International Baccalaureate: the right choice for facing global challenges

Brad Brasseur left his prestigious job working for the United Nations on humanitarian projects to become a humanities teacher at a British international school in Lima, Peru. He says the International Baccalaureate is perfect for fostering the core values of humanitarianism.

He was immediately intrigued by working at an IB school and educating 'generation Z' with the skills that they could use to fight current global challenges. This ambition led him to become a geography teacher and university counsellor coordinator at an IB school. He is part of a team of international educators that follow the IB mission statement that aims to "develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people".

By working in an IB school, Brad is part of an organisation that focuses on educating students through international mindedness and an IB profile grounded on mutual respect and cultural awareness.

The three humanitarian principles at the core of the IB

1. Community focus

Brad’s students have focused their Service Learning project on a small community called Ihuanco. Last year, he supported the student-led three-day project there, working on improving local facilities.

2. Critical thinking

As well as fostering this sense of community spirit, the IB helps create individuals who can make sense of the world around them - something that is especially important at the moment.

The IB programme places emphasis on developing independent and critical thinking skills based on quality research and applying this when scrutinising global assumptions.

3. Sustainability

The IB recognises the importance of training future generations to manage global challenges sought by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The SDGs are the foundation of the IBDP Geography workshop and highlighted throughout the Geography DP syllabus. The SDGs are the roadmap to sustainable development and, like their predecessor the Millennium Development Goals, they will need a new set of global goals in 2030.

As a teacher, Brad feels he can help to equip generation Z with skills to fight climate change, eradicate poverty, improve global education and combat social and income inequality. The IB geography syllabus includes relevant 21st-century global issues, such as cybersecurity, drone technology and trans-boundary pollution.

Go to https://www.tes.com/news/why-teaching-ib-helps-address-global-issues to find out more

A new classroom for a new era

The world has been changed forever by the Covid-19 pandemic, nowhere more so than in the classroom. Schools and educators have to adapt to a new paradigm of teaching and that can be daunting if you do not know where to turn to for help

Whether you are teaching your classes online, blended or have returned to school, you need to reach out and access the wide range of practical resources and tools available to you on the internet.

The socially distanced classroom

Teachers around the world are carefully redesigning their classrooms from changing seating positions and the way rooms look, to staggering classes, teaching smaller groups and increasing the use of outdoor spaces. It is important to encourage active learning and collaboration within the classroom, while supporting the limitations and regulations that schools have.

Emotional support for learners

As learning continues to adapt to the changing situation, teachers, learners and parents need to feel supported through the changes.

Looking after your wellbeing is important itself, but especially so during change. There are lots of things you can do to help manage anxieties and motivate students back into formal teaching, such as having a daily routine. Learning experiences may feel different from before, and new learning behaviours can take time and need support. Don’t forget to take time to talk, share and reflect together.

Understanding your learners' levels and needs

As your learners return to school, you may find that some students are at different levels or abilities. Everyone’s experience of learning remotely will be different, and some students will have engaged more with home education than others.

If your learners haven’t been in normal class for several months, each of them will now be at a different stage. All of them will have made progress, but there will also have been some loss of learning, which will need reviewing. Some will have done more learning than others. Some may have chosen to avoid things they enjoy less or feel they aren’t good at.

Go to https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/your-new-classroom/ to find out more

Consequences of AI used to set grades

In this year of lockdown, governments around the world canceled year-end graduation exams. The International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) opted for using artificial intelligence (AI) to help set overall scores for high-school graduates based on students’ past work and other historic data.

The experiment was not a success. So, what went wrong and what does the experience tell us about the challenges that come with AI-enabled solutions?

In a normal year for the IB, final grades are determined by coursework produced by the students and a final examination administered and corrected by the IBO directly. The coursework counts for some 20-30% of the overall final grade and the exam accounts for the remainder. Prior to the exam, teachers provide “predicted” grades, which allow universities to offer places conditional on the candidates’ final grades meeting the predictions. The IBO will also arrange independent grading of samples of each student’s coursework in order to discourage grade inflation by schools.

The process is generally considered to be a rigorous and well-regarded assessment protocol. And then came Covid-19.

Canceling the exams raised the question of how to assign grades, and that’s when IBO turned to AI. Using its trove of historical data about students’ course work and predicted grades, as well as the data about the actual grade obtained at exams in previous years, the IBO decided to build a model to calculate an overall score for each student – in a sense predicting what the 2020 students would have gotten at the exams.

A crisis erupted when the results came out in early July 2020. Tens of thousands of students all over the world received grades that not only deviated substantially from their predicted grades but did so in unexplainable ways

The main lesson coming out of this experience is that any organization that decides to use an AI to produce an outcome as critical and sensitive as a high-school grade marking 12-years of student’s work, needs to be very clear about how the outcomes are produced and how they can be appealed in the event that they appear anomalous or unexpected. From the outside, it looks as though the IBO may have simply plugged the AI into the IB system to replace the exams and then assumed that the rest of the system — in particular the appeals process — could work as before.

Go to https://hbr.org/2020/08/what-happens-when-ai-is-used-to-set-grades to read more.