Maslow Before Bloom

The beginning of the academic year is often a frantic time of kickstarts, deep dives and readied launchpads. Having a new grade’s worth of content to dig one’s teeth into and projects to roll out to students, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, can also cloud visions and stop us from giving learning engagements the space to breathe. It can seem like everyone is solely tasked to “start as we mean to go on” and “hit the ground running.”

The attribute of Knowledgeable is not only concerned with the recall of facts. It’s an ability to place new learning alongside prior, to synthesize incoming information and to know that what’s challenging today becomes easier to tomorrow. Because, after all, that’s what learning is.

Pertaining to learners and educators alike, this Learner Profile attribute is key as schools and classrooms around the world throw open their doors. As students gear up for new concepts, new groupings and new experiences, educators draw upon their knowledge from each year of their time in our profession.

My argument is that if we throw ourselves headlong into curricula, we may forget to lay the foundations for a year all the more meaningful. Knowledge, again, is centre stage. Grade 5 spent the first few days scratching the surface of what was to come, piquing interests and putting down markers. We spoke, listened and got to know our new space. Our group had only just formed and really had no business in hitting the ground running. Slowly, we built trust. We needed efficacy. The lye in which to laminate relationships.

We have to know them before we teach them. Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs, all the way to self-actualization, enters the learning equation before Bloom’s Taxonomy, a well-known framework of educational objectives.

Grade 5 is a phase as pivotal as they come. It’s a peculiar hybrid of PYP and MYP. Not really aligning itself to either, but finding a spot somewhere in between. Expectations grow. There are wider responsibilities around school. The PYP Exhibition looms, for some reason, large on students’ horizons. Entire visual thinking routines reveals stress related to something which should be the celebration which puts the icing on the Primary Years cake. The strategy? Relationships. The tool? Know each other as learners.

I’m writing this piece from Departures, about to spend my weekend growing my Knowledgable attribute at an IB Workshop in Bangkok which is geared towards supporting our learners through the Exhibition.

So far, we have been front-loading the tech skills, unpacking the Approaches to Learning and allowing seeds of action to authentically grow. It’s a year-long harvest. Grade 5 embraced and empowered their identity and those of others in our first Unit of Inquiry and have showed more ownership of the learning journey than I could have imagined them to. Our Knowledgable attribute lets us look back to what experiences can help us today and to where our next steps are for tomorrow.

This is Grade 5 2.0 and where intentional starts make for inspiring ends.

Matthew Payne, Grade 5 Homeroom Teacher