Teachers Start Here

Welcome to the Website

Whether you are a new or a well-established IB Film teacher, we hope to provide you with valuable resources, insights, and support to enhance your teaching practice and navigate the intricacies of the IB Film curriculum.

The teacher pages on this site are designed to assist you in creating engaging and effective learning experiences for your students, while also addressing the specific requirements and demands of the IB Film course.

To ensure a comprehensive understanding of the IB Film curriculum, it is essential to unpack the course and familiarize yourself with its various components and objectives. From practical production to reading and contextualizing film, this web page will provide guidance and options on each aspect, enabling you to design and deliver a well-rounded and meaningful film course or supplement the one that you are already delivering.

Welcome New Film Teachers!

For new IB Film teachers, this web page hopes to serve as a valuable starting point. It is crucial to understand that this website, like the course itself, is not meant to be prescriptive in how you might approach the teaching of the course.  Each film course should be tailored to the specific needs and context of the school and the students. This web page will offer practical advice on how to introduce and prepare students for assessment tasks, with activities and materials to support their learning journey.

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Welcome Veteran Teachers!

We hope that established and veteran IB Film teachers will find this web page to be a valuable resource for supplementing their teaching resources, and incorporating new approaches. Here you will find additional resources, such as marked exemplars, lessons, and grade descriptors to further enhance your understanding of assessment requirements and expectations.

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Welcome Everyone In Between!

Overall, we are dedicated to supporting and empowering our fellow IB Film teachers in our common mission to provide a high-quality film education. We hope that by leveraging some of the insights and resources provided here, you will be equipped to create or supplement your already engaging and rigorous learning experience, helping students cultivate a deep appreciation for film and developing the skills and attributes outlined in the IB learner profile.  Below and in the pages that follow, you will find some guidance on how to navigate and use this site. Furthermore, you will have the opportunity to participate in our comments section, receive weekly newsletters, and explore and share useful resources with other IB Film teachers, fostering a collaborative and supportive community.

A Note About Content

Films

The IB Film course is designed so that you, as the teacher, have a lot of latitude in the content that you teach. One particular area to think about is what films you might choose to use with your class.

Many teachers opt to start with the first moments committed to film of Muybridges' horse and move forward from there.  Other teachers might try to find a familiar film for a comfortable beginning or a very unfamiliar film to shake students out of their comfort zone right from the start.  In developing this site, we've tried to include all sorts of films as examples.  That being said, many (but not all) of the examples included on the site tend towards a somewhat diverse blend of contemporary & multicultural films.  This stems from a desire to find films that are both engaging and useful to examine and analyze from an IB perspective, as well as offer a wide range of diverse and pluralistic perspectives.

Projects, Activities, & Exercises

Teachers also have a great deal of autonomy regarding the sorts of projects that they might do to build the necessary skills around reading film, exploring film production roles, collaboratively producing film, and contextualizing film. On this site, you will find some detailed examples of projects to support these goals, but you will also find resources to construct your own.

Where Do I Start?

You can try this approach if you are looking for a curriculum map.

This is the activity I like to do on the first day of class with my Year One students:

Followed by this one, which helps make a connection to their experience with film and the content of the course:

If you have your own curriculum but are looking for some lessons, the individual pages below are a good place to start. 

Assessments

One of the ways we hope that this site is useful for you is to answer questions and provide clear information about how students are assessed in the course.  We have created the following pages as starting points for each assessment as well as an assessment overview page.

Film Roles and Film Language

At the center of this course is an understanding of both film analysis and hands-on production.  These two approaches complement each other as students learn about the language of film. As students learn to analyze film, they also synthesize their learning into the production of their own films.  As they create and reflect on their own work, they better understand how filmmakers utilize the language of film to create meaning as they conduct their analysis'.