For the Oct.24th professional development day, as well as today, those of us in the IB cohort attended workshops hosted by experienced IB educators in our specific subject areas.
Those of us in biology attended a workshop led by Catherine Daniel, a biology teacher from Stratford Hall. During the two day-session, we covered many different areas of the IB biology curriculum, as well as different resources that we can use for teaching. It was a productive two days, and I learned a lot about how the IB programme is structured and how it has and continues to evolve.
The following are some notes that I took during the session, and some photos of what we worked on.
- IBEN = IB educator network
- Available to educators after working for 2 years
- evaluate programs for different schools
- work in curriculum development
- working towards improving the entire program / teacher support
- Question bank = collection of old papers & questions
- set up by topics à choose to use on own exams
- different types of questions available
- mark schemes/answers given for questions
- Mark Distribution
- IA = 20% (usually in 2nd year)
- 3 papers = 80% (distribution dependent on SL or HL)
- paper 1 = multiple choice
- paper 2 = data analysis and long answer
- paper 3 = option
- Internal Assessment
- rubrics for marking just updated
- let students know that for collecting sufficient relevant data, they need 5×5 in order to use trend lines or calculate standard deviation
- if students are doing a bar graph, they need 2×10 in order to perform a t-test and get a p-value
- do not mark higher than a student should be getting (moderators will mark them down and the students will be harmed in the end)
- Teaching Hours
- have to allocate limited hours to specific areas (i.e. try to spend time on ‘practical scheme of work’)
- flexibility with order of teaching material
- possibility to have students pick their own option for self-study
- although some students really need that guidance for material
- an option is to do the SL and HL topics together to save time
- important to check in with students about their stress levels and time management
- PSOW (practical scheme of work) à method of keeping track of the lab work that students are doing
- D = design
- DCP = data collection and processing
- CE = conclusion and evaluation
- 7 mandatory prescribed practicals that students will have to cover
- students develop method that will allow them to meet these practicals
- can have students focus on one aspect of a lab report that covers the prescribed practical (finishing an entire lab may take too much time)
- recording
- what was done (title and brief introduction), date and how long it took
- “handbook of procedures for the Diplomma Programme” gives information about everything the teacher needs to do for PSOW
- how to prepare students for writing papers
- mock exams
- teaching students how to read the questions properly
- process of elimination
- some answers are just worded differently
- available resources for teaching
- Edumodo.co
- Chance to have students fill out forms to evaluate and give feedback on your teaching (some students don’t like speaking in class)
- Edumodo.co
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- Online simulations for lab work
- data loggers
- neulog
- logger pro
- “teacher resource exchange”
- school-specific issues
- what equipment and resources are available at the school? (will they help with meeting the lab requirements?)
- discussions about controversial topics (e.g. evolution)
- use questioning; bring in resources such as articles
