A great way to start learning about the MYP is to hear from a veteran MYP teacher and coordinator. 

In this episode of our MNIB Podcast "IB Matters" we hear from Angela Wilcox a former MNIB Vice President talk about her experience with the Programme.

What is the MYP?

The International Baccalaureate® (IB) Middle Years Programme (MYP) emphasizes intellectual challenge. 

It encourages students aged 11 to 16 to make practical connections between their studies and the real world, preparing them for success in further study and in life.

What the MYP offers students

The MYP aims to develop active learners and internationally minded young people who can empathize with others and pursue lives of purpose and meaning.

The programme empowers students to inquire into a wide range of issues and ideas of significance locally, nationally and globally. The result is young people who are creative, critical and reflective thinkers. 

From the IB public website: IBO.org

Teaching and Learning through 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.

From the 2014 IB document: MYP Principles into practice (pp 14-16):

"Concepts have an essential place in the structure of knowledge. They require students to demonstrate levels of thinking that reach beyond facts or topics. Concepts are used to formulate the understandings that students should retain in the future; they become principles and generalizations that students can use to understand the world and to succeed in further study and in life beyond school.

The exploration and re-exploration of concepts lead students towards:

• deeper understanding of the subject group

• appreciation of ideas that transcend disciplinary boundaries

• engagement with complex ideas, including the ability to transfer and apply ideas and skills to new situations (Erickson 2008).

Students gradually work towards a deepening of their conceptual understanding as they approach concepts from a range of perspectives. The concept-driven curriculum frameworks of the MYP help learners to co- construct meaning as they become increasingly competent critical and creative thinkers, able to transfer knowledge and take responsibility for their own learning.

Teaching through concepts encourages teachers to work across national and cultural boundaries. Concepts promote a broad approach to education that can encompass many ways of thinking, inspire a variety of experiences, and open doors to exciting and highly relevant interdisciplinary learning."

Assessment in the MYP*

*From the 2014 IB document: MYP Principles into practice (pp 78-80)

In the MYP, teachers make decisions about student achievement using their professional judgment, guided by mandated criteria that are public, known in advance and precise, ensuring that assessment is transparent. Across a variety of assessment tasks (authentic performances of understanding), teachers use descriptors to identify students’ achievement levels against established assessment criteria. MYP internal (school-based) assessment uses a “best-fit” approach in which teachers work together to establish common standards against which they evaluate each student’s achievement holistically.

This “criterion-related” approach represents a philosophy of assessment that is neither “norm-referenced” (where students must be compared to each other and to an expected distribution of achievement) nor “criterion-referenced” (where students must master all strands of specific criteria at lower achievement levels before they can be considered to have achieved the next level).

Assessment in the MYP aims to:

• support and encourage student learning by providing feedback on the learning process

• inform, enhance and improve the teaching process

• provide opportunity for students to exhibit transfer of skills across disciplines, such as in the personal project and interdisciplinary unit assessments

• promote positive student attitudes towards learning

• promote a deep understanding of subject content by supporting students in their inquiries set in real- world contexts

• promote the development of critical- and creative-thinking skills

• reflect the international-mindedness of the programme by allowing assessments to be set in a variety of cultural and linguistic contexts

• support the holistic nature of the programme by including in its model principles that take account of the development of the whole student.
  
  

Assessment practices in the MYP can sometimes represent significant challenges to existing school practices. Some key features of MYP assessment include:

• distinction between internal summative assessment and the supporting formative processes

• attention to the most accurate demonstration of student performance, rather than mechanically and uncritically averaging achievement levels over given reporting periods

• assessment of student understanding at the end of a course, based on the whole course and not individual components of it.
  Students must be able to recall, adapt and apply knowledge and skills to new questions and contexts. Students need to understand assessment expectations, standards and practices, which teachers can introduce early and naturally in teaching, as well as in class and homework activities.

The MYP assessment criteria across subject groups can be summarized as follows