General IB Information 

The International Baccalaureate (IB) is a non-profit organization that serves students from ages 3-19 around the world.  There are more than 4,000 IB schools in the world with more than 1,700 in the United States.   The IB aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who are motivated to success and build a better world through intercultural understanding and respect.  

The IB curricular framework: 

• Encourages students to think critically and consider multiple perspectives

• Promotes language development and multilingual students 

• Uses best practices from data-based research to best support teaching and student learning 

• Provides a flexible framework so schools can meet local, state, and national requirements 

For general information about the IB, visit www.ibo.org.

The International Baccalaureate® aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.

To this end the organization works with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.

These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.

IB’s philosophy of teaching and learning encourages students to be independent learners who can make connections between their classroom experiences, their experiences, and the real world to be critical thinkers who can solve authentic problems.  The IB mission statement guides our philosophy of teaching and learning at IHS as we aim for our students to develop the knowledge, attitudes, and skills that they will need to be active global learners in the 21st century.  

Inspired by the mission statement and reflected in the IB learner profile, the MYP is guided by three fundamental concepts for teaching and learning:.   

• Intercultural Awareness – concerned with developing students’ attitudes, knowledge and skills as they learn about their own and others’ social and national cultures. By encouraging students to consider multiple perspectives, intercultural awareness not only fosters tolerance and respect, but also leads to empathy and understanding.  

• Holistic Education - emphasizes the links between the disciplines, providing a global view of situations and issues. Students should become more aware of the relevance of their learning, and come to see knowledge as an interrelated whole. Students should see the cohesion and the complementary nature of various fields of study, but this must not be done to the detriment of learning with each of the disciplines, which retain their own objectives and methodology.  

• Communication - the MYP stresses the central importance of communication, which is fundamental to learning, as it supports inquiry and understanding and allows student reflection and expression. The MYP places particular emphasis on language acquisition and allows students to explore multiple forms of expression.