunity for growth, pushing learners to adapt and develop a deeper understanding. As professionals, there are always ways we can push ourselves to evolve, and we have to recognize the supports we need to survive the messiness of the learning journey. If we as educators can embrace the process it can be so enriching and we experience the transformation. Embracing the complexities and uncertainties of the learning journey can lead to more meaningful insights and a stronger grasp of the subject at hand. By cultivating a mindset that welcomes mistakes as stepping stones, means we are authentically recognizing when we fall short and modeling this mindset for our community. This fosters a resilient approach that ultimately leads to personal and community success.

As I ponder working with teachers, I think on these:

• Funds of Knowledge and Identity
• Schema; Memories; Emotions connected to those memories
• Mathematics Understanding (knowledge, skills, processes, strategies, facts combined)
• New Curriculum - every school means learning a new curriculum 
• Mindset
• Cognitive Load Theory - Where is the correct starting point?

I am left with these questions which may surface as I work on my thesis: 

• How can I get to know the teachers I work with in a similar way I would get to know my students in a classroom?
• How can we as a learning community make decisions about professional development in response to learning needs and are accessible to the teachers? An approach for less panic, and more baby steps moving forward
• What ways can we leverage agency for addressing gaps (known/unknown)? No shame, just support!​​

GAP YEAR PLANS
Now that I am in a gap year, I am pondering what my next learning community will be curious about and what mathematics will look like. I know that I am interested in moving increasing towards ongoing assessment over spending hours and hours on summative assessment. The benefit of having growth markers against a baseline data point is that schools can track assessment growth over time and identify trends. Secondly, transparent assessment data supports shared ownership for learning. As a team, we can respond to the data and meet the needs of the learners. 

However, there is a downside to these. Number interviews take so much time; most times about 45-50 minutes. They generally lead to someone (like me, a learning support team member or a teaching assistant) pulling children for the teacher to conduct the interview. If it is a learning support team member then that person is not supporting students in their learning and their time is traded for assessment. I am unsure now if that is a valuable use of their time. It also means the homeroom teacher has not seen the student perform the assessment tasks. They are given a report with assigned stages thus internalizing what the assigned stages mean slows down drastically. I want to figure out an efficient system that allows us to track over time based on daily math observations and interactions. Our teachers work so hard so finding ways to improve our efficiency will ease the load. 

​I am so grateful to trusted colleagues like Christine Lewthwaite, Perico Pineda, Nicole Panoho of IDBEC; to Linda Allen and Chinyelu Ndubisi, of MEFIS; to Lauren Graham, Charaine Poutasi, Breda Hayes, Michelle Dirlik, Nichole Krissman, Rob Grantham, Monica Hoge and Greta Hazlett of IICS; and Olivia Popovitch, Celeste Hinshaw and Melanie McClean of Brewster Madrid all of whom supported me through moments when math anxiety unexpectedly surfaced, many times unbeknownst to them!​

The collaborative work to create 6 interdisciplinary units for grade 6 began out of two needs. One, to generate 6 new units for our Murcia campus grade 6 students to investigate in the upcoming school year. Our second motivation stemmed from a need to become more effective at supporting language development for our grade 6 Chamberi students. As a school, we wanted to begin a shift in mindset from pull-out English support to integrated intentional language support for all within every discipline. This would increase alignment to the language policy which stated, 'every teacher is a language teacher.' We saw an opportunity for the Middle School English class to integrate with social studies and science contexts using a CLIL (Content & Language Integrated Literacy) approach. This means targeting the genre to read and produce. And following this by utilizing the interdisciplinary unit contexts for accessing and/or developing academic vocabulary for production and communication development.

The Goal: make language accessible for student language development for production and communication AND improve the efficiency of the MS Team by not creating distinctly new contexts across disciplines.

Here were began the final steps of identifying the central ideas and additional understandings. Because I am a certified CBCI trainer, I was able to walk us through the process by scaffolding highly conceptual Level 3 understandings that will require students to dive into deep research and use their thinking skills for evaluating, analysing and connection making to draw conclusions.

Below is the final set of units that were designed for launch this school year. Implementation implies ongoing collaboration through regular meeting to discuss how research unfolds, what questions arise and how subject teachers are approaching the inquiry. Connections to local and global contexts to address each conceptual lens can be supported through collaboration with teachers and the local community networks. 

Overall, this was such a rewarding experience for us all. Most of our team had not had experience with this approach to curriculum mapping. Our work to bridge Lower and Middle School approaches to teaching and learning made interdisciplinary teaching more accessible for the team. Because I was able to make the process supportive through accessible tools and templates, the energy to engage never diminished, motivation and commitment remained high to see the initiative through. I look forward to hearing about these units over time and how teachers are collaborating to bring them to life for meaningful research, dialogue, debate, writing pieces and student action. This is an example of what CBCI training does. It opens doors to thinking conceptually!

When we opened Brewster Madrid, I shared a vision for a community of learners who worked together efficiently and effectively so that everyone felt supported. This was how I envisioned achieving our mission to see that every learner of all ages thrived. By establishing a Lower School on the idea of relationships before program, and communicating a strong sense of shared ownership for the learning and teaching process, I was able to guide our team to fully implement systems for learning, teaching and assessment.

In July 2023, I introduced our founding Lower School team to the principles of Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction (CBCI) based on the works of Drs. Erickson and Lanning. As an Erickson & Lanning CBCI certified trainer, I used our Brewster Summer Institute (BSI) to begin making conceptual teaching and learning accessible to our team. We started with establishing an initial understanding of the role of generalizations, their structure and levels or depth of understanding. Generalizations serve as an assessment tool from which we can respond to through scaffolding the thinking process. This impacts our planning process. When there is an intention to harvest generalizations, the planning process needs to change so that can become a reality.

These themes formed the foundations for our deep dive into inquiry-based learning for conceptual understanding. Every teacher received a copy of Carla Marshall and Rachel French's book, Concept-Based Inquiry in Action: Strategies to Promote Transferable Understanding. Our school joined the Concept-Based Inquiry Mathematics (CBIM) pilot project to begin to dive into CBI through the lens of mathematics. My hope was that this participation would support teacher understandings over time of how the inquiry cycle works, and the intentions behind its design. By the second year, under the guidance of our NEASC visitors, we established Concept-Based Inquiry (CBI) as our first pedagogical anchor, the pedagogy that we would see in action daily. This anchor became one of 4 anchors:

1. Concept-Based Inquiry
2. Approaches to Learning
3. Progress Monitoring & Reflection
4. Inclusive Classroom (UDL & Differentiation)

Our Early Years program, while inspired by the pedagogy of play, honors the principles of CBCI. We know our early learners can be thinkers. They can think about their play and express understandings as emerging communicators. Between 2023-2025, our team came to in-service training days with open-minds, carefully and thoughtfully considering the concepts of play, space, playful (more teacher-led) and play-based learning. Through reflection, we continually unpacked the ways in which we can plan for play: 

• play invitations
• play provocations
• continuous provisions 

There were ongoing discussions about the documentation of what was observed for learner ownership, participation, reflection and parental involvement.

• the hard copy portfolio - intended to be student-led
• the digital Toddle portfolio - parent involvement and feedback
• the documentation on the walls and bulletin boards - teacher- and student-led

During planning meetings, we slowly unpacked the ideas behind play-based learning endeavoring to elaborate an evolving Philosophy of Play personalized to our learning program. We want a program where we can follow and respond to the developmental needs of the child. This means introducing them to literacy and numeracy concepts when they demonstrate readiness - knowing our learners well to keep them challenged.

The tension lies between our need to be teachers (i.e. to teach phonemic awareness, phonics, the elements of a story) and play without reconciling what that can look like through play. The tensions are real! As teachers learn to facilitate play there is a struggle to identify their role. And it is through patience and ongoing support that each teacher can find the space to wrestle with their individual tensions and explore ways to employ continuous provisions for symbolic exploration and expression. I am thrilled with how far our team has come in their understandings. We have high hopes for program as we continually unpack the needs of our learners and their development.

Progress Monitoring & Reflection
There was a lot of mental tug of war as our team began to dive into the UK Birth to 5 Matters with increasing intention to make sense of those developmental parameters and align those with the observable skills identified in the PYP Early Years Approaches to Learning. We wanted to build an understanding of the two documents so that we could document what we saw, speak to developmental progress based on observations in alignment with stages and help parents understand how learning happens through play. An ongoing project, we continue to consider are the Approaches to Learning and their connection with Birth to 5 Matters for developmental growth tracking. We currently are pondering these questions:

• What tools will help us track learner development efficiently?
• How can we organize the information in those documents for accessibility?
• How can we track development to guide our play plans such that both students and parents are aware of the developmental progress we observe?

Over these two years, our EY team's curiosity about how to plan for play while making connections to our units of inquiry has led us to dialogues about process, efficiency and learner agency. We aimed to document learning in a way that our learners can connect to their contributions. We also wanted our parents and families to feel connected and informed through our Toddle digital portfolios. It can become overwhelming if we don't find the right approach.

• By creating Walls of Understandings, we can share the learning story with our families and make the learning visible to our community.
• Through group learning stories, we can communicate our observations about early childhood development: the emerging knowledge and skills, the approaches to learning and the whole child's physical development.
• The individual hard copy portfolio become places to store the artifacts chosen by the learners. It is accessible to the child to peruse and reflect on. And its relevance will grow over time as they build connections to tracking their learning journey over time.

In August 2023, outdoor play presented a challenge for our team as we lacked sufficient equipment and storage. As a new school, we had not been able to participate in planning the outdoor spaces. When we saw what had been organized by the architect, we were uncertain of how to create a welcome space for all ages. The equipment selected was limited, lacking the ability to develop strength and the vestibular system (equilibrium, balance). We were overwhelmed by what we lacked: a mud kitchen, creative play spaces and a storage shed to teach our learners how to care for the equipment for sustainability. It was difficult to make the space stimulating and engaging. Unintentionally, we found ourselves focussed on controlling the play area with lots of rules and increasingly eliminating risky play opportunities.

Through collaboration with the facilities team and our senior leadership, we were able to get some equipment built. Using the discarded pallets, Juan Carlos built us a mud kitchen, three mini-markets, benches and a mark-making house. These additions began to transform the play though we still lacked the storage to maximize the spaces and the Tuff trays. Most of the equipment was getting abused and worn out by the rocks and the type of dirt we had. We prepared a space for digging dirt to be delivered but was unable to get that approved due to the shortfalls in the budget. 

Our play consultant, Duane Smith, offered the teachers advise on ways to use what we had access to through a continuous provisions approach. By responding to the play observed, teachers can stage the play before children arrive. This system took time for our team to adapt to and slowly, slowly, all this equipment began to shift and move locations. We realized the Tuff Tables needed to be far away from the rocks and mud so that they could be used for blocks and other play invitations. We moved the mark-making table out of the garden and onto the patio to put chairs around it for reading and drawing outside. We saw the children building fairy houses in the trees, using their imaginations creatively.

Planning forward with a significant increase in enrollment for September 2025, we were targeting more didactic materials for outdoor play including oversized blocks, tools for building ramps, large outdoor games, and a new mud kitchen to make sure all children could find materials and something to draw their curiosity. Because of the heritage building, getting swings requires more permitting. Over time, there is hope to replace the seesaws with open space for more flexibility. And to remove the equipment in the sandpit. There is hope to have that in place within a year or two.

In January 2025, we finally got a storage shed installed. It was exciting to organize it so that we could begin teaching the children how to care for their play materials. We wanted to find the way to allow for full access with our learners practicing care and responsible choices.

Our greatest resource was found in our consultant, Duane Smith of Early Learning in Education, who carries a full career heavily invested in the early years teaching and learning. We consulted with Duane in the second year of the school and program launch. He spoke from experience building immediate rapport and igniting curiosity from our EY team. He inspired our entire team to rethink how we defined play, how we used the spaces and to challenge our team to provide for a wide variety of childrens' play needs through continuous provisions.

The Formation of Strategy Teams: Curious, Persistent, Creative
We divided up into small working groups to take ownership for driving the documentation of our philosophical and pedagogical approach: best practice research, content, strategies, skills for clear scope and sequence documents. As a completely new program, we had to ensure alignment across the grades. This would also ensure that our practices reflected the sales pitch our parents heard. 

What documents needed articulation?

• Collaboration in the Lower School: This document encompassed all of our Essential Agreements for interactions, ongoing meetings (a wide variety of types of meetings), homeroom/specialist responsibilities for tier 1 instruction, steps to collaborate with learning support for tier 2 or 3 support, approaches to behavior issues, playground agreements, etc. Over two years, this document expanded to articulate all expectations clearly.
• Assessment Handbook: This document encompassed our approach to assessment elaborating our cycles of reporting through conferences or formal student reports. It also elaborated ways to conduct assessment, to triangulate data and how to use assessment to make decisions about teaching and learning.
• Language & Literacy Scope and Sequence: This document encompassed our beliefs about language development and literacy instruction. We strove to align to the Science of Reading through Structured Literacy and the application of a functional approach using Systemic Functional Linguistics. It explained the strands that must be included in the homeroom practices each week for holistic literacy instruction. It also elaborated the AERO standards and UK Birth to 5 Matters for the Early Years. This document also included our host country, the Spanish Language for homeroom teachers to be informed.
• Philosophy of Play: This document opened the discussion to our Early Years team and how we would approach learning and teaching in Kinder 1, 2, 3 and into grade 1. We had to learn a holistic, developmental program that made space for play with a team who had not been exposed to play-based learning yet. In the document, we defined play and playful guided by Harvard Project Zero's newest publication. Then we began to unpack over the next two year, through ongoing training, what continuous provisions implies; how we can invite, nudge and provoke interest; the role of the teacher and the role of the student. Over time, we wanted to have the resources and spaces for play-based learning to always be available to all ages on campus. 
• Mathematics Essential Strategies: This supporting document encompassed our approach to reasoning by developing skills for problem-solving through strategies that build and extend upon one another. This aligned to NZ Mathematics and Pam Harris' resources for problem strings as well as her top models and strategies document. Our school chose to participate in the CBI Mathematics Project Pilot which would take time for us to fully understand and internalize the phases and understandings. So, it remained important to us to map out our strategies and models sequentially.
• Documents launched after school start:
  • Technology Usage / Digital Citizenship / Scope and Sequence
  • Social and Emotional Learning / Safeguarding and Child Protection

The Design of our Initial Program of Concept-Based Inquiry

As a CBCI consultant, I took the team through the introduction to teaching for conceptual understanding. We reviewed the Structure of Knowledge, the role of facts and concepts, the ways to identify a concept. Then we reviewed the purpose of learning to scaffolding the thinking by assessing generalizations. It is important to understand why we generalize and how we assess those generalizations - statements of understanding. Then we reviewed the the types of questions we can pose.

Additionally, every teacher was provided a copy of Concept-Based Inquiry in Action which became our guide for a book study throughout the school year. Also, we frequently referred to it during collaborative planning meetings when thinking about strategies to use at each stage of the cycle. To further support this process, our team also joined the CBI Mathematics Project which organizes units aligned to the same cycle for inquiry leading to generalizations as a form of assessment.
​
Using the Standards that we had agreed upon, we began to identify the concepts that we could use to build a program of inquiry. It was a messy process with lots of sticky notes and moving concepts around. We began with science and then added social studies until we could identify the conceptual lens that would be the driver of the unit. This would allow for authentic connections by specialist teachers. This was an initial attempt with almost all teachers new to inquiry-based learning except two. There was great enthusiasm as we brainstormed in small teams the units of inquiry for the upcoming launch. As small groups began to present their units of inquiry, they share their reasoning for the units and how they drew upon the standards. Others across the team provided feedback for further revision or adaptations. I chose to take a supportive stance even when I saw some units as potentially challenging for one reason or the other so that teachers could thoroughly experience the process of creating a unit, rolling it out and then later reflecting and revising based on their own experiences with the units of inquiry. 

Time and ongoing support would be the strategies that we would rely upon to build strategies and tools for full implementation. Our team as well as our brand new incoming cohorts of students faced a sharp learning curve. The majority of our students transferred because of a learning challenge and they had never been exposed to inquiry-based learning. It would take time!

In June 2024, we conducted a vertical and horizontal review of our Program of Concept-Based Inquiry to improve our units of inquiry as transdisciplinary learning opportunities. Our review process intentionally uses processes to provide participation that is authentic and agentic. I want to see teachers in reflective conversation about practice and content. This yields meaningful changes for improvements. Taking the time to make it interactive always pays off. Teachers are active, on their feet, observing, discussing and making notes. This brings the level of energy up, engagement increases and participation is more meaningful.

Ongoing professional development on restorative practices conducted by one of our team members. This was supported by further development of our handbook on learning support as well as identifying a curriculum framework to include in our program - Second Step with Safeguarding and SEL Curriculum Standards and Benchmarks by ICMEC and CASEL.

I facilitated ongoing professional development on Systemic Functional Linguistics after school to make SFL relevant and accessible. These lessons were organized for a grade 2 classroom level; however, the lesson lab experience opens doors to ideas for ways to make adjustments for different levels of challenge.

End of Year Professional Growth Reflection
In June of 2025, our Lower School team dedicated time to reflect once more. This time, I organized a reflection that focussed on a continuum of personal growth and development through the lens of our pedagogy. If you click through the images below, you will see examples of the continuum (beginner to world class). Based on feedback from our NEASC visitor, we had focussed our program on 4 pedagogical anchors as follows: 

• Concept-based Inquiry
• Approaches to Learning
• Inclusion and Differentiation
• Progress Monitoring and Reflection

I asked our team members (including myself) to honestly consider personal strengths and potential areas for growth. Areas for growth can be seen as opportunities to explore and extend on what we know now. They do not have to be seen as a weakness. The objective was to end the school having given thought to goals for development and making those reflections visible to our community. This information would inform the faculty meetings calendar for PD as well as the identification of resources for supporting PD.

This image above highlighted by Julie Stern on LinkedIn was helpful for guiding our conversations with a trusted colleague. I encouraged everyone to partner up with a trusted colleague to discuss how they were growing and what personal goals he/she might be considering to move their learning journey forward. Everyone on our team participated, including myself. The energy in the room was engaging. Teachers were reflecting, writing reflections and sharing honestly with one another. Exit tickets were used by each individual to identify personal strengths and areas for growth.

UPDATE:
Unfortunately, I was unable to see this endeavor through due to sudden layoffs over the summer of July 2025. It is terribly sad when one invests so heavily in an organization (knowledge, skills, schema and passion) and cannot see the results or impact of the vision-casting and investment - all the hours dedicated (evenings, weekends, vacations), the intellectual knowledge and the energy. The school's value of caring (integral to the guiding statements) did not manifest in the financial management or strategic planning of the institution. 

When I launched the program with our team, we spoke of taking 5-6 years to develop our team's collective capacity to facilitate concept-based inquiry using an embedded language approach. We believed that all teachers are language teachers so developing our capacity to use strategies that support that was a significant aim that would require ongoing sustainable support. Our homeroom teachers were learning to provide critical structured literacy lessons. Secondly, we wanted to develop our ability to facilitate reasoning by integrating the Problem Strings recently published by Pam Harris and Math-is-Figureoutable with the CBI Mathematics project. These goals were no small endeavor whatsoever; however, I bid the school farewell. I look forward to the next learning community in whom I will have the opportunity to inspire and pour my energy into; a community with belonging, care and financial sustainability.

After our first week of Distance Learning (DL), I felt proud of our school's professionalism, commitment to learning and especially to the general wellbeing of our entire community (students, teachers, leaders and parents). Our team pulled together and worked hard to find solutions. The Learner Profile came alive in our staff. No-one on our team had previous experience with conducting DL sessions for primary students. Many of us have experienced DL as learners through the various professional development courses offered (i.e. online masters courses, IBO courses, etc.) but facilitating it is another issue entirely. Everyone demonstrated commitment, open-mindedness and risk-taking while relying on colleagues to support them along the way. Fortunately for our learning community, we were able to provide every student with a Macbook or iPad from school which helped us to avoid many potential issues with technology connections and software.

As COVID-19 began to spread slowly from China, our school took steps to begin preparations for launching a balanced DL program aligned not only to our mission and vision but also to 3 core values we identified as a team: continuity of learning, keep us connected as a learning community and make sure it both sustainable manageable for community wellbeing. After the first week of DL, we made adjustments for sustainability to our DL program expectations. Above all, this is one of the biggest take aways for me, the need for flexibility, growth mindset and the ability to think creatively and strategically about best practice teaching in the digital environment.

​Our learners are at the heart of the triangle; we seek to facilitate the learning and teaching so that our learners are successful in this new environment. This meant all hands on deck working to create content, learning new platforms and introducing students to an entirely different system for learning. Besides being involved in multiple meetings and joining grade level morning meetings on Google Hangouts, I made myself busy creating digital read aloud videos aligned to the current units of inquiry or to the approaches to learning, key concepts and learner profile of the IB PYP. Now I feel like a pro on iMovie. I've also learned how to ScreenCast. Next, I will be learning how to conduct a math group session on Google Hangouts while sharing my screen. So much to try and so much to learn, but I'm determined to figure it out and be successful so our students feel successful. 

Areas to consider for your program:

• Child protection - ways to stay connected safely, limiting how we expose little ones to social media, digital citizenship
• ​Wellbeing - providing creative ways to learn without screen-time (play-based learning, tinkering and maker ideas, forest school approaches; fostering the joy of reading); providing staff with time to unplug, rest and see to their wellbeing; getting the counselor involved with checking in on isolated international teachers
• Community - sustain the sense of community through department and grade level check-in meetings with leadership; communicate consistently through morning messages from leadership; respond to emails as quickly as possible to ease anxiety and stress; schedule a staff get together in the virtual realm each week (happy hour)
• Share the load - Encourage teaching teams to split up the disciplines/content; one takes mathematics/number, one take unit of inquiry and one takes literacy/language. Encourage Teaching assistants to get involved with giving feedback and monitoring student posts on Seesaw. Encourage staff to maximize their capacity to collaborate for their own wellbeing.
• Consolidate learning over new material - perhaps focus on consolidating learning from past lessons at this time rather than introducing new material; focus on conceptual understandings and deepening them in mathematics, language and extending on inquiry skills;
• Routines - supporting students in establishing a routine at home and a place to learn with all their materials easily accessible to them.
• Schedule - a balance between synchronous and asynchronous learning engagements, a balance between school programming and allowing for flexibility at home to meet the demands of the family. 
• Resources - provide key or strategic resources to staff for immediate launch (login list for paid sites, quick training sessions to up-skill, specific platforms to begin using first; tools for staff collaboration and communication); encourage learning support staff to support differentiation needs; prevent teachers from being flooded with resources that lead to lost time following rabbit holes
• Framing the lessons - do not forget about the ways children learn (make the goal clear, access prior knowledge and provide context, provide new information, provide a means of application, and review the goal). I have always used Jane Pollack's approach to planning a lesson mentally in my mind; it is worthwhile considering her GANAG model as you facilitate digital lessons. See the lesson plan template below for reference.

It is not my custom to write about concepts in terms of only one nation but recently these concepts have been at the forefront of my thinking and reflection. As I watch the news or read about the issues arising daily around the world, I ponder these things in terms of my home country, the USA. Education is the most important gift we can offer our children. It is through equitable education that we can build a strong united nation. We cannot marginalize people and expect a united future. Our definition of success and prosperity needs to shift. Read the article from NPR and watch the TED Talk by First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon. Consider the multiple benefits of shifts in mindsets, processes and policymaking...

 Schools can perpetuate the systems currently in place, maintaining the status quo or schools can transform a society. We can transform our country through education that promotes international mindedness and values the process of learning over passing exams. We need a country of people who love to learn, who are creative and innovative. We need a unity, peace and contentment. Which path will we choose for our education system?

Later in the same week, I received my weekly update from TED Talks. Over the past two years, the issue of how we measure our success as a nation in terms of a growth economy have bothered me. How can we tackle the sustainability issues if we are constantly told our economy has to grow and produce above and beyond the previous years' growth indicator? How is it possible to not abuse the remaining natural resources if the we feel as nations that sales and material wealth are our priorities? I really believe this approach taken by Scotland, Iceland and New Zealand to form a network of Wellbeing Economy Governments is something the world should carefully consider. While I value the free market economy and the American dream, I also do not see the need for promoting such materialism and waste. If we truly want to provide a future for our youth, then changing our measurement of success is vital for a sustainable future. 

To measure our economy in terms different parameters is groundbreaking:

• Number of people working and sustainable employment
• Number of people receiving health care, general health of a nation
• Happiness factor - general human wellbeing, fitness and mental health
• Equal pay and closing the gender gap
• Access to nature and green space
• Resources consumed, reused and recycled
• State of sustainability - human and material resources
• Access to education, multiple literacies
• Decreased violence and benefits of preventative programs

So proud to have an article on The SharingPYP Blog. I hope you have a chance to read it and learn from all the years of research it took to arrive at these understandings.

UPDATE: January 3, 2026
Recently, I noticed my article no longer appears on Sharing the PYP Blog. I have added the content here for anyone interested.

Ways to facilitate language development through concept-based inquiry

​As an international educator, most of my action research questions have focused on the needs of language learners. I have been driven out of a desire to meet their needs and help my students achieve their full potential. Questions about how language works, how to teach literacy skills efficiently and effectively, the role of home language, what tools and systems will help, and finally how to both foster and capture conceptual understandings drove me to read, research and attend professional development courses. Through research I have discovered a few fundamental learning principles that are relevant to all international educators no matter the context or language of instruction. These learning principles can positively impact the learning for all students. Conceptual understandings can both deepen and become visible to the learning community. Their self-efficacy and sense of agency will grow as they reflect on learning that was relevant, engaging and comprehensible.
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Principle 1 – Give sufficient time for exploration through experiential learning. Use it for pre-assessment, to identify misconceptions, to draw out questions and to cultivate curiosity while making language development relevant.

Piaget and Vygotsky have shown that learning is constructed through tangible, concrete, social experiences (Woolfolk, 2014). The more concrete, hands-on experiences our students can have throughout the unit of inquiry, especially in the first couple of weeks, the more powerful and meaningful the inquiry will be for them (Fahey, 2012). Using concrete learning experiences fosters language development by making the content comprehensible (Hamza, 2016). It makes learning tangible, which in turn fosters the curiosity needed for questioning. Through experiential exploration, students can make connections to their funds of knowledge, and identify relevant local issues alongside deepening questions for the investigation stage (Custance, Dare and Polias, 2012).
 
During  Where we are in place and time, our central idea was about settlements and landforms. Through research, I discovered scripted process drama (Barnes, Johnson & Neff, 2010). After giving my students time to cultivate some curiosity through listening to short stories read aloud, listening to guest speakers share stories about migration, observing pictures of early settlements and a field trip to the Citadel, I was able to facilitate the scripted process drama to engage their imagination, pre-assess understandings and draw out some questions for our investigation such as:

• How did people build homes in the past?
• How did people survive in the past?
• How do people find a spot to start a town?

Through the weekly use of learning stories, I was able to track developing understandings as they reflected each week. Reflections showed developing understandings.

 “We learned how people in the past, they were working to get water and food to survive. They need a home and wood to make a home.”

Principle 2 – The learning environment as the third teacher is where learning takes place and should be a stimulating, anxiety free space where mistakes are seen as opportunities and where the voice of the child is heard as a social environment.

Foster a learning environment that meets the students where they are and cultivates a culture of curiosity, growth mindset and social construction of ideas within their zone of proximal development (Dweck 2016; Woolfolk, 2014). The environment should honor their learning and provide resources to make learning accessible. According to Loris Malaguzzi, the learning environment is the third teacher as it represents our values and beliefs about children, delivering the unspoken messages about children’s rights (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1998). John Dewey wrote about the power of an environment and its role in social function for bringing about change and social improvement over perpetuating the old behaviors that benefit a few (2015). Value home identity and culture through the strategy of translanguaging to foster understandings by using home language to make meaning at critical times (Garcia & Kleyn, 2016).
 
Make home language welcome in the classroom from the first day of school by honoring the child’s identity through language profiles. Translanguaging used thoughtfully, at critical learning moments enables students to converse in their home language to make meaning (Garcia, & Kleyn, 2016). Use the think-pair-share strategy for a translanguaging moment. Visual scaffolding connects pictures with text for meaning making (Harrel, & Jordan, 2015). The environment in my classroom became a visible language rich resource and my students could easily refer to the displays to support making connections and language needs.

​To foster a social learning environment, recognize that all learners benefit from time to learn together as a whole group through modeled thinking and instruc-tion, in small groups and in pairs (Custance et al, 2012). Students need oppor-tunities to deconstruct things such as a genre or process and to construct as a whole group and in small groups before you can expect them to try it alone (Custance et al, 2012). That is why transdisciplinary learning is so beneficial for the inquiry-based classroom. Language reading and writing skills can be taught and developed throughout the inquiry process within a relevant context as they learn to read and write about what they are learning through the transdiscipli-nary theme. Integrating the targeted genre via the summative assessment task, gives the genre context for meaningful engagement with the language strands (IB, 2018). Below are some examples of genre integration:

Hattie and Yates suggest that concepts serve as mental ‘coat hangers’ allow our students to organize their learning to make sense of it (2014).  Just as we take the time to explicitly model and teach literacy or mathematics processes and skills, it is essential to teach and model the skill to make generalizations. ‘Generate-Sort-Connect-Extend’ is an example of a visible thinking strategy that encourages students to make connections between concepts by drawing a line to connect concepts and identifying a new generalization (Ritchart et al, 2011). It extends the concept map to facilitate transfer. Hexagonal thinking is another way for students to organize their learning visually and then create generalizations to state why the concepts are connected to each other. 

The PYP approaches to learning now include the skill of ‘information transfer,’ which recognizes our role in facilitating transfer (IB, 2018). There are many tools that you can use to help students make connections to the concepts while also making their thinking visible to the learning community. Begin to explore this area of instruction. Our language learners can participate in concept-based inquiry while learning a second or third language if the supports are in place. Language learners develop understandings and language simultaneously when provided the support, tools and a language rich environment.

References
 
Barnes, M. K., Johnson, E. C. and Neff, L. (2010). Learning through process drama in the first grade. Social Studies and the Young Learner 22 (4) 19-24.
Custance, B., Dare, B. and Polias, J. (2012). Teaching ESL in the mainstream: language and learning across the curriculum, 3rd ed. South Australia: DECD Publishing
Dewey, J. (2015).  John Dewey: The collected works of John Dewey [Kindle edition]. PergamonMedia.
Dweck, C. S. (2016).  Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York, NY: Random House.
Edwards, C., Gandini, L., and Forman, G. (1998). The hundred languages of children: The Reggio Emilia approach – advanced reflections, 2nd ed. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing.
Erickson, H. L. (2007). Concept-based curriculum and instruction for the thinking classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Fahey, J. (2012). Ways to do inquiry: Guiding children to deeper understanding. Cardiff: IBO
Garcia, O. and Kleyn, T. (2016). Translanguaging with multilingual students: Learning from classroom moments. New York, NY: Routledge.
Halliday, M.A.K. & Webster, J. J. (2016). Aspects of language and learning, 1st ed. Sydney, NSW: Springer.
Harrel, A. L. and Jordan, M. (2015). 50 strategies for teaching English language learners, 5th ed.  Boston, MA: Pearson.
Hattie, J. and Yates, G. C. R. (2014). Visible learning and the science of how we learn. New York, NY: Routledge.
Hagemans, M. G., van der Meij, H., & de Jong, T. (2013). The effects of a concept map-based support tool on simulation-based inquiry learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(1), 1-24. doi:10.1037/a0029433
IBO, 2018. Learning and teaching. Cardiff, Wales: Peterson House.
Murdoch, K. (2015). The power of inquiry. Northcote, Vic: Seastar Education.
Ritchart, R., Church, M., and Morrison, K. (2011). Making thinking visible: How to promote engagement, understanding, and independence of all learners. San Franscisco, CA: Jossey-Bass
William, D. (2011). Embedded formative assessment. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.
Woolfolk, A. (2014). Educational psychology: Active learning addition, 12th ed. Boston, MA: Pearson.
Hamza, T. [Tarek Hamza]. (2016, Jan 28). Stephen Krashen: Language Acquisition and comprehensible input. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUc_W3xE1w.
Van de Walle, J., Lovin, L. H., Karp, K. S., and Bay-Williams, J. M. (2014 ). Teaching student-centered mathematics: Developmentally appropriate instruction for grades pk-2, Vol. 1, 2nd ed. New York, NY: Pearson.