A couple weeks ago, a pair of visitors representing the International Baccalaureate (IB) spent two days at our middle campus observing classrooms and interviewing teachers, parents, and members of ANCS’s leadership. This visit is the final step in a years-long journey our middle campus has been on towards IB authorization. For those of you new to ANCS or otherwise unfamiliar with this process and why we started down this path, I hope my post this week will help to fill you in.
In the fall of 2014, the ANCS board authorized the creation of a task force to learn more about the IB’s “Middle Years Programme” (MYP) and to explore whether pursuing IB MYP authorization would be a good fit for ANCS’s middle campus. The MYP–which focuses on generally on the period of time in middle school and early high school for students–offered an opportunity to bring a solid framework to our teacher-developed units of study and align the campus through common rubrics and academic language, but there were a number of questions about the potential benefits and drawbacks the task force set out to investigate. The team of six people on the task force (parents, teachers, and a board member) spent a year visiting other IB MYP schools and conducting research in the areas of philosophy, organization, curriculum, and funding before making a recommendation to the board that the middle campus should pursue IB authorization. The task force saw many potential benefits to students, such as increased student learning and engagement, a greater level of open-mindedness, and a deeper connection to the world beyond ANCS. Additionally, the development of the IB Programme at Maynard Jackson High School was a separate, though related, benefit to ANCS students matriculating to MJHS for high school.
At that point, our middle campus principal, Dr. Cathey Goodgame, and IB coordinator, Somer Hobby, set to work on organizing ANCS’s application for candidacy to submit to the IB. Thanks to their work and a high degree of existing alignment between ANCS’s mission and the IB MYP, the middle campus was approved as a candidate school in June 2016, and we began to take steps to more fully align with the IB’s structure. In the 2016-17 school year, this meant the beginning of monthly IB information sessions for parents and caregivers, teacher training, and use of IB rubrics to guide teacher planning and assess student learning. Last year, the process continued with a new schedule and course structure (including Spanish as a second language for all students throughout middle school) and the introduction of elements like the community project and learner profile. A visit last January from a consultant from the IB resulted in our team being allowed to move forward to submit an application for authorization in the spring, and, as I mentioned earlier, the recent visit from two representatives of the IB will now hopefully be followed up with notification soon that our middle campus has been fully authorized as an IB “World School” for the MYP.
So assuming we become an IB World School, what happens then? Well, many of the pieces are already in place at ANCS, so it’s not likely that you’ll see much discernible change. Information sessions for parents and caregivers (especially new ones) will continue to be provided, and the IB rubrics and course offerings will remain the same. However, ANCS will now be a part of a larger educational community, allowing our teachers to connect with other IB teachers through training and resource sharing. Similarly, there will be greater opportunity to collaborate with the IB programme in place at MJHS to help make the transition from middle to high school even smoother for the majority of our students who move on to MJHS for 9th grade.
If you want to learn even more about the IB MYP at our middle campus, I highly recommend attending one of the information sessions we host each month. The next one is tonight (Tuesday, 11/6) from 6:30-8. You can attend and make it home in plenty of time to see election results roll in :).