MYP @ WIS

At West island School the IB Middle Years Programme (MYP) is a comprehensive curriculum framework of academic challenge and life skills appropriate for Years 7-9. The MYP is designed to foster students' independence and responsibility and to develop internationally minded attitudes while encouraging creativity, cooperation, and compassion for others. Learning activities cultivate a hands-on approach to learning with the aim of balancing intellectual challenge with joy of learning.

Like all IB programmes, the MYP, in its aim to encourage holistic learning, emphasizes understanding concepts, mastering skills and developing attitudes as well as learning knowledge. These are all tools designed to help students be successful in our global society, as well as providing a sound foundation for learning in their senior high school years and beyond.

The MYP curriculum framework comprises eight subject groups, providing a broad and balanced education for early adolescents.

The MYP requires at least 50 hours of teaching time for each subject group, in each year of the programme. In the final two years of the programme, carefully-defined subject group flexibility allows students to meet local requirements and personal learning goals.

Teaching and learning in context

Students learn best when their learning experiences have context and are connected to their lives and their experience of the world that they have experienced.

Using global contexts, MYP students develop an understanding of their common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet through developmentally appropriate explorations of:

• identities and relationships

• personal and cultural expression

• orientations in space and time

• scientific and technical innovation

• fairness and development

• globalization and sustainability.

Conceptual understanding

Concepts are big ideas that have relevance within specific disciplines and across subject areas. MYP students use concepts as a vehicle to inquire into issues and ideas of personal, local and global significance and examine knowledge holistically. The MYP prescribes sixteen key interdisciplinary concepts along with related concepts for each discipline. 

Approaches to learning

A unifying thread throughout all MYP subject groups, approaches to learning (ATL) provide the foundation for independent learning and encourage the application of their knowledge and skills in unfamiliar contexts. Developing and applying these social, thinking, research, communication and self management skills helps students learn how to learn. 

Service as action, through community service 

Action and service have always been shared values of the IB community.

Students take action when they apply what they are learning in the classroom and beyond. IB learners strive to be caring members of the community who demonstrate a commitment to service—making a positive difference to the lives of others and to the environment.

Service as action is an integral part of the programme, especially in the MYP Community Project

Inclusion and learning diversity in MYP

As part of the MYP curriculum, schools address differentiation within the written, taught and assessed curriculum.

This is demonstrated in the unit planner and in the teaching environment, both of which are reviewed during programme authorization and evaluation.

The MYP allows schools to continue to meet state, provincial or national legal requirements for students with access needs. Schools must develop an inclusion/special educational needs (SEN) policy that explains assessment access arrangements, classroom accommodations and curriculum modification that meet individual student learning needs.

STEM education in the MYP

The MYP curriculum focuses on STEM as an important perspective from which to consider integrated teaching and learning in concepts and skills related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

https://www.ibo.org/programmes/middle-years-programme/curriculum