Collaborative Planning- Working Together for Student Success

As our grade 7-10 intermediate team begins the school year in late August and early September we will be embarking upon a fresh challenge. We will be unpacking the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme (IB MYP) in preparation for our (hopefully) eventual accreditation to teach this program in our school. We began teaching the IB Diploma Programme (IB DP) for the first time last fall, and have applied for authorization to teach the IB Primary Years Program (IB PYP) next year. I know, there are a lot of acronyms associated with this program. But if you consider the chronology it has been the senior grades (11 and 12) first, the primary grades (JK-6) second, and lastly, the middle grades (7-10).

One of the challenges of implementing the MYP at our school is that it spans two separate parts of the campus in two distinct schools, that operate with two different schedules. This is not an insurmountable problem, it just requires some thinking. It will be imperative to be able to bring together all of the teachers in grades 7-10 who will be teaching the MYP, even though teachers in grades 7 and 8 belong to one school, while those in grade 9 and 10 belong to another. At the close of the 2012-13 school year we had a one day exercise that did just that. It was a very productive day, providing the forum for a healthy exchange of ideas between teachers, and giving positive energy and momentum to the implementation process. It also demonstrated that there is a fair bit of work ahead.

A recurring question is why is there so much planning involved in the MYP? The short answer to that is that IB places a strong emphasis on matching the written, taught, and assessed curriculum. That is, it expects that you teach what you planned on teaching, and that you assess what you taught. It is simple and sound pedagogy, but not easy to ensure. The MYP also places great stock in collaborative planning amongst teachers, and I believe that this a real strength to the program. So, we began that process in the spring to close the last school year, and we will start 2013-14 in the same fashion.

In fact, I believe that the role of collaborative planning is critical to the overall success of our adoption of the MYP that I have made it my own tagline for the foreseeable future: “ We become better professionals when we work together to improve student learning.”