International Baccalaureate (IB)

www.ibo.org

Diploma Programme (DP)
The International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) offers three challenging programmes to students, ages 3-19.  The Diploma Programme, begun in the late 1960s for high school juniors and seniors, is illustrated by the hexagon with six academic areas and a central core of three requirements.  Students must take at least three, and not more than four, subjects at the Higher Level (240 hours of instruction, or two years of study).  The remaining courses are taken at Standard Level (150 hours of instruction, or one year of study).

The Diploma Programme (DP) is a rigorous course of study for students in the last two years of high school.  Currently, there are eight authorized Diploma Programme schools in the State of Tennessee: three MNPS schools (Hillsboro High, Hillwood High, and Hunters Lane High) plus Franklin High, Cookeville High, Germantown High, Oakland High, and Science Hill High.

Hillsboro High Hillwood High Hunters Lane
www.hillsborohs.comwww.hillwood.orgwww.hunterslanehs.mnps.org/Page8970.aspx

In May 2004, the first group of IB Diploma Candidates in the State of Tennessee were graduated from Hunters Lane High School. In May 2006, IB graduates from two more Metro high schools (Hillsboro and Hillwood) joined this quality group.  In order to earn the full IB Diploma, students must move through these steps: (1) complete rigorous coursework and sit for externally scored examinations in six subject areas, (2) write a documented extended essay of 4,000 words on a subject of their choice, (3) take a Theory of Knowledge capstone course and write an essay for external evaluation, (4) perform 150 hours of Creativity/Action/Service hours during their junior and senior years.  Assessment of student learning within each of the subject areas takes a wide variety of forms that result in both internal and external marking of student work.

Admission to the Diploma Programme (DP)
At the end of the sophomore year, a student may enter the IB Diploma Programme at Hillsboro, Hillwood, or Hunters Lane with these prerequisites:
• A strong academic record, with possible Advanced Placement work at the ninth and/or tenth grades
• Honors English I and Honors English II credits
• Two years of either Spanish or French

In addition to these basic requirements, students who exhibit the following habits have found the greatest success in the IB Diploma Programmes:
• A love of reading
• A love of writing: Students who earned a score of 5 or higher on the District’s 7^th grade writing assessment have reported less frustration with the demands of the IB Diploma Programme.
• A desire to conduct scholarly research
• A willingness to evaluate assumptions about what is known
• The ability to balance a homework load, averaging three to four hours per night, with extracurricular interests

Hillsboro High School is an open enrollment school; interested students should apply at the appropriate times each year for the following school year.  Refer to the Metro Nashville Public Schools website for additional details: www.mnps.org.

Students who do not live within the zone of an IB school, but who meet the eligibility requirements described above, may apply for a special transfer.  Forms are available under the tab Our Schools on the Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) website.

District and Building DP Coordinators
Contact these coordinators for additional information about the Diploma Programme offerings at MNPS high schools.

Dr. Sharon Chaney, Central Office, MNPS Director of Advanced Academics
sharon.chaney@mnps.org

Mary Catherine Bradshaw, DP Coordinator, Hillsboro High School
mary.bradshaw@mnps.org

Dr. Donna Harper, DP Coordinator, Hillwood High School
donna.harper@mnps.org

Tom Jackoboice, DP Coordinator, Hunters Lane High School
thomas.jackoboice@mnps.org

Middle Years Programme (MYP)
Introduced in 1994 for students ages 11-16, the Middle Years Programme (MYP) uses the holistic learning approach in order to develop fully informed, internationally minded learners who can communicate and exchange ideas in global arenas.

MYP Authorization Process
Hunters Lane High School and its feeder schools (Brick Church Middle, Goodlettsville Middle, Neely’s Bend Middle) submitted their partnership application to offer MYP in grades 6 through 10 throughout the cluster.  The IBO authorization visit took place on February 22-23, 2007. The three members of the authorization committee were from Canada, California, and South Carolina.

J. T. Moore, a feeder school for Hillsboro High School, was authorize in August 2007 to implement the MYP.  The J.T. Moore faculty and staff hosted their authorization visitors on March 29-30, 2007.  On their committee were two IB leaders, one from Washington, D.C., and the second from Annapolis, Maryland.  West End Middle School is working toward an on-site authorization visit in May 2008.

Bellevue Middle, a feeder school for Hillwood High, was also officially authorized to offer the IB Middle Years Programme in August 2007.   A three-member committee visited Bellevue Middle on May 3-4, 2007.  H. G. Hill Middle is completing the Application A phase of authorization.

Visiting committee members give an oral report to schools at the end of the on-site visit, submit a written report to our regional MYP representatives in New York, who then make a recommendation to the Director General.  As is true with for all MYP application schools, a candidate school’s official IB status will be communicated in a letter from Jeff Beard, IB Director General, housed in Geneva, Switzerland.  The official letters, received on August 3, 2007, authorized MYP implementation at six MNPS middle schools: Bellevue, Brick Church, Goodleettsville, J. T. Moore, Neely’s Bend, Hunters Lane’s 9^th and 10^th grades.

MYP Building Coordinators
Contact these coordinators for additional information about MYP offerings, activities, and plans at their middle schools.

Hillsboro Cluster
Amy Cate, MYP Co-Coordinator, J. T. Moore Middle School
amy.cate@mnps.org

Bill Duncan, MYP Co-Coordinator, J. T. Moore Middle School
william.duncan@mnps.org

Melissa Burka, MYP Co-Coordinator, West End Middle School
melissa.burka@mnps.org

Suzanne Daniel, MYP Co-Coordinator, West End Middle School
suzanne.daniel@mnps.org

Hillwood Cluster
Cathye Hancock, MYP Coordinator, Bellevue Middle School
catherine.hancock@mnps.org

Hunters Lane Partnership
Alexis Mattingly, MYP Coordinator, Hunters Lane 9^th and 10^th Grades
alexis.mattingly@mnps.org

Willie Danforth, MYP Coordinator, Brick Church Middle School
willie.danforth@mnps.org

Niki Rager, MYP Coordinator, Goodlettsville Middle School
alison.rager@mnps.org

Debra Smith, MYP Coordinator, Neely’s Bend Middle School
debra.smith4@mnps.org

Central Office
Sharon Chaney, MNPS Director of Advanced Academics
sharon.chaney@mnps.org

Primary Years Programme (PYP)
The Primary Years Programme, introduced in the late 1990s, is an inclusive programme for all students in an elementary school.  Transdisciplinary themes and a pedagogy of inquiry are the vehicles for PYP teaching and learning.  Some MNPS elementary planning teams are investigating the feasibility of PYP implementation in their schools.

IBO Mission Statement
The International Baccalaureate Organization 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 IBO 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.

International Baccalaureate (IB)





International Baccalaureate (IB) Programme Standards

The International Baccalaureate Programme (IB) has at the heart of its mission to develop inquiring, knowledgeable, and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.  (See www.ibo.orgfor further information.)

The IB curriculum is based on the research from the cognitive sciences, from which we derive our understanding of human learning processes and the development of competence in students.  Central to this research is the concept of transfer, or how students translate ideas from one context to another.  If students are successful in applying what they have learned to other contexts, then learning has taken place.

How does this happen?  Students need opportunities to mold, shape, wrestle with, and apply what they are learning.  Students need to work with authentic problems, and their learning must be assessed in meaningful ways that allow students to demonstrate what they know. These deeper and more complex connections imprint the learning into long-term memory. The IB curriculum frameworks are designed so that students must apply what they are learning and demonstrate their understanding of given concepts.  For example, woven throughout the Middle Years Programme curriculum are five Areas of Interaction which encourage students to take responsibility for themselves and their surroundings: Health and Social Education, Community and Service, Approaches to Learning, Environments, and Human Ingenuity.

Three cognitive principles provide the foundation to foster this transfer of classroom learning to real-world contexts.  They are engaging prior understandings, the role of factual knowledge and conceptual frameworks, and metacognition. These principles are also foundational to the International Baccalaureate Programme.  For further research on these principles, see Bransford, John D., et al, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (1999), and the National Research Council’s How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom (2005).

Principle 1: Engaging Prior Understandings

Students come to the classroom with their own set of observations and experiences, dispositions, and personal ideas.  IB experiences begin with students’ prior knowledge and experiences as building blocks for future learning of concepts.  For example, the following are common preconceptions about mathematics: 
    • Mathematics is about learning to compute.
    • Mathematics is about “following rules” to guarantee correct answers.
    • Some people have the ability to “do math” and some don’t.

IB students experience mathematics in a very different way.  Rooted in real-world problems, students are challenged to develop solutions by thinking flexibly about authentic issues. Learners must be able to explain and write about the process through which they arrive at their solutions, an essential metacognitive activity.

Misconceptions arise when students have ideas that clash with accepted theories of the world.  For example, elementary students might think that a number with three digits is always bigger than one with two (i.e., 3.24 is more than 4.6 because it has more digits.) See “Math Misconceptions”, by Steve McCormack, Teacher Magazine, 42, January 2006 for further details about misconceptions.  By engaging in hands-on inquiry activities, IB students gain an in-depth understanding of fractions rather than memorizing rules about decimals.

Through ongoing formative assessment, IB teachers discover what students know about concepts, in terms of accurate presentation of information, misconceptions that obstruct understandings, and gaps in general knowledge that should be filled.  Teachers utilize this knowledge to scaffold instruction according to student needs.

Principle 2: The Role of Factual Knowledge and Conceptual Frameworks

What are the central ideas around the topic and how do the facts fit?  What are the organizers around foundational ideas of a discipline?

Educators often feel pressured to cover a vast curriculum quickly so that students are exposed to facts that might be addressed on standardized achievement tests.  “We don’t have time to go in depth,” stressed educators often say.  However, the research strongly suggests that if students do not have a framework on which to “hook” skills and bits of information, student recall is not nearly as high.

A big idea about fractions is that fractions are about proportionality: e.g., ¼ is always the same portion of the whole, but that the size of that portion changes depending on the size of the whole.  Percents, ratios, and decimals are part of the same big idea of proportionality (i.e., ¼, .25, 25 %). Frequently, students do not see them as part of the same concept.

Different communities think of “facts” in different ways.  This is an important part of the IB experience.  For example, in the Diploma Programme capstone course, Theory of Knowledge, instructors encourage students to discover how we know.  This involves consideration of knowledge across the disciplines: i.e., what counts as knowledge in one discipline or "area of knowledge," such as the natural sciences, often has a different vetting process from knowledge arrived at in another area of knowledge, such as history.  A previous Theory of Knowledge essay prompt encouraged students to account for the fact that most of us would say that an object such as a desk is solid, while a physicist might describe it as made up largely of empty space.  Another prompt asks students to consider whether historians and mathematicians mean the same thing when they use the word explain.

IB units of study are designed around a central idea or question, in contrast to a list of facts about a given topic. In-depth investigation into concepts is preferable to superficial coverage. For example, the Higher Level (HL) Diploma Programme courses in high school are two years in length.  An IB Chemistry class might require students to demonstrate an understanding of Le Chatelier’s principle by doing more than calculating the formula.  To demonstrate true understanding, students must be able to use formulas for calculating mathematical equilibrium expressions, as well as have facility in visualizing changes in atomic arrangements between "product" and "reactant" configurations.  A guiding question for teaching and learning the principle might be this: “What is the relationship between Le Chatelier's principle and kinetic-molecular theory?”

Principle 3: Metacognition

Metacognition refers to the habits of mind necessary for learners to assess their own progress, rather than relying solely on external indicators.  Stated differently, metacognition is self-monitoring and a key skill of lifelong learners.  A critical role that IB teachers play is teaching students how to learn, how to self assess what they know and do not know, and how to devise a plan to access needed information.  A healthy classroom culture allows teachers and students to model this “thinking aloud.” Self-reflective questions might include the following: How can I draw on my past successes to solve this new problem?  What do I already know about the problem, and what resources do I have available or need to generate? How accurate are my data sources?  Guiding questions in the IB curriculum foster student abilities to think about their own learning: How do my justifications for new-found knowledge inspire new avenues of inquiry?

The role of self-monitoring is critical to all facets of learning.  For example, good readers monitor their own comprehension.  They know what to do when they don’t understand something they have read.  They use strategies such as rereading, using context, adjusting the rate, looking at pictures, and reading ahead to make sense of what they do not yet understand.  Effective teachers explicitly teach these comprehension strategies.  Students in the natural sciences pursue questions of inquiry through experimentation and then determine what they still need to know.  This is how scientific understanding is advanced.  Our evolving understanding of Pluto is one such example.  The same could be said for mathematics.

A healthy dose of skepticism about students’ own conclusions as a result of this kind of thinking is part of the IB curriculum.  A teacher of Theory of Knowledge (TOK), once stated about students, “I want them to second-guess their research processes and ask themselves what sources they might have overlooked or which sources they might be overemphasizing.  I believe that the Theory of Knowledge course gives them the tools that they need to self-monitor” (e-mail communication with Tom Jackoboice, March 6, 2008).

Conducting research, critical analysis of reading material, and writing about conclusions are central strategies in the IB curriculum.  Each of these strategies requires students to self-direct their learning, a central tenet of the IB learner profile.  IB students become lifelong learners with a strong sense of international community and a sincere sense of honor and purpose.

Permission to copy and distribute has been granted by the author.
Kristen Weeks Neal, Ph.D., is Senior Advisor for Product Development, Modern Red SchoolHouse and may be reached at krisneal@comcast.net.
Sharon Chaney, Ed.D., is MNPS Director of Advanced Academics and may be reached at sharon.chaney@mnps.org.