IB Heads Conference 2018
Overview
As many conferences are this was something of a curate’s egg. There were some very good parts and some weak ones. There were some common themes and some contradictions. The themes that stood out to me were educators from all over the world looking forward (It was called “shaping the future”) and trying to find ways to make education more relevant, more successful, more engaging etc. It was refreshing not to have a conference schedule peppered with people telling you how to find and mine more data about children. I think we may be turning a tide towards a more human education.
The contradictions lay, as they often do in these things, with the actions of the IB that have just introduced more numerical assessment for MYP, are apparently planning to do so in PYP and remain obsessed by grades in the DP. There is no sign of them introducing collaboration, for example, as an assessed element of the DP, however important it is claimed to be in the ATLs.
The future of on screen assessment could however be a more interesting and positive sign. See later.
There were two main keynote speakers who demonstrated the contrast. One was excellent and one was not. There were also three “outstanding educators” who gave a very personal view of education and their journeys. They were all in different ways inspiring, and I hope videos of their short talks become available.
The first, Taryn Bond Clegg, was a primary school teacher who described moving from being a robot to a rebel. She had stopped making her children follow fixed rules and given them more agency in their work. She introduced flexibility in timing and activity content. Eventually she realised the school she was at was not the place for her and moved to one where she found a rebel alliance of teachers and administrators who wanted to take risks and bring excitement to education. Her colleagues did a session later in the conference that I missed through being at something else, but apparently it was excellent.
The second, Geoff Derry, was more into the use of technology to give kids agency and the creative opportunities to express their learning. There were some great examples of the use of virtual reality and augmented reality that students got excited about. A simple idea was that they write, or curate, the textbook of their course as they go through it rather than just use someone else’s. I will try this with my next TOK class.
The last, Teresa Tung, spoke only to the Heads. The conference was a combination of a Heads conference and a Global conference for coordinators, VPs etc. She challenged Heads to give their teachers the ability to make exciting changes happen, or to allow them to happen. We are all faced with “buts” whenever a new idea is put forward, and too often the buts prevent the action. Her challenge was to move the buts into ways to clear the obstacles rather than the opposite. There was a lot of mild humour about moving buts, heads being the but-movers which wore rather thin, but the point was well made.
Plenaries
Teach less learn more
Pak Tee Ng
This was from the Singaporean who trains all the Principals in the Singapore state system. The title is the name of their current educational policy or campaign. They love campaigns in Singapore. His first three questions were:
Why change
What to change
What not to change
He claimed that Singapore has been successful by learning about education for 50 years. They have deliberately studied what they do and its effects and are on a constant move to improve. Although they are seen as successful, this is the time to change. Indeed, because they are successful this is the time to change. He noted the outstanding PISA results of his country, dismissing their validity, but acknowledging with a wry grin that if there was to be a table that it is quite nice to be at the top of it. His message was to change from a position of strength. This is his challenge to the IB. Acknowledging that now the IB has become accepted worldwide as the leader in International education, he said that we must analyse what we should be doing next and move forward rather than resting on our laurels.
I also went to his breakout session where he went more into the meaning of Teach less, Learn more. Interestingly the idea and the name came from the President, who said that Singaporean teachers needed to teach less so their students could learn more.
It is not just about cutting down on contact, but that is a good idea. What do we put in place?
Key areas
Understanding and thinking
Creativity
Engagement
Social and emotional learning and values
More pathways for different students
You may recognise some of these ideas from our own Skills Framework. Hopefully it is reassuring that we are not so maverick and others out there have similar ideas to us. The creativity issue was absolutely key to him. They had had tremendous success in getting students to learn enormous amounts of content, but they have not created students who have creative solutions to the problems of the modern world. What they have discovered is that kids are creative until they come to school where we try to develop creativity. The result is the opposite. It doesn’t need developing. Don’t kill it through schooling! And this from a Singaporean!
Is frontal teaching bad? Not necessarily. There are times when it is a good idea. Facilitation is not wrong either. It is how we bring them together. Teachers still need to understand content and be able to explain, but that alone is not enough. Variety of strategies is enough. It has been hard to convince teachers to tell the students less about the model answers, but to give open ended problems to explore based on the initial content.
He had a little aside on lesson observation, which is all about putting on a show. It tells us nothing about what teachers and students are doing on a daily basis. For him leadership is not about observing and criticising. It requires the leader to demonstrate what Teach Less Learn More means in the classroom. They need to show they understand it and can demonstrate it.
Deep Learning for him is about ensuring a student:
Can understand and explain
Can apply in different contexts
Can interpret what it means
Can generate other perspectives
Learning and learning not to be trapped by the learning.
AI in 2040.
Rose Luckin
Panel discussion, followed by the second plenary.
Somewhat confused discussion about where AI is going or what it might look like. AI is already good at managing data in massive quantities, and this is where it is going to be much better at. Are we teaching the right things if we are making kids do things that AI will be able to do better? My view is that if we assess by numbers, then we are bound to be doing things that AI does better. Both the discussion and the plenary were poor, and deserve little in the way of positive comment. We know that teachers are valuable over AI because they can build relationships that AI does not seem to be close to doing. Discussions about values, and what it means to be human are going to be more natural for humans, whether we mean empathy, ethics, emotional contact or artistic sensibility. Things that can be measured in numbers are likely to be very well done by AI which are basically digital devices. Quite why none of these experts can take the next step and say we should stop measuring things out of 45 is a mystery. Rose also used the famous fake statistic about 60% of kids doing jobs that don’t exist yet. She did try to find a source for this data because, as we all know, no such source exists!
Other sessions
Toby Newton
Toby talked about Human Technologies – a core course from P6 to S4 in an IGCSE/IBDP school and is a bridge to TOK, and much more. Toby is a deep thinker and full of excellent and different ideas. This sounds really interesting. He would say that this is what knowledge is, but I would be a bit more modest and say it is a lens through which to understand it. There is a powerpoint to look at and some stuff on his school’s website.
Monash University
It was interesting to see what universities are thinking and doing. These are short notes.
They talked about collaborative learning space intrinsically linked to different teaching methodologies. The learning space informed the teaching and the teaching informed the creation of the space. They were very keen on a multidisciplinary approach. Eg a Motor Sports course, which included students from engineering, design, business, advertising, etc.
They have spent some time surveying what workplaces want, and came up with the following competencies: Lifelong learning, willingness to learn, communication, creativity, problem solving.
They have a long tradition of students having international study experience during their degree courses. They spend a period of time (term or year) at an institution in another country, mostly in Asia. I think these can be work experience as well as in educational institutions. What they find is that these students get better grades, are more employable and earn more! This was interesting.
They have greater empathy having been “the other” in a different place and out of their comfort zone. The intellectual challenge makes them more critical and better learners. All the skills we value are established and strengthened. They want to make this a compulsory part of all their courses. It has some interesting implications for our Round Square exchanges. Should we get more kids spending time abroad? Should we worry less about them missing curriculum time here?
Simon Head from Dusseldorf International School.
This was all about change and how we make it happen. He has introduced various changes at his school and described some of them. It was then more about how we all deal with the blocks to change in a school.
They put 4 P5 classes together with 5 teachers (PYP). In the following year they opened up the rooms to create a larger shared learning space with lots of different types of areas. Advantages were significant. Looks a bit like our Pre K classes!
The fear that students would get lost were unfounded. Actually there was more observation of each child and problems were spotted more quickly.
Teachers learning from teachers was the best CPD. Teachers feeling that others would see what they were doing made them want to be consistently on top form.
Parents, initially sceptical, wanted this to continue in P6. They decided to make this happen for the trans disciplinary part of P6, so they made similar room changes.
They also discovered that being outside for some of each day improved language development, so all kids have a period outside with an outdoor team that is out there all the time working with class teachers.
They have removed numbered grades from all up to the end of middle school (Grade 8).
DP developments
This was led by the Head of Assessment, Matt Someone, and the Head of Curriculum Jenny Gillett.
At the end I had a chat with the Matt about the problems with cheating in the November exams. He said they found out something was amiss a couple of days before the exams were sat. They decided it was too late to change the paper or postpone it. They then spent the next few weeks trying to find out the extent of the problem and making some very difficult decisions. I said that I was sure it had been a nightmare and that I was sure they had made the best decisions they could, but that schools found themselves in an information vacuum.
I said it would have been a great deal easier if we were given some heads up much longer than one day before the results came out so we could have prepared to react quickly when they did. I pointed out for example that attempting to survey and interview students and staff in the middle of the summer holiday with two days’ notice was almost impossible. He accepted this. I further said we were still pretty ignorant and it was not, even now, too late to get more information to schools about what happened, how, and how widespread it was, together with some of the reasoning behind the decisions such as the Maths Studies results. We were finding it hard to deal with students and parents in cases where the coursework was poor but they were expected to get a much higher exam grade. He was surprised that more information even now would be well received, but accepted it and said they would follow up with some kind of report.
The sessions were about DP developments. The first covered the mundane and the second the more speculative.
All development is based in the Hague, where 23 people are leading and managing this. There are 2 curriculum heads. 4 strand managers ,who also link to MYP, and curriculum managers for one or two subjects each.
Matt pushed the value of the CP. Could we link to our PN? The core has changed. There are lots of resources, including videos. There are others in Lima that do this (Casuarinas, Newton(?))
The subjects that were reviewed last year include Film, Geo, Psych, Social and Cultural Anthropology
2018: Lang B and ab initio. Subject guides are available. 5 language themes. Skill development is the important new stress. Skills are explicit in the guide.
2019: Lit and Lang Lit for assessment 2021. There will be some shared assessment components between Lit and LL. This will enable equalising of standards. The emphasis will be on conceptual understanding and an active inclusion of international mindedness and ATLs.
Maths. Now two subjects each at HL/SL. Analysis and Approaches (A&A). Applications and Interpretation (A&I).
More emphasis on modelling and statistical analysis using technology. HL more accessible without reducing rigour? Much of the content recognisable.
A&A: emphasis on calculus. It is primarily for kids going on to study Pure Maths, engineering, sciences, econs. Current HL calc option is part of this. SL is a complete subset of HL.
A&I: more applied. Tech, modelling, data etc. Current HL stats and discrete options are subset of the new HL
A&I SL designed for kids who used to take Maths Studies.
60 hours of common SL material across both.
30 hours to development of investigation, problem solving, collaboration, modelling.
IA hasn’t really changed from current SL/HL model.
HL will have a problem solving paper 3, with two scaffolded questions leading to a generalisation.
Work going on with unis in many countries.
Explicit connections to TOK.
2020
TOK: The stress is on knowledge and the knower and the differences between shared and personal knowledge. There will be optional themes from 5 or 6 Areas of knowledge.
Options could be: knowledge and tech, knowledge and Lang, knowledge and indigenous societies, knowledge and politics, knowledge and religion.
DP and CP wider initiatives and discussions.
This was a separate session looking further into the future.
Exams: There are now 157,000 candidates in May.
16,000 in November. This is a 40% increase from the previous year. It is a big growth area.
Pass rate constant at about 80%. However there is a decline in 6s and 7s in our region due probably to the number of new schools.
20%-25% or EURs change grade on exams. About 5% on coursework.
They are trying hard to improve security. Exams will sit in schools for much less time. We were exhorted to impress the importance of security on students. Eg not using social media after an exam etc.
Wider initiatives
Student workload. There is a large survey of 4000 students in 40 countries over the 2 years of the programme. Final results in August. However there already some results from the pilot and from the early returns.
The questions were about how demanding is DP, what courses or aspects are most demanding. What causes stress? What are student perspectives?
Perceived workload is more stressful than actual. The highest workload is perceived to be in Lang/Lit, Lit. Hist, Maths , Bio
The greatest difficulty is in: Maths, Hist, Bio lang/lit, lit
Subject combination is more of a determining factor than school, region etc. This means that students taking several subjects perceived to be the most difficult, or courses with the highest workload, are the most stressed wherever they do them.
Girls more stressed than boys
Students with parents of lower educational level more stressed
Students with parents less involved more stressed
What do students think would help?
Clear deadlines for IAs, agreed by all departments and not conflicting. This is the biggest thing for kids. All schools urged to take this into consideration.
More non exam components
More IB approved resources
Flexibility in DP
They are looking at flexibility in time. Can the DP be taken over more years in particular circumstances eg for students doing a lot of sport, arts, etc.
Non standard diplomas. Can we simplify the rules?
Allowing interdisciplinary subjects to be HL and SL. They are looking at this, starting with ESS
Could there be more of them? Looking at this. Eg Art History
E assessment
No firm timeline. But committed to doing it. It is coming!
Note that it is onscreen not online.
MYP uses it
Handwriting does not reflect the modern world.
Lots of interesting options that on-screen allows. Can be more authentic with video footage and modelling etc.
Too much scanning and posting and printing now.
Security is better.
Accessibility features are better.
Automatic uploads. No packaging at school level
Quicker feedback.
There are outcomes of a survey into school views on ibo.org last week. Also with brief summary.
80% of schools would be ready to transition in 3 years. Only 10% would drop the programme if it went that way.
The core
TOK assessment is priority
The current importance of PPD for presentation moderation was strongly stressed.
Presentation has too many questions that are not KQs. Often they are ethical questions instead.
Essay problems are about the confusion between title and KQs
There will be more focus on comparisons across areas of knowledge
Global marking stays but redesigned
Less focus on formulation of KQs
Research on Adaptive comparative judgement for marking TOK questions. Search web for “No More Marking”
New tool to replace presentation. No PPD form. Possibly an exhibition where they identify a tension/disagreement and exhibit 3 objects that highlight this in the world. Very flexible for schools to decide how this is done. Do we want to be a trial school? I think this means we should assess SEED by exhibition.
ATLs
More explicit in the subjects.
Now two workshops. One for classroom teacher. One for leaders/coordinators.
That is about it for the sessions.
Chris Binge
March 2018