What should a child know about themselves by the time they finish the primary years? For Bonbon Chakravartee, PYP Coordinator at Good Shepherd International School (GSIS), the answer has little to do with facts retained or tests passed. It has to do with something quieter: whether a child believes they are capable of learning, questioning and finding their own way forward.
“A child arrives at us already capable, already curious, already full of potential,” she says. “Our job isn’t to build that in them, it’s to make sure we don’t get in the way of it.”
That belief runs through everything she describes about the Primary Years Programme at GSIS.
The Years Children Start Testing Themselves
Ages eight, nine and ten mark a shift. Children stop simply exploring the world and start measuring themselves against it, comparing, attempting, failing, trying again. For Bonbon, what matters most in this window isn’t a skill mastered so much as a feeling formed. “That effort moves them forward more than talent does,” she says. “That their questions matter enough to be followed.”
She points to a moment from a Grade 5 unit on Sharing the Planet. She placed two images in front of the class: a dense, biodiverse forest, and a stretch of stripped, barren land. Using a simple See-Think-Wonder routine, one child asked a question nobody had planned for: if a forest this rich is this beautiful, why would people destroy it? Couldn’t they use half and keep half?
That single question quietly reshaped the unit. Five weeks later, the same curiosity had grown into Zero Waste Wednesday, a student-led initiative in the school dining hall. “Nobody had asked them to solve a real problem,” Bonbon says. “They simply did, because we trusted them to.” The same instinct shows up when a child stands before classmates during an Exhibition, searching for their own words for what they have learned, rather than reciting somebody else’s.
Where Curiosity Becomes Inquiry
At GSIS, inquiry rarely starts with an answer. It starts with something unresolved: a question, an object, an image that doesn’t quite add up. From there, the process loops through the PYP’s familiar rhythm: tuning in, finding out, sorting out, going further and eventually taking action, circling back to revise along the way.
Bonbon’s own role in that process is deliberately understated. “I ask more questions than I answer,” she says, “because the questions children generate for themselves are what carry an inquiry forward.” A half-formed idea scribbled on a sticky note, then challenged by a classmate, does more for a child’s thinking, she believes, than a tidy final answer ever could.
A Teacher Who Walks Alongside
Ask Bonbon what mentorship looks like at this age, and she doesn’t talk about milestones. She talks about presence. “Mentorship means walking alongside a child rather than walking ahead of them,” she says. “Children don’t truly learn from people they don’t feel close to.”
Two decades in education have sharpened that instinct rather than settled it. Bonbon has come to believe that no two children learn in quite the same way, and that this only holds true inside an environment of trust and transparency. She carries the same principle into how she leads her own team of teachers, guiding them, but leaving room for each one to bring their own individuality into how they teach.
She recalls a student who arrived at GSIS carrying real fitment issues and a strong superiority complex. Rather than confront it head-on, his dorm parent simply kept showing up, week after week, creating a space where the boy could voice his frustrations without judgement. Slowly, something shifted. Today, Bonbon says, he practises honesty with real courage. “He has become, in every sense, a brave heart.”
It’s a moment that captures what she believes a school owes every child: someone in their corner who doesn’t give up.
That same sense of belonging extends into GSIS’s residential community, where children from entirely different backgrounds build a shared home. “Held together by adults who know them, not just teach them,” is how she puts it.
Habits That Travel Beyond the PYP
For Bonbon, the value of the PYP isn’t confined to the years a child spends inside it. The inquiry cycle builds a habit of asking why and how, not just what, and that habit doesn’t stay behind when a student moves on. Whether they continue into the MYP, ICSE or IGCSE, what carries forward is a readiness to question and investigate rather than a fixed body of content.
What Comes Next for PYP at GSIS
Looking ahead, Bonbon is focused on deepening student agency: giving children more ownership of their learning, and more room to explain not just what they’ve learned, but how they got there. Alongside that sits a push to build a genuine reading culture, an in-house inquiry-based writing framework currently in pilot, and a reimagined PYP Exhibition that blends physical and digital presentation.
Technology has a place in that vision too, though a carefully bounded one. She sees promise in tools such as Google Gems and AI tutors, used well. “Not as a shortcut,” she says, “but as something that helps a child learn more like themselves.”
Room to Be Curious
Asked what she’d say to parents, Bonbon returns to where she started. “Every young child needs room to be curious,” she says. “The space to try, to fail, and to learn and grow from that failure. That is the landscape we try to build for them at GSIS.”
Her message to students is simpler still: “Stay kind. Stay joyful. Stay curious.”
For Bonbon, those three qualities aren’t separate from learning. They are what make it worth pursuing at all.
