The City of Carrollton Mayor, Kevin Falconer, accepted an invitation to come speak with third grade students at R.E. Good Elementary, IB World School. Students were researching about leadership and took action to invite Mayor Falconer to Good Elementary. Several students used their creativity and created a video invitation for Mayor Falconer. The video invite worked! Mayor Falconer came to Good Elementary and shared about leading the city of Carrollton.
The transdisciplinary theme of this IB unit of inquiry was How We express Ourselves. This was an inquiry into the ways in which we discover and express ideas, feelings, culture, beliefs and values. The Central Idea of the unit was Leadership shapes cultures and communities. Several lines of inquiry were :
- Personal qualities that demonstrate leadership
- How ideas, hopes and values of a community are expressed through leaders and
- Our responsibilities as citizens of this community.
Students focused on the Key Concepts of perspective, function and responsibility. During the research phase, students formulated questions, collected data, organized data and gave presentations. They used communication skills as they read articles and books about leaders, took notes about various leaders and then shared research findings in the form of presentations.
After hearing Mayor Falconer speak about how he leads Carrollton, the students were able to make a real-life authentic connection to this unit of inquiry. Many thanks to Mayor Falconer for giving his time to share with our third grade students at RE Good Elementary.
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