You started to create your MYP PHE units and need help introducing the unit to students. Today I will share with you what you can do to ensure students understand the unit you created for them and give them a sense of belonging. 

If we introduce the unit well, the students will have a clear understanding of what they will be doing during the weeks that you set to work on that specific unit. They will share their understanding and knowledge about the main concepts they will explore and will easily relate to the content you will be exploring. 

I will share my practices and as a result of collaboration with other teachers, I introduced my last units differently and was surprised with the outcome. 

Resources used to introduce a unit – (If you need a specific document I mentioned here, feel free to drop a message)

You already have your unit planned, but to introduce the unit, you might need to create a summary unit with all concepts and GRASPS (summative assessment)  to make sure the students have a clear idea of the concepts that we will be exploring. 

This works well for me but you might find a different way to introduce the unit and that might lead to using different resources. It’s all about your own creativity and figuring out what works better for your students, and what will make the students understand the concepts that will be learned during the unit. 

Once you have the concepts make sure you share them with the students and you can ask them basic questions. 

• What do you know about these concepts? 

Let’s say your key Concept is CHANGE, you can ask the students to tell you what they know about the change in general. Ask them to share aspects of the concept outside the school or related to different subjects. Doing this makes sure they share their experience before connecting this concept to Physical and Health Education. 

When I did this one of my students told me that one of the examples of change, in general, would be relocating from one country to another one. And I asked the student, What are the implications of making that change? And the students would share about challenges they would have after relocating from one country to another or share the success of having to make new friends in the new country. From there they will understand that changes have consequences in real life and that will not be different in Physical and health education. 

Asking more guided questions to the students will allow them to make a great connection from the key concept to the related concepts. Let’s assume that one of your related concepts is interactions. 

1. How interactions will help you to accommodate your changes? 

Make sure students share their knowledge about each concept before bringing the concepts together. Once I asked my grade 7 students, Why do we need to interact with others? I had a lot of interesting answers.  Some said, we interact with others to make friends, others said to learn from each other and improve our social skills, and the last student asked to share an example about why is it important to interact with others, she said We need to interact with others because in future we might need help in order to get jobs, and if we had great interactions with them we will have more chances of getting the job. 

The more questions you pose to the students about the concepts they will share their understanding and you will direct them to make connections in sports. One example would be asking the students, “what can we change in sports?” 

My students said we can change our technique, or we can change our time to improve our performance in athletics, or we can change the way we communicate with others, or we can change the way we interact with others. So the inquiry is a powerful tool in teaching and learning. If you use it during the introduction of the unit students can share their understanding and they can also share their questions with you. When I want them to share questions I usually share with them my statement of inquiry and ask them what questions do you have about this statement. 

Once I realised that the students have a great idea about the concepts, I normally move to the factual, conceptual and debatable questions and let students discuss and share their opinion about them. But recently I had a great Idea from one of my colleagues, who shared that he used to ask the students to create their own statement of inquiry once they have all concepts  ( Key concept, related concept and the Global context – Area of exploration). 

I tried this recently and I was surprised by how the students would come up with great statements of inquiries some of them were very close to my statement. By doing this the students felt part of the process they could understand where the statement of inquiry comes from and why it is important when I move to the GRASPS ( the summary of the summative).  When they see the goal they understand that the goal of the assessment is the same as the statement of inquiry. 

Why GRASPS is important!

If you have used Grasps before, you must have realized that it’s easy for students to understand what they need to do at the end of the unit. It’s also an easy way to create a clear relationship between the statement of inquiry and the summative assessment. 

Starting from the goal, and moving to the role, audience, situation, product and standards, all these points give students a clear picture of what they need to work on and what they need to present as the final outcome. 

You can ask your students to tell you what the criteria they will be assessed are just by looking at the product. If you use the correct terms they will be able to tell you. Make sure to use words like, plan, reflect, knowledge and perform while talking about the product. 

Talk and teach the ATLs

One of the strategies you can use is to ask students about the activities they can do in order to improve their approaches to learning. You might be focusing on communication, the students can suggest ways to improve communication and you can work on improving the ATL selected. The ATLs have to be taught explicitly. You need to teach the students to communicate so that they can engage better in the unit and have a better understanding of the concepts and content being explored in class. 

Author: Elves Tembe

Editor: Antoney Luvinzu