How can schools prepare their community to explore the initiative of adopting IB courses schoolwide? Here you can find resources for conducting a needs analysis and identifying your school’s priorities.
Resource toolkit
These toolkits are designed to support some of your stakeholder groups so your school can embark on the exploratory journey toward a school-wide adoption initiative.
Optimizing school readiness
A guided reflective self-study can help with outlining the current state of things and identifying resources that will have the most impact.
Strategic development is most successful when a shared understanding of the current context can be evaluated in line with shared ownership of how the school will navigate change.
The International Baccalaureate is committed to a learning partnership with schools and can help identify and develop the tools and resources that will have the most impact. This will allow all students to engage in high-quality education that prepares them to be caring and compassionate lifelong learners.
By strengthening networks among schools, educators, and organizations, we can work together to identify opportunities to make progress.
Shared ownership and responsibility
Members of the school community may have varying degrees of understanding about the way the IB designs education. These toolkits are designed to support some of your stakeholder groups so your school can embark on the exploratory journey toward a school-wide adoption initiative.
Let’s tackle some of the myths and misconceptions and discover what people want to know, as you move forward, together.
Addressing learning barriers and the degree of influence
Before moving into building a strategy for strengthening the school-wide system of education, schools may benefit from a community reflection that identifies the learning barriers in ways that position stakeholders to address them.
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“Identifying areas of focus” resource (PDF, 5 MB) This resource provides two suggested activities to help schools unpack the problems and issues that make getting started even more daunting. They will help school communities to conduct an initial needs analysis, empower creative problem-solving, and establish shared responsibility for taking action. |
This resource provides two suggested activities to help schools unpack the problems and issues that make getting started even more daunting. They will help school communities to conduct in initial needs analysis, empower creative problem-solving, and establish shared responsibility for taking action.
Deconstructing the challenges schools face can help identify priorities and quick wins. A big part of the strategic process will be celebrating the milestones so the community feels energized by their accomplishments, rather than overwhelmed by the work ahead.
Engage in thinking routines
Ron Ritchhart has developed practical support resources to help educators and schools engage in thinking routines. Ritchhart emphasizes that by making thinking visible we are not simply creating visual representations of thinking, we are bringing the thinking behind our understandings out into the open.
As school communities increase their capacity to discuss, explore, and address complex topics, issues, and problems, the following model below presents a design thinking routine that can help schools explore questions such as:
- What expectations have been set for IB programme(s) in our context?
- Do the expectations set for IB education align with the needs of all students?
- What actions have been taken to support or shift these expectations?
- What has been the result of actions the school has taken?
- What has been learned so far, that can support further development?
- What further understanding will equip the community to improve the quality of the learning experience for all students?
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“Key considerations: A vision & purpose for action” resource (PDF, 3.6 MB) Strategic development is most successful when a shared understanding of the current context can be evaluated in line with how the school will navigate change. By strengthening our collective understanding of where we will place our focus, our work to remove learning barriers is operationalized through collaborative efforts to innovate and make positive change. |
