Conceptober
In the land of English B, we are getting excited about the new guide! Both of us are in the middle of the upskilling training for workshop leaders and we are busy taking notes. The anticipated publication date will be in February 2027 with first teaching in August 2027. Although there aren't many changes to the structure of the course, the pedagogical model has been updated. Also, we will host a free 30 minute ThinkIn Short via Zoom about the new structure of the English B site!
Hi from Joe and Susan! We were lucky to both be in Stockholm in September delivering workshops for InThinking. We didn't even plan to wear navy blue that day, but we were in sync.
As seen in our curriculum review report, concepts will play an even larger role than our current guide. We will have three broad, transferrable concepts that will serve as the disciplinary lenses of the course. In my mind, these are similar to the MYP key concepts. In the DP we have:
- Communication
- Culture,
- Perspectives
Also, we have our subject specific conceptual understandings that are the same as our current guide. These are:
- Audience
- Context
- Meaning
- Purpose
- Variation
These conceptual understandings shape how our students learn the skills needed to communicate in English in an effective manner. Also, they are embedded directly into the language of the Paper 1 rubrics and implied with the Paper 2 in terms of meaning and variation of the English from the Anglophone world. Overall, they have a more prominent role in our new Language B guide that will influence how we teach our students to develop critical and creative thinking skills.
Before our guide is published, you can review the curriculum review report on the PRC that was published in July 2024. Also, Dr. Lynn Erickson and Dr. Lois Lanning have done some amazing work with concepts. Their most notable book is Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction for the Thinking Classroom published in 2017.
In particular, Dr. Lanning helps to separate the more knowledge based content subjects such as Science with more skill based subjects such as languages. I believe this will help better connect MYP with the DP and make language learning focus on skills
We hope to see you in our free InThinking Short session that we will host on October 29th where you can learn about how to get the most out of your Inthinking subscription. Over the summer, we were busy making new updates and changes to the site, and we’re excited to show you what’s what. It is always nice to come together as an English B community. We hope to see you there!
