The Unit Planning Process
The MYP is a constructivist curriculum, which means that while the IB provide the learning objectives and assessment criteria (which outline the skills and levels of skill that students should achieve) the content of the subject courses is determined by the teachers. As such, our teachers have engaged in planning a programme that is rigorous and relevant for our students, and which builds upon the students' skills, knowledge and understanding for each year of the programme to develop mastery.
A concept-based model is used in the MYP because it encourages students to:
process factual knowledge at a deeper intellectual level as they relate the facts to concepts and essential conceptual understandings; this synergistic thinking (interplay between factual and conceptual thinking) engages the intellect on two levels—factual and conceptual—and provides greater retention of factual knowledge because synergistic thinking requires deeper mental processing
create personal relevance, as students relate new knowledge to prior knowledge, and promote understanding of cultures and environments across global contexts through the transfer of knowledge
bring their personal intellect to the study as they use a key concept to personally focus on the unit topic in order to increase motivation for learning
increase fluency with language as students use factual information to explain and support their deeper conceptual understanding achieve higher levels of critical, creative and conceptual thinking as students analyse complex global challenges, such as climate change, international conflicts and the global economy, and create greater subject depth through the study of discipline-specific related concepts.
Each unit of inquiry is embedded into a Global Context and is based upon a Key Concept.
Global contexts provide a common language for powerful contextual learning, identifying specific settings, events or circumstances that provide more concrete perspectives for teaching and learning. When teachers select a global context for learning, they are answering the following questions.
Why are we engaged in this inquiry?
Why are these concepts important?
Why is it important for me to understand?
Why do people care about this topic?
Key Concepts
Key Concepts are powerful, abstract ideas that have many dimensions and definitions. They have important interconnections and overlapping concerns. Key concepts engage students in higher-order thinking, helping them to connect facts and topics with more complex conceptual understanding. Key concepts create “intellectual synergy” and provide points of contact for transferring knowledge and understanding across disciplines and subject groups.
Each unit of inquiry combines the selected global context with the selected key concept and subject-specific related concepts to develop a statement of inquiry. This statement expresses the relationship between concepts and context; it represents a transferable idea supported by factual content. Statements of inquiry facilitate synergistic thinking, synthesizing factual and conceptual levels of mental processing and creating a greater impact on cognitive development than either level of thinking by itself.
Under the statements of inquiry, teachers (and students) then devise inquiry questions. These become the focus of the learning. Inquiry questions fall into three categories: factual, conceptual and debatable.
Once all of these conceptual elements have been determined, the next stage is called backwards planning by design. This is where teachers identify the learning objectives of the unit of inquiry. What is is that we want the students to know, understand and do by the end of the unit of inquiry? Using these learning objectives, assessment tasks are constructed that will enable all students to demonstrate their learning in the unit. It is only when the assessment task has been determined, that teachers begin to design learning experiences that will enable the students to successfully achieve the learning objectives of the unit.
When designing learning experiences, teachers must consider the diverse needs of learners, as well as how learners will explore the inquiry questions.
Teachers must also explicitly identify which approaches to learning skills the students will develop in the unit, and how these are explicitly taught.
Throughout the unit, teachers must further create opportunities for students to receive meaningful feedback on their learning from the teacher, from their peers and also through self-assessment.
References
IBO. From Principles into Practice. International Baccalaureate Organization (UK) Ltd, 2014.