Lower School

Santiago College implements the International Baccalaureate curriculum, a transdisciplinary program through which students inquire and build enduring and significant learning, developing abilities and positive attitudes that invite them to reflect and act.  The integral individual development is encouraged by way of emphasis on intellectual, personal, emotional and social growth.  Imparted in English and Spanish, this program nurtures and challenges its students, preparing them to be active participants in their learning process and capable of contributing to make a better and pacific world within the purview of mutual understanding and intercultural respect.

At Santiago College we constantly work to reveal and include these attributes. The curriculum is designed and planned so as to provide valuable and significant opportunities, based on which the community can be more receptive to this great purpose. The learning community profile is also an important evaluation criterion that is frequently reviewed by students, teachers and directive staff, guiding the permanent reflection on the teaching and learning processes.

 

Curricular Scope

The curricular scope is structured around three interrelated questions:  What do we want to learn? The written curriculum. Which is the best way to learn? The taught curriculum, and How will we know what we have learned? The assessed curriculum. Each one of these items creates a basis for the other two in permanent interrelationship.

The Written Curriculum looks for a balance between the acquisition of abilities and essential knowledge, the development of conceptual understanding and positive attitudes, and the decision to act responsibly.  For these purposes, it is focused on the following essential elements:

• Knowledge: Significant and pertinent contents that we want the students to explore and acquire, bearing in mind their experiences and their previous understanding.
• Concepts: Important ideas relevant in each disciplinary area, but also transcending them, that students must explore more than once to reach an in-depth and consistent understanding.
• Skills: The abilities (related to a specific or transversal discipline) that students must show to reach their goals in a changing world full of challenges.
• Attitudes: Disposition of mood to express values, convictions and essential feelings about learning, the environment and the people.
• Action: Proof of deeper learning and responsible behavior through responsible actions; practical presentation of the other essential elements.

The Taught Curriculum: is understood as the implementation of the written curriculum and emphasizes the active construction of meaning so that the learning process has a purpose.  For this, the main pedagogical focus is on the structured inquiry addressed to specific purposes, where students take active part in their own learning process.  Students are encouraged to investigate important matters by formulating their own questions, designing their own inquiries, assessing the different available means to carry them out and executing the inquiry, experimentation, observation and analysis that will help them reach their own answers.  The starting point is the knowledge the students have and the goal is the active construction of meaning through the creation of connections between this knowledge and information and experience arising from the inquiry within the framework of new contents.

The construction of meaning, and consequently the understanding, is complemented with the acquisition and use of a number of skills that are transversally addressed from all curriculum areas and are essential tools to be used by students in their investigation. These abilities are:

• Thinking abilities:  know, understand, apply, analyze, synthesize, assess, dialectically think, and develop metacognition abilities.
• Social abilities: accept liability, respect others, cooperate, solve conflicts, take group decisions, and adopt different roles in the group.
• Communication abilities: listen, speak, read, write, see and understand, present, develop non- verbal communication.
• Self-control abilities: develop gross and fine motor skills, develop spatial awareness, organize, manage time, adopt a safe personal behavior that prevents endangering yourself and others, make balanced elections, know and apply codes of behavior.
• Investigation abilities: formulate questions, observe, plan, obtain data, record data, organize data, interpret data, and present research findings.

The development of attitudes is an essential part of the practice as it evidences commitment with the curriculum strongly inspired on some values.  The students develop positive attitudes towards the others, the environment and the learning process, contributing to personal and collective welfare. These are explicitly included within the taught components of the curriculum that are assessed.  Attitudes expected from students are:

• Appreciation
• Commitment
• Trust
• Cooperation
• Creativity
• Empathy
• Enthusiasm
• Independence
• Integrity
• Respect
• Tolerance

The Assessed Curriculum implies obtaining and analyzing information about the student’s performance and aims at serving as a basis for the teaching practices used.  It identifies what students know, understand, can do, and feel during the different phases of the learning process. The evaluation of students’ progress is a process where teachers and students take active part within the development of their capacities to self-evaluate and critically judge.

The summative assessment provides teachers with a clear idea of their students’ understanding levels.  It takes place at the end of the teaching and learning process and allows students to test what they have learned. It can cover several aspects simultaneously:  it offers information on the students’ learning process and the teaching process, permitting to improve both of them; it measures understanding of the main idea and lead students to act.

The formative assessment provides information used to plan the next stage of the learning process.  It is essentially joined to learning and helps teachers and students to identify what they already know and are capable to do. It is directly related to teaching and both processes are perfectly combined to reach the proposed objectives. Its aim is to encourage learning through frequent and periodical information on the results obtained.  This helps students enhance their knowledge and understanding, feel encouraged to continue to learn, reflect, develop the self-assessing capacity and recognize the criteria used in measuring achievements.

Curricular planning

Students acquire abilities for the rest of their lives when the learning process is authentic and takes place within a context. Consequently, planning a curriculum at Santiago College emphasizes the active construction of meaning, so that the learning process has a purpose.  This is structured within a program of inquiries and independent research that develop the different essential elements of the program:  knowledge, concepts, skills, attitudes and action.

The investigation program is based on six transdisciplinary themes that are considered important, regardless of the students’ age. They are:  who we are, where we are in time and space, how we express ourselves, how the world works, how we organize ourselves and how we share our planet. Each theme is explored in one research unit that is planned and documented in a work planner. Each year, six research units are addressed, one for each transdisciplinary theme.  The research unit is organized around the exploration of a main idea and research lines, from which the students formulate questions, develop their critical judgement capacity and build knowledge.

Similarly, independent research aimed at certain purposes is also planned, where students take active part in their own learning process. They investigate important matters following their own inquiries, designing their own research, evaluating the different means available to carry them out and executing the research, experimentation, observation and analysis that will help them reach their own answers. The starting point is the students’ knowledge and the goal is the active construction of meaning by way of creating connections between their knowledge and the information and experience arising from the research in relation to new contents.

Investigation, as main pedagogical focus, permits students to actively participate in their own learning process and assume their responsibility, while helping them understand the world so as to develop in their own way and pace.

Disciplinary areas to be addressed within the curricular planning

 

1. Unit of Investigation: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and Technology

These three areas are based on teaching abilities and concepts rather than contents. They are developed from a structured investigation approach and aimed at defined objectives, with the starting point always being the knowledge the students already have and their understanding level at the time.  The goal is an active construction of meaning, establishing relationships between the student’s experience and the information and processes derived from the investigation of new contents.

Natural Sciences

Students investigate the existing interrelationship amongst the biological, chemical and physical aspects of the natural world by formulating their own questions, considering the means available to answer them and executing the investigation, experimentation, observation and other procedures permitting them to reach their own answers. 

Social Sciences

Students investigate about the past, present and future of people, the environment and society where they live; they develop an understanding of the world that is rapidly changing and understand their personal and cultural identity.  This area encourages an intercultural understanding and respect for people, their values and traditions.

Technology

From pre-school times, students handle information technologies as basic tools for their own learning process and means to maintain a permanent communication with the world. Through technology, students “develop and apply strategies for critical and creative thinking strategies, engage in inquiry, make connections and apply new understandings and skills in different contexts". (The role of ICT in the PYP, 2011)

2. Mathematics:

Mathematics is considered as a tool that supports investigation and offers a universal language that helps students understand the surrounding world. The objective is that they learn to use this language efficiently and begin to use it as a way of thinking instead of perceiving it as a number of data and equations to be memorized.

Students acquire mathematical knowledge by way of:

• Building their own meanings, based on their experiences and previous knowledge and reflecting on its interaction with objectives and ideas.
• Transferring meaning to symbols.
• Applying such knowledge through their understanding, whereby students independently select and use adequate symbols to process and record their thinking.
• The mathematical curriculum is organized in five main areas: information treatment, measurement, form and space, patterns and functions, and numbers.
• In the areas of numbers and patterns and functions, students investigate the numbering systems, their operation, patterns and functions.  Students become fluent in the use of the mathematical language and in the end they understand its meaning, its symbols and its conventions.

 

• The remaining areas (treatment of information, measurement and forms and space) are the mathematical parts used by other disciplines to investigate, describe, represent and understand the aspects of their own fields.  Mathematics provides models, systems and processes for everything implied in the treatment of information, execution and comparison of measurements and resolution of spatial problems.  Consequently, the subjects of these three areas are better studied in real context, through transdisciplinary investigation units.

3. Language

Language is the main connection element in the curriculum.  Therefore, in those schools that offer the PEP, it is not only important to learn, but also to apply it in all disciplinary areas and in the transdisciplinary investigation program.  Students at the same time learn:

• About their language:  when they listen and when they use it in their daily lives.
• About the language:  when they learn how it works.
• Through the language:  when they use the language as a tool to think or reflect about information, ideas and global and local issues.

The Language curriculum is organized in three areas:  oral communication, visual communication and written communication considering both the receptive aspects of language (receive and build meaning) and the expressive aspects (create and share meaning).

Oral communication:  oral understanding and oral expression

The students are provided with significant opportunities to take part by listening and talking.  Talking, with the defined purpose that permits them to express thoughts when they build and rebuild meaning in order to understand the surrounding world. On the other hand, listening permits them to develop an active and conscious attention to be able to understand what they hear.

Visual communications:  visual and exhibition abilities

Students learn how visual images have a bearing on meaning and generate powerful associations that create our way of thinking and feeling. Learning to understand and use different visual tests contributes to enhance the sources of information and their expressive abilities.

Written communication: reading understanding

Students learn to build meaning from a text.  For this purpose, they develop specific reading and understanding strategies allowing them to interpret, retain information, organize information and appreciate the read texts.  This process begins during the first years, when the students understand that printed words transmit meaning and become interested in finding the meaning of the symbols they see on the page.

Written communication: written expression

Students learn to communicate meanings and intentions through writing.  This process implies progressive development of a variety of structures, strategies and literary techniques (orthography, grammar, arguments, characters, punctuation, style) and their application with an increasingly efficient and competent ability.

4. Arts

In Arts, students participate in creative processes through which they explore and experiment in a continuous cycle of action and reflection. From very young, students have the opportunity to develop a true interest, consider their own work attentively and develop an attitude of reflection and self-criticism

Learning about arts and through them is essential for an integral development of students, as it encourages creativity, critical thinking, abilities to solve problems and social interaction.

Music

Students are provided with opportunities to discover a wide variety of musical experiences; amongst them:  classify and analyze sounds, compose, explore body music, create harmonies, listen, play instruments, sing, use musical notes, read music, write songs and record them. In the area of creation, the students use their imagination and their musical experiences to organize sounds (natural and those generated through technology) in different ways communicating ideas or specific moods.  In the area of creation, students have the opportunity to answer to different music styles, as well as music from different times and cultures.  Alone or in collaboration, they have the opportunity to create musical ideas and answer to them. By having contact with the broad variety of musical styles, they may begin to understand their surroundings, what there is around them and their structures, and develop personal connections with these elements.

Visual Arts

Students are exposed to a great variety of experiences illustrating the field of visual arts:  architecture, ceramics, collage, drawing, graphic design, installations, illustration, land art (the art of nature), creation of masks, work with metals, painting, engraving and sculpturing.

The same as Music, Visual Arts addresses two common areas (creation and answering) applied to all forms of visual art and refining the main artistic processes.  These areas are based on concepts and are conceived for an introduction to and cooperation with the integral development of students.  In these interconnected areas there is a balance between the acquisition of knowledge and abilities and the development of conceptual understanding.