The IB categorizes self-management skills into two separate areas: 

1. Organization Skills 

2. Affective Skills 

We must as DP teachers ensure that assessment components are spread throughout the year and perhaps scaffold assignments into sizeable and workable chunks. 

The key aspects of affective skills involve resilience, self-motivation, and mindfulness. 

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Resilience 

Remember that the optimal conditions for learning are for you to create tasks that are challenging and yet achievable. It is important too to factor in the notion of learning from mistakes. This will help students to be more willing to take risks, be more adventurous, and ultimately more creative with their ideas. 

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Self-Motivation 

It is well documented that classrooms that develop student autonomy and self-direction are those that help to increase intrinsic motivation. We need to cultivate an environment in our classrooms where we not only know our students but also guide them to explore areas of interest. 

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Mindfulness

Do attempt to try some relaxation activities before a particularly challenging conceptual lesson. This will certainly help students to remain in the moment and not be distracted by external influences. Factor in some of these relaxation activities at the beginning or middle of a lesson. 

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One aspect that you may wish to try with your students is having them contribute to their internal deadlines. Here are the deadlines to which we all must adhere for both the November and the May assessment periods. 

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Here are some ideas that you may wish to attempt with your students: 

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IBDP Music Deadlines (from 2023 onwards)

Early Component Deadline 15 March/15 September	Internally Assessed Deadline 20 April/20 October	Externally Assessed Deadline 30 April/30 October
Exploring Music in Context	Experimenting with Music and HL Contemporary Music Maker	Presenting Music

You could explain to your students that you need to provide feedback to them and that they also need to factor in a period of re-working / polish, but they could perhaps decide on these internal deadlines. They should also consider submissions in other subjects, as well as other deadlines that they may have outside of school (college applications, personal statements, etc.). There may be some flexibility that you can offer them to have a semblance of control with this (not all the deadlines need to be the same for every student either). 

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Research suggests that "performance improvement in this area, therefore, comes partly out of time-management strategies themselves and partly out of attitude and perception, both of which can be influenced by affective skill development" (IB document Approaches to Teaching and Learning in the Diploma Programme, see p.10). 

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For downloadable and printable summaries of deadlines (May and November), you may visit here.