About
The teacher behind the wall
I teach Grade 5 in a bilingual IB PYP school in Shanghai.
This site documents one part of my PYP Exhibition work: the learning wall my class used across an eight-week inquiry.
I built the wall because too much of the Exhibition was easy to lose. A group could find three facts and not be able to explain which one mattered. The wall gave moments like that a place in the room.
I also lead the Grade 5 team, so the structures on this site were decisions I was responsible for: the weekly wall routines, the mentor-meeting cycle, and the readiness checks in the final weeks. None of it was complicated. It had to hold up with six groups using it at once.
A lot of this site is records of things that did not work. That is deliberate. When something fails in my room, I write it down while it is still fresh, change one thing, and check again the next week. The What Changed page is six of those corrections in a row.
New ideas earn their way in. I try them small first, and I keep the ones students actually use. The Research page is the reading that survived that test.
How I work
What I pay attention to
My work usually comes back to a few classroom questions. What are students actually doing? Where is the evidence? What is helping them work without waiting for the teacher? What looks good but is not doing much?
This project helped me think about those questions more clearly. It also gave me a better way to see the inquiry as it changed week by week.
Who this is for
Teachers planning, schools deciding
This site may be useful to teachers planning Exhibition, inquiry units, learning walls, or classroom documentation systems.
It may also be useful to schools who want to see how I think through planning, student evidence, reflection, and course correction in a real classroom.