International Baccalaureate at the Primary
The IB Primary Years Program – PYP.
The International Baccalaureate, or IB for short, is a highly esteemed educational institution making headways into centering learning around the student and creating internationally minded and compassionate citizens. A great partnership for us here at EISB, since we too strive to create such students. Gone are the days of comparing student to student, of monitoring their progress by simply providing a standardized test. What the world needs right now is even more than that, skills that are much harder to learn, skills that cannot be memorized and then quickly forgotten. We need compassion, we need empathy, we need to care. What do you care about? Truly care about? I am talking about caring in such a way that you take active steps to solving it, to being an active participant, not just liking something on social media. It is something you are involved in, it is something you feel like you have a voice in, a choice. This is what the IB aims to bring into each classroom. A sense for each student that they have the voice, choice and ownership of their learning. And this leads to caring, caring about our problems and caring about finding intelligent and mindful ways of solving them. It leads to agency. Dictionary definition: an action or intervention, producing a particular effect.
Last week I gave a short presentation about our journey here at EISB primary years to form part of the IB. As you know, our secondary school already boasts this program in the MYP and DP areas and so it was a logical step to streamline this program and extend it towards our younger students as well. I will not bore you with the details but instead will share the presentation slides with you, for those of you who couldn’t make it, to read and digest in your own time and space. Please do not hesistate to contact me if you have any further inquiries about your child’s learning under this PYP program or if you would like to share some anecdotes or reflections about what you have observed here in the learning community and beyond.
