How a focus on word choices can enhance the quality of the central idea

Louise Knight, a previous PYP Coordinator and Language Support teacher with grades 1 to 5

The author of this article provides some pointers to aid the process including focussing on the word choices and arrangement when writing a strong central idea. 

A unit of inquiry is only as strong as its central idea. We have to be able to answer the question “At the end of the unit what do we want the children to understand, know and do?”

Writing a good central idea is not easy. There should be a balance between openness for the generation of inquiry and be specific enough to ensure the construction of knowledge, skills and conceptual understanding. After many years of evaluating units of inquiry, my colleagues and I have identified some patterns in central ideas that make for strong or weak units of inquiry and constructed some guidance to evaluate central ideas when writing them.

Some common pitfalls to avoid are:

• Central ideas that are a rewording of the transdisciplinary theme, for example ‘Societies use systems to organize themselves’ – the central idea should reflect the transdisciplinary theme not simply be a rewording of it. The central idea needs to refine the statements from the transdisciplinary theme to enable in-depth inquiry. For example, ‘Businesses are organizations that provide goods or services to meet the needs of customers’ has a number of concepts from the heart of the disciplines, is specific in the type of social system but is broad in that there are many types of businesses.
• Central ideas that contain phrases like ‘for different reasons’ or ‘takes various forms’. These avoid the focus that is essential for depth. Almost everything that happens, happens for different reasons and we need to explore some specific reasons. Compare ‘Different forms of transport have different uses’ – that includes only one significant concept to ‘Transportation systems enable people and societies to connect’.
• Central ideas that describe teaching strategies or tools. ‘By exploring the interdependence of social systems and analysing the evidence we can better understand society’ – for example, describes teaching and learning strategies, there is no enduring understanding from the heart of the disciplines (Wiggins and McTighe). ‘Scientific thinking’ although a concept from science, is general and is better developed through the process of learning to prove or disprove ideas from the scientific fields in a scientific way. ‘Energy is transformed, stored and used in industrial and domestic applications,’ has clear concepts from scientific field which can be investigated by a process of scientific thinking.

We found that focusing on very specific word choices and sentence structure is a useful device.

Central ideas that contain concepts from the heart of the disciplines to drive the inquiry ensure building of globally transferable, significant knowledge. In the PYP these are the ‘related concepts’ for example ‘migration, stories, force, light, simple machines’ as described in Making the PYP happen (2009), in the subject area annexes.

The writing of a single, concise sentence benefits from the use of a well-known acronym from word level English teaching – CVC (Consonant Vowel Consonant). We modified this to stand for ‘Concept Verb Concept’ when thinking about the structure of the central idea. This structure helps focus on efficient and powerful word choices.

Verbs that describe relationships between concepts, or processes one performs on another, give clear direction for ‘unpacking’: impact, shaped, depend, work together, grow, change, communicate’ are examples of powerful verbs that denote a clear relationship or process. Verbs that are subjective in nature such as ‘appreciate, value, enjoy’ can be avoided as they are judgmental. Children are engaged by potentially interesting content but they can only know this if they understand the sentence. Complex ideas do not have to be dressed in complex language. Mystery generally does not promote the engagement that is a precursor for appropriate, challenging and critical thinking.

‘The properties of materials determine their function’ – has globally significant science concepts, a verb that describes the relationship between them, is concise and can be unpacked using the key concept questions. There is breadth in the multitude of materials and objects made from them that exist in the world and the potential for exploration, comparison and investigation by the scientific method promotes scientific thinking.

The collaboration of multiple perspectives in writing central ideas can lead to excellent outcomes but I believe that some systematic evaluation a little akin to the scientific method may be helpful to consider.

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Louise Knight has worked with the PYP in schools in Norway, Nigeria, Iraq (including as PYP Coordinator and Language Support) and Indonesia with grades 1 to 5. She is passionately interested in language and literacy, particularly Functional Linguistics and  she finds it useful to look at some of the issues around the use of language in texts, in this case the central idea as a text form, through the Functional Linguistics lens.