“Learning in an IB community celebrates the many ways people work together to construct meaning and make sense of the world.” (Standards and Practices)

The following questions will help you reflect on the revised IB Standards and Practices (2020).

• What is our understanding of how learning in our school happens? To what extent is it aligned to the IB understanding that learning is co-constructed through positive interactions with students, teachers and the wider learning community? What artefacts could we present to evidence this?
• How do we as a school community learn and develop?  How can we evidence that our learning is about engaging in (professional) inquiry, action and reflection (this is the IB way!) What do we purposively do to provide opportunities to develop student agency, to actively engage in inquiry, problem-based learning?
• How embedded is this culture of learning in our (a) classrooms, (b) staff room, (c) board meeting? Does the learning cycle of inquiry, action and reflection inform how we develop strategically and pedagogically?
• To what extent is collaborative working embedded in the life of our school community – design of space, timetable opportunities, culture, policy development? How do we enable and encourage everyone to collaborate, to think and learn together?
• What artefacts and evidence can we use to evidence our commitment to professional growth of all members of staff? How do we enable people to ‘think together’, learn from each other and collaboratively innovate? Do any of our colleagues participate in IBEN roles: school visits, assessment, curriculum review, workshop facilitation?
• What are our instructional design principles? To what extent do we apply them consistently? To what extent do these align to the IB approaches to teaching?
• How do we make learning meaningful and relevant to our students’ lives outside the classroom? How do we relate learning to our local context, and how do we apply learning to national and global contexts? Do we have a consistent approach? Do we collaborate across subjects to make learning meaningful? Where do we explore human commonality, diversity and interconnection?
• Learning how to learn: How do we foster students’ awareness (metacognition) of the learning process? What systems and processes do we have in place to develop, monitor and evaluate the development of students’ thinking, research, communication, social and self-management skills? Where are they explicitly taught? What tools and practices do we use that best support students in developing and applying these skills (associated with IB approaches to learning)? How do we support students to initiate, manage and direct their own learning (agency)?
• How do we keep the focus on the main goal: the growth of students who exhibit the attributes of our learner profile? How do we keep the balance between this and delivering curriculum specifications? How do we help our students to affirm identity to build self-esteem thus providing them with the security to take informed risks? What do we actively do to enable our students to reflect on multiple perspectives?
• How do we make the link for students between learning and action? How do we nurture the spirit of service in our students? How do we help students recognise what they have to offer the local community in principled action and service? How could we evidence that students act independently and collectively to create change in their own lives, their communities and in the wider world in ways that they believe will create a better and more peaceful world?