Essential Elements
The MYP provides students with a well-rounded education that emphasizes not only academic excellence but also personal development, community engagement, and global awareness.
The MYP curriculum is designed to prepare students for the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century by promoting critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration. It encourages students to explore their interests and passions while developing their skills and knowledge across a range of subjects.
MYP students are also encouraged to take action on issues that matter to them, developing empathy and a sense of responsibility towards their local and global communities.
Four main elements of the MYP include:
Approaches to learning
Developing approaches to learning (ATL) skills are core to learning in the MYP and across all IB programmes, Through intentional planning, teachers encourage the development of skills that help students “learn how to learn”. ATL skills provide a base for becoming effective, independent learners. Not only do the ATLs ”help students prepare for, and demonstrate learning through, meaningful assessment, they provide a common language that students and teachers can use to reflect on, and articulate on, the process of learning”.
(MYP: From Principles into Practice, 2022)
Approaches to teaching
Effective approaches to teaching in the MYP include inquiry-based learning, interdisciplinary teaching, and student-centered instruction.
These approaches allow teachers to create a dynamic and engaging learning environment that supports the development of critical thinking skills, fosters curiosity and creativity, and promotes lifelong learning.
By utilizing these effective approaches, teachers can help students become independent learners who are able to take ownership of their own education and apply what they have learned to real-world situations.
Conceptual Learning
Conceptual learning focuses on big ideas that have relevance within and across subject groups. Concepts reach beyond topics being studied and are an important part in how students build their knowledge.
”They help to integrate learning, add coherence to the curriculum, deepen disciplinary understanding, build the capacity to engage with complex ideas and allow transfer of learning to new contexts”.
(MYP: From Principles in Practice, 2022)
Global Contexts
Learning and teaching in the MYP involves understanding concepts in context. All learning is contextual.
A learning context is a specific setting, event or set of circumstances, designed or chosen, to stimulate learning. The context, therefore, should be relevant students, their interests and identity, or in their future.
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