What is the DNA of an MYP unit?
If offering advice to an emerging teacher or professional arriving from another education system, where do you begin to explain what goes into an MYP unit? With the curriculum set to change significantly in the coming years, here’s what I hope it supports as well as what I believe needs balancing in a given curriculum, year level and across secondary education:
1. A chance to implement students’ personal culture, passions and/or experience
Given the diverse and amorphous nature of most international schools, it makes sense to empower students to use their own perspectives. This not only recognises what might be a varied cohort but also allows them to engage with new material through the lens of something they’re familiar with. In English, this might mean coming to develop their narrative skills using a literary hero from their own culture. Alternatively, they may consider stereotypes they’ve come across about that very same way of life when learning rhetoric in order to tackle them. For analysis, they can consider which of the IB’s Learner Profile attributes they most embody using a 360 degree survey amongst their family and peers as well as using this to identify a character during a novel study who could help them to better understand it. Much of the current iteration of MYP is set up for this already, as inquiry is the central pedagogical stance in the Principles into Practice. But given the mixed understanding of inquiry held within the IB community, perhaps more needs to be discussed about how students’ personal and educational background can be better implemented.
2. Access to the fundamental concepts (if horizontal) or concept (if hierarchical) of the subject
I can only really offer ideas on the horizontal here, being an English teacher. But one current element I would like to see removed from the MYP framework is the ‘Key Concepts’. Whilst a good attempt at encouraging interdisciplinary learning, they have been too broad as to be of use to students in an individual subject. Rather, the concepts offered by David Didau; context, structure, argument, story, metaphor and grammar are more indicative of the lived experience of studying and teaching English. This also does not preclude the opportunity of interdisciplinary learning, given that these can be found under different terms in multiple subjects across the curriculum. Sarah Cottingham’s work with Ausubel’s Theory of Meaningful Learning reveals that we should aim to start broad and begin introducing new disciplinary knowledge that relates to each concept in order to deepen students appreciation consistently over a longer period of time. Didau uses the analogy of boxes with each new unit bringing new knowledge or skills that can be placed in each. Cottingham refers to the concepts as planets with each new knowledge or skill being something that enters and remains within its orbit in terms of the student’s knowledge base. Ensuring exposure to each is challenging, particularly the tension between story and argument in terms of style but attempts to do so yield learning that is far stickier and therefore malleable in the long term. The MYP’s related concepts are probably what come closest to this currently but even within these, there are debates to be had about when each should be introduced to students with a progressional model of knowledge and skill acquisition in mind.
3. Appropriate disciplinary knowledge and skills for their respective attainment level
Once you know the planets in your discipline’s solar system, you can go about introducing the appropriate rocks that orbit them. This can yield useful conversations about what students need to know and where they need to learn it. Do students need to know the word classes, if so which and when? Do students need to know what an unreliable narrator is, if so why and when? In attempting to implement each of the elements on this list, there has to be an ongoing acceptance of opportunity cost. David Perkins argues that a more responsive curriculum requires students be ‘expert amateurs’, meaning that teachers are forced to accept that aspects that would otherwise prepare pupils for scholarship in the subject be sacrificed. Some may never learn what synecdoche, stream of consciousness or reader response theory are unless they come across it during personal exploration. This may provoke anxiety or even consternation; aren’t we doing kids a disservice by not at least trying to give them to as much of the curriculum as possible? Dylan Wiliam has argued that the limits of the possible curriculum are infinite. If we aim to maximise the knowledge rich curriculum, there is a chance that we cover so much content as to removing opportunity for other processes involved in learning.
4. Opportunities for research and reflection
The aforementioned opportunity cost comes into consideration significantly here. Giving students time and scope to research something from their lives that could otherwise be mandated within an assessment prompt uses up time that could be spent learning new skills or knowledge. However, the skill of accurate research and the dispositions needed to do it properly are indisputably things that pupils will need at every stage of life. Added to this is the vital stage of reflection. In English, this would range from students’ retrieval practice, journalling of their emotions in and around key moments of the course, reviewing and redrafting work or studying the progress they’ve made in a given unit before considering what they have not yet mastered. This kind of metacognitive appreciation for one’s education as well as a first hand experience for gathering data for their final piece of work has significant implications for the amount of content that can be covered. Despite this, the dispositions picked up alongside the disciplinary knowledge that does get covered can alloy themselves well to produce students that possess a solid base in the given subject as well as the independence and maturity needed to make solutions and conclusions of their own later in life.
5. Appropriate service or authentic outcome for their respective experience in the subject
As with skills and knowledge, gauging when students are ready for a particular service opportunity or assessment outcome requires careful judgement and scaffolding. Whilst it might be exhilarating to encourage students to design their own artifact to show understanding in Year 7, doing so before they have a solid foundation in the discipline can lead to confusion, frustration and little learning. There is a delicate balance to be struck at each stage of the curriculum around how much freedom to give students in terms of the way they express their understanding. Similarly, implementing service opportunities can be a powerful way to end or spend a unit’s learning. However, much like a discipline’s skills and knowledge this needs considerable stratification. Following Kaye’s framework of: research, advocacy, indirect service and service helps in illustrating the possible path students’ development could take. Additionally, gauging the scale of the service can be vital too. Beginning a unit with Y8 saying that the outcome is writing a letter to the UN Attorney General about a matter of global significance is only worthwhile if you actually plan on sending the correspondence and are confident that there will be some form of acknowledgement in return. Without this, students will come to see such ‘authentic’ or service opportunities as make believe at best and genuine distractions from the knowledge and skills expected at worst. Tiering the sophistication of each unit’s assessment in terms of authenticity and/or service means a teacher can steadily build confidence whilst continually showing students what Roger Schank refers to as the bigger picture of a discipline’s output.
6. Oracy
With the proliferation of AI, the current paradigm regarding assessment may alter seismically in the coming decade. In an interview with Toddle, Hattie, Wiliam and Hamilton put the case forward for greater emphasis on oral or presentation based examination. Whilst oracy is present in the taught curriculum of MFL and to an extent English, there is a growing sense that students’ oral expression as with literacy before it, is the responsibility of all teachers in the school. Oracy can range from paired or small group conversations, debates, prepared presentations, unprepared presentations and recordings in the style of podcasts or vlogs. Although written expression is currently suffering something of an identity crisis following the easy access of ChatGPT and the like, demonstrating your ideas verbally remains a key skill when it comes to persuading, pitching, inspiring or presenting new information to people in the most immediate of settings.