Beginnings

The International Baccalaureate® aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.

To this end the organization works with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.

These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.

I am standing outside the English and maths block on the 4^th of September. Students flow around the school following the painted arrows on the floor marking out the government mandated one-way system. Yesterday, when the school was empty of students, it looked like a well-planned irrigation system; today the lockdown glacier has melted and we are facing an avalanche. After six months at home, 1300 students are roaring towards us in a clamour of excitement, fear and confusion.

I started the day by pinning the IB mission statement to my new office wall. These are the kind of lofty ideals that bought me to teaching a decade ago but which are all too easily overwhelmed in the race for grades, progress 8 scores, promotion and recognition.

My colleague and I hold the doors open, smile through our masks, and adopt the familiar roles of Calm & Reassuring. The kids don’t need to know that we’re as anxious as they are.

Welcome back! Do you have a face covering?

Could you put it on, please? Not there! You’re blocking the door…

Get off his back!

Did you have a good summer – turn left, please. It’s a one-way system. No! The other left.

Of course I’m pleased to see you. Remember any Macbeth quotes? Nope, me neither…

Yes – all the way round, please. It’s a ONE-way system.

Every now and then, the flow is stemmed by a tiny, tearful year 7, the full force of a hundred students at his shoulder.

Don’t worry, Ms Sen can tell you where to go. Just stand to the side. Good lad.

I am aware that these scenes are playing out across the city, across the country, across the continent and across much of the northern hemisphere: generation lockdown are returning to their new normal after six months at home.

My own daughter stood at the front door this morning in protest uniform: red nails, a fistful of rings, flicky eyeliner and her uniform skirt a good 6 inches above the knee. Despite six months at home, her shirt looked unwashed…

You’re going into school like that?

At least I’m going into school…

There have been more tears from staff and students than I remember seeing in ten years of working in schools.

The torrent has slowed and we are left with the final trickle. First comes Evie: fourteen, fierce. She walks quickly and ignores any requests to put on a face covering. Her hair is straightened, her face neutralised with foundation, eyebrows pencilled on – her fat brown furry forehead friends. But they don’t hide the panic in her eyes. Lockdown has not been easy on some students and even though school is the safest place for them to be, they will be the most resistant to returning. A member of the pastoral team follows Evie, directing her in firm but kind tones. The pastoral team will spend most of the morning cajoling, joking, chivvying and bargaining with similar characters.

We are desperate to reintegrate these students: they will disrupt our meticulously planned lessons, they will trash our scores but even in affluent Cambridge, county line drug gangs prowl the perimeter of these students’ lives. We are all aware that there are lean times ahead for young people. Applications for a single bar job are running into the hundreds and entry-level office jobs are non-existent. These kids are going to need to do more than pass their exams to make it.

Finally come a cluster of students with pronounced special needs accompanied by learning support assistants. All of these kids are wearing face coverings, though there are some eccentric adaptions. One child peers out from a mask that seems to engulf his entire face. It’s not clear that he can see as he stumbles past us. Another has a face shield on at such a sharp angle that it’s more like an oversized running visor. This group of students is vulnerable for different reasons. They are visibly agitated: some are trembling; some are protesting loudly about following the one-way systems; some are counter protesting (equally) loudly about the lack of adherence to the one-way systems. All of them are terrified that they are going to forget a rule. We are all forgetting the rules all of the time. It’s a lot to remember.

After the last student scurries to his tutor base, I wander through the empty corridors to the sanctuary of my office, close my door and reread the IB mission statement. This year I am leading on the implementation of the Middle Years Programme at Key Stage 3. The need to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world has never been more pressing. I haven’t felt this excited about a work project in quite some time.

I have been leading the English IB diploma and career programmes for a few years now and I know, that properly taught, IB programmes can be transformative. The explicit focus on critical thinking, developing the IB Learner Profile and the requirement for students to integrate self-directed physical activity, meaningful extra-curricular activity and service elements into their lives shapes to a fully integrated pastoral, academic and co-curricular experience. Like many people, before teaching the IB, I believed that the main difference between A-levels and the IB was the opportunity to access a broader academic curriculum. I now understand that it’s the opportunity to access a broader concept of what it means to be educated.

The challenge of MYP is to feed this down into the lower school.

When my children were younger, they were involved in an organisation called Woodcraft Folk. On more than one occasion, I found myself cheek down in a damp field in Cambridgeshire, under a dampening of drizzle, blowing at sparks inside a pyramid of twigs. Stationed around me were hopeful and overly confident children clutching sticks and tree trunks foraged from surrounding woods. The minute I had coaxed the pyramid into flame, it was their job to build the fire. Some of these kids were sensible and compliant wielding dry batons of hazel and beech. Others were visionaries, with huge damp logs, resolutely non-compliant, evangelical in their belief that these logs would explode into flame. Behind these children were a team of adults but the golden impediment rule of Woodcraft Folk, is that all activities are child led and all the children are included. The longer we worked together, the better we became at marshalling the children. The children fed the fires and the adults cooperated with them to ensure that the fires took hold. Even huge, spongey crumbly logs found their place: we all watched curiously to see what would happen. I learnt a lot about fire.

I feel like I am cheek to mud again, looking at a glimmer as the rain falls.

It feels challenging to start a fire in a storm but perhaps this is when it’s most needed. The future has never felt so uncertain. As we embark on this school year we are unsure whether we will stay open for the whole year, unsure whether the students will sit their exams and unsure what those exams will look like. Perhaps, in the absence of so many answers we should be focusing our teaching on how to ask questions.

At the heart of the Middle Years Programme is inquiry based learning. This is not some facile exhortation to let the teachers drink coffee and hand over lesson planning to the children: rather it acknowledges that education arises from the fundamental human desire to make sense of the world around us. Curiosity and wonder are innate in all our students and yet as a classroom practitioner, the answer to the eternal “Why do we need to know this?” question is still all too often: “To pass the exam.”   

The IB encourages practitioners to journey alongside their students with a clear curriculum map but also with an open mind seeking opportunities to connect Pythagoras, alliteration or ecosystems with a student’s lived experience. MYP builds the curriculum around conceptual questions leading to inquiry-based dialogic lessons which enable us to “stretch students’ thinking beyond the topic itself”. As an IB teacher, if my students are not asking questions and pursuing lines of inquiry that are meaningful to them, I am not really delivering the programme. For teachers used to delivering the content driven GCSE curricula, this is quite a mind shift.

A truth that classroom experience teaches us again and again is that the most interesting answers lie nascent in the questioning wild minds of our students (often the ones heaving damp logs into a fire). If the events of the past year have taught us anything, it is that we are a global community in crisis with no clear answers. It thus feels fitting that we are embarking on an educational journey whose end is inquiry: teaching students how to ask questions and how to think critically about the answers they find.

Next week – curriculum planning.