What PYP planning is built on
The PYP is a transdisciplinary, inquiry-based and student-centred framework for students of roughly 3 to 12. Planning starts from the school's programme of inquiry, organised around six transdisciplinary themes, and each unit of inquiry sits inside it.
That makes planning a collaborative act. Homeroom and specialist teachers plan units together, because a unit about how communities organise themselves draws on language, mathematics, social studies and the arts at once, and no single teacher owns it.
Start from the programme of inquiry, not a blank page
The IB says each school develops its programme of inquiry collaboratively to reflect its own community. A unit is planned into a cell of that grid: a year group and a theme. Before planning a unit, read the cells beside and above it, so you know what students have already inquired into and what comes next.
The full anatomy of the grid is in the PYP programme of inquiry, explained.
The planning cycle for one unit
A workable cycle has five moves, and the order matters more than the template.
- Begin with the central idea and lines of inquiry, and test them before anything else is written
- Decide what evidence of understanding you want, and design the summative assessment before the activities
- Choose the key and related concepts, the approaches to learning and the learner profile attributes to develop
- Plan learning experiences that let students inquire, including student questions and action
- Record reflection: what worked, what students did, and what to change next time
Assess early, and plan for evidence
Deciding how understanding will be shown before designing the activities keeps a unit honest. If the summative task can be completed without engaging the central idea, the unit is really about a topic.
Evidence should be collected as learning happens, not assembled afterwards: student work, reflections, photographs and teacher observations. A portfolio that is filled as a matter of routine is both an assessment record and, later, the evidence a programme review asks for.
Where skodle fits
This section names our own product, so weigh it accordingly. The planning cycle above works on paper, in shared documents or in any platform.
skodle holds PYP planning as records. A PYP unit carries its central idea, lines of inquiry, key and related concepts, approaches to learning, learner profile attributes, assessment and reflection, and moves from draft to review to coordinator approval. The programme of inquiry is a grid of those units by year group and theme, read live from what teachers edit, with the spread of key concepts beside it. Assessments and student portfolios, where reflections and evidence are kept against the child, sit on the same student and unit records. A gap report then flags, for PYP and MYP units, concepts that unit after unit carries or that no unit uses, and units missing evidence or assessment. See the PYP programme page.
The limits. skodle does not write a unit's central idea or judge whether it is a good one; that is the team's work. The gap report counts what people link, so it is only as good as the links, and it has no year-by-year progression view. There is no family-facing view of the programme of inquiry itself, and skodle does not carry the official IB route for registration and coursework submission.
Review the whole, not the unit
Coverage analytics and a coordinator's review are what catch repetition, gaps and uneven progression across year groups. Once a term, read the programme of inquiry as a whole and ask whether each theme is genuinely inquired into at every level and whether the concepts are spread or clustered.
What to check before choosing software for PYP planning
Ask each vendor to plan one of your real units live.
- Are the central idea, lines of inquiry and concepts fields in their own right, or free text in a generic template?
- Can you see the whole programme of inquiry, and change a unit from within it?
- Where does student reflection and evidence live, and can families see it?
- Does a change to a unit leave a record of what it was?
Common planning problems
Planning the activities first and inventing the central idea to fit. Central ideas that are topics. Units planned by one teacher and delivered by four. Specialist teachers brought in after the plan is written. And documentation done to satisfy a visit rather than to help the next teacher.
