Okay, so tell us a little bit about how you designed your PPS course how has it evolved over the years.

So when, when we initially sat down and came up with our design for PPS, we the way that it's initially right laid out in the guide is you get you get each theme individually. So as you're reading through, you can first read about professional or personal development and read through theme number one, and then your intercultural understanding, and so forth and read through the themes independently. But when you read the rest of the guide, right, it talks about how everything is really interconnected. And what I also find interesting is that the personal professional skills evolved from being approaches to learning. And so in a sense, the five themes used to be the five ATLs. And as educators, we know those ATLs are foundational to everything, and are really interconnected.

So rather than looking at each of the five themes of PPS, as individual units, we went into the different subtopics because that gave a lot more depth, and meaning to just what personal development means and what thinking skills are. And by going into the subtopics, we started to draw connections with the different subtopics to each other. And the approach that we decided of thinking about it from a sub topic perspective, knowing one of the other major components of the CP core is the reflective project and knowing that we were going to start our reflective project in the second half of year one; so we thought about it in terms of what are what are the critical skills and subtopics that we would want to address with our students before they started their reflective project? And so that's how we designed it thinking, and what's going to be best for our students? Right? I mean, that's the question. All educators ask themselves is what's going to be best for my students in my context?

And so our understanding of the personal and professional skills was, it really is for our students, that initial journey of understanding themselves as as learners as people? And then once they know themselves, how is it that they're able to connect and work with others and, again, kind of embrace the that IB Mission Statement of Understanding multiple perspectives, even though the other person you might think they're wrong, but it's okay, you can still be friends. And, and then how, how do we think, how do we analyse and then bringing in that ethical dimension, so really getting those four things started. And then we would introduce the reflective project. And so as we were then getting into kind of that fourth component around ethics and those thinking skills, we were then separately in another core lesson, introducing the reflective project.

So really, just constantly being mindful of how PPS really ties all of the other core components together, and constantly looking to be making those connections back and forth, of what is it that we're doing and PPS, how is it connecting to the reflective project? What is it that we're working on? And PPS? How is that connecting to service learning? What was it in PPS and how was that connecting to language development? And so when we designed RPPS course, we really did it with mixing the themes together, looking at how subtopics can connect, and then over the two year timeline, how is it that they are connecting to the other core components? So again, it's it's trying to be mindful of the concurrency of everything over the two years? When is it happening in the overall to your calendar, thinking about the overall assessment calendar with all the different deadlines for DP subjects, and CP core components and the CRS work that students do?

So again, it takes a lot of thought and planning but we've really enjoyed how our course has developed and it taking the subtopics and blending them together and not taking the approach of we did personal development and all of its subtopics first and then next we did intercultural understanding, and did all of its subtopics. Because we felt that if if we did all of the groupings in order, waiting until the end to do applied ethics didn't feel right, because of the context as to how we set up the rest of the core. So that would be another way that you could approach it is to think about what the five themes are and doing each theme as a whole. And you could do them right in the order in which they're presented in the guide, you could perhaps start with Applied Ethics at the beginning of the year and do everything within Applied Ethics and and change the order around. Again, it really is that conversation about who are the collaborators on your team, designing this and implementing this and knowing your students in your context and what's going to be best

I like the idea of using that PPS course, I've always used the analogy of a mothership. I know use it house glue. You know, lots of different analogies, but it really is that place where you can pull everything together and then it will link out in that way. Fantastic.

When it comes to assessment in PPS, it's, it's important to be mindful of the context of your school, the context of your students, and the resources that you have available to you. So, it's important to make sure that you are consulting with your team, right? Finding your collaborators; if you're the coordinator or the PPS teacher, hopefully, those are different people. So, you can have some collaboration happening there. But if it's only one person, that's fine, too. When thinking about assessment within PPS, because it is a pass fail component, [if we have opted to do a lot of portfolio work.

And being mindful of what is it that that they need? This is a personal and professional skills course. So what are we asking students to do in order to document their learning document? How do the skills that they're gaining, not only just within their school context, apply to a more professional context? [For example] when we were thinking about our students’ personal development, in one of our initial units, [they wrote about] … who am I as a person as a learner? What do I know about myself? What are what are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? Who are the people that I can work with super easily? What are some of the things that I just don't do? I can't work with this type of person - how do I overcome that? We did a lot of personal journaling around that. Because it is a story of personal development. And so that's not necessarily something that every student is going to be comfortable with everybody else seeing.

Then when we get into bringing in how do I work with other people, then we do a bit more of some role playing. And we've done collaboration with our theatre teacher who's come in and done some theatre games with our students just about interacting with other people and uncomfortable situations; how do you react to those things?

And later on, when we got into … ethics and the professional side of things, we again, would collaborate with our theatre teacher, but also pulling in other personnel from human resources, our head of nursing to talk about some of those ethical dilemmas, what is it that they are looking for, we have created CVs with our students, and written professional emails and professional letters, and practice those types of communication skills.

We have also when introducing our applied ethics unit, and getting students ready for the reflective project, had them do a mini reflective project, often on a topic that the students get to choose, because that's something else that we value is making sure that students have some voice and some choice in how they want to be exploring these different themes presented in PPS. So students will often choose a topic of interest to them. And we go through a mini process of turning it into a bit more of an ethical question. And then we've brought in our speech and debate coach, and the students actually have a mini debate with each other where they're practising those research skills. So bringing in thinking skills and that theme, our librarians come in, and we'll discuss academic honesty and making sure they're citing their sources appropriately.

And then they actually have the debate. And after … we have them write a short, brief essay on one side, and again, so that they have that experience of the other options and the other formats available to them with a reflective project. For the other side of the debate, we have them choose one of the optional methods for the reflective project to present the other side. So they'll have the live debate, they go away, and they'll have a written component for one side. But then they have to choose one of the other options for the other side of their debate. So again, before they get to the real reflection of project, they've done a mini one, they've experimented with writing a short essay, as well as one of the alternative formats, so they have a better sense of what that would look like. Again, this is all done in collaboration and conjunction about the timing of the core components over the two years of the coursework, and trying to be mindful of what is it that they're actually going to be experiencing and using when they graduate from high school? What is it that they'll be doing in tertiary if they're going to university if they're going to be doing an internship or work-based placement, but we try to make the assessment that we do and that we look for as authentic and meaningful as possible.

This is about skill development and everything with the assessment is, is rooted in the approaches to teaching and learning skills areas. How do we report on PPS in a meaningful way? And how does this assessment gets shared?

Internally within the classroom, there's, of course going to be written feedback from the teacher, as well as conversations. We also allow, depending on the project, students can peer assess, and so they get peer feedback often.

And then in the more formal sense of reporting, we of course, have written report card comments that are sent home twice a year to families, for parents to see a full reporting of not just PPS, but how they're doing across all four components. So we officially as a school report on all four components to families twice a year. But internally, specifically within the PPS course, they'll receive teacher feedback verbally and written. We also do peer feedback as well. And students also will be given the opportunity to do self-assessment as well. I'm saying the self-assessment is so important because of course, we want students to really be able to chart how they're developing. And that's not we're not saying that it's a upward trajectory, we want them to be very honest about being able to say these are skills are found really difficult to develop. And these are the ones that are found easier. It's not I think we can sometimes think it's about them being a finished product by the end of the course. But it all comes back to sounding very IB - the lifelong learner. Really, we're all in progress!