When Aspen Elementary School students in Mark Wise’s fourth-grade class started reading “Hatchet” by Gary Paulsen, they didn’t know they would have the opportunity to step into the main character’s shoes.

In the novel, 13-year-old Brian is forced to crash-land a plane into a lake after the pilot has a heart attack. In a typical classroom setting, the students typically read the book, answer comprehension questions, and move to the next unit.

But under the framework of the district’s International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme curriculum, Wise encouraged his students to dig further into the book, taking advantage of the district’s flight simulator to simulate what Brian’s crash landing would actually feel like.

“They feel like they’re the main character,” Wise said. “They can really have empathy towards Brian; they feel that they are Brian in some situations … the whole unit is based on survival and human survival in extreme settings, so this is a great provocation for them to actually experience what Brian was feeling and his fight to survive as he was flying the aircraft.”

The international baccalaureate (IB) framework pushes teachers to create “provocations,” or exercises that connect to what the students are learning while encouraging them to engage with the material on a deeper level. It is meant to trigger critical and creative thinking for students beyond just answering comprehension questions about a text.

For three years, the Aspen Elementary School has been integrating IB frameworks into its curriculum, with the goal of reaching official certification for the Primary Years Programme (PYP). The district has had the IB diploma program for juniors and seniors since 2001 and secured authorization for the IB middle years program in 2023 for grades 6-10.

An IB representative will come to the elementary school in late May to evaluate the implementation of the IB framework in classrooms and will potentially award the school with the PYP certification, effectively making the entire district a unified IB district.

It’s lessons like Wise’s with the flight simulator that the IB representatives look for in awarding a school with IB certification, said IB PYP Coordinator at Aspen Elementary School Harpreet Mehta.

“We want to trigger the wondering, the critical thinking; we want to trigger the curiosity,” she said. “Curiosity at this age is more natural … so this experience leads them into those questions of, ‘Why did we have to do that?’ ‘What if he didn’t do this?’ or whatever questions that come up. And then the teachers are picking up these golden nuggets, the golden student questions and wonderings, and designing the entire six week journey of the inquiry into the work itself.”

Wise worked with ASD Aviation Director Garrett Seddon to teach the fourth-grade students how to use the district’s flight simulator. Seddon mapped out the same flight path described in the novel and told the students to land the plane into a lake, as Brian did in the novel.

The students began reading the book before turning to the flight simulator. After using the simulator, many of them said it helped them empathize with the character on a deeper level and helped them engage with the book even more.

“I couldn’t really imagine how scary it was; at first I thought, ‘Oh, it always ends happy,’ but then when we went in the flight simulator, I was like, ‘Wow this is a lot harder than I thought it would be,'” said fourth-grader Colby Kalamaya.

Using the flight simulator also helped the students better understand the descriptions of the plane in the novel and what the author meant as he described the main character landing the plane.

“After we did the flight simulator, I started to understand and look at the longer, harder words, and started to understand what they meant,” said fourth-grader Caroline Quigley.

The students were also able to learn about the school’s flight simulator and some of the intricacies of the plane. Seddon described the model of the plane in the book and the safety protocols when emergency-landing a plane.

“From an instructor perspective, this brings to life what they’re reading, and when they came in, they were all starry-eyed and looking at the simulator,” he said. “I got a chance to share some of the knowledge of the aircraft and then talked about what Brian’s flight path actually was.”

An IB representative will visit the elementary school on May 28 and 29 to meet with students and teachers to discuss their curriculum. It is the last step after a three-year implementation period before the school can receive official IB certification. It will take about a month to receive official certification after the representative’s visit, Mehta said.