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.