Designing the core programme
Using PPS to join the dots
The CP core is what makes this programme stand out, made up of unique elements. The Personal and Professional Skills course, to use a favourite analogy, is the mothership of the programme. Schools all over the world deliver a PPS course that has been contextualised and wholly relevant for their students. Where the PPS course really comes into its own, however, is how it is a conduit or medium to 'join the dots' and enable students to connect the career-related studies, DP courses, Service Learning, Language Development and the reflective project.
Build your core to create a culture of collaboration
The way you design and build the core can set the tone for how collaboration is viewed in your school; the more you can build collaborative opportunities into it from the start, the more teachers and students will benefit from it throughout the course. A few points:
1. Remember the PPS course needs consistent review to strengthen the shared pedagogical underpinnings of the IB philosophy shown in Problem-based Learning and reflective practice.
2. After designing your core, consider how you will use sustainable systems that keep the conversation continuous - both within and outside the curriculum. The PPS course will always be a work in progress
3. You need a collaborative and communicative curriculum and staff in order to develop transversal skills.
4. Creating a cohesive, connected and contextualised core means both making existing good practice explicit but also reimagining the familiar. It will get messy.
Introduction
Every CP school has undergone authorisation and therefore had to submit a course outline for the key elements of the core. In all likelihood, your PPS outline was probably the most detailed out of the four core areas. Often schools will plan their core starting with the PPS and building in links to the other elements at the start. Where it becomes tricky is allowing this to develop, create more connections and having time to review and reflect on what is working and not working.
Keep the Approaches to Teaching in mind
informed by assessment (formative and summative).
as well as Approaches to Learning
Thinking Skills
Research Skills
Social Skills
Self-management Skills
Communication Skills
Where to start?
The starting point for creating a bespoke PPS student centred course is not to rush in juggling everything as listed above but to extract certain elements of this IB philosophy and approaches to teaching and learning as central.
Process
How will you allow students to celebrate that their learning is a process and not about an end product and utilise skills that they can use throughout their CP course?
Take the ATL of Thinking Skills here; if we differentiate further, we can see the role that cognitive, affective and metacognitive thinking processes play in the PPS course.•Skills of building understanding, developing feelings and effectively reflecting.
Cognitive skills include all the information-processing and thinking skills, needed in a school context.
Affective skills are the skills of behaviour and emotional management that underlie attitude related elements such as resilience and self-motivation.
Metacognitive skills are the skills that students can use to monitor how they are learning and how effectively they are utilising processes. This helps them understand and evaluate their learning better.
Progress
How will students be able to explore how they are progressing throughout the course in every aspect of the CP?
Taking the 'Approaches to Teaching' principle of 'focused on conceptual understanding', explicitly using the PPS themes of Personal Development, Intercultural Understanding, Effective Communication, Thinking Processes, and Applied Ethics individually as well as connected to more specific big ideas, and giving students the opportunities to revisit them throughout their course, will allow them to consider the progress they are making.
Furthermore, exploring the parameters of formative assessment and what this can mean is an excellent way of ensuring that students are focused on process over product. As the PPS course, as well as Language Development and Service learning, are portfolio based and not externally assessed, schools are at liberty and encouraged to be as creative as possible with the role assessment plays within the core.
What can a PPS outline include to connect the core?
Choose a central platform and document that connects all the core areas.
This plan will possibly not be your detailed short term plan but an overview that records what is being explored in PPS and how it connects to the CP course as a whole. Remember that we are making opportunities within the course for students to make the connections themselves rather than make them for them. It starts with the framework we have in place.
Concept/theme/big idea: What is the overarching theme or concept that will allow you to connect to other areas of the course?
Lead with inquiry: What are the essential questions that are driving this part of the course?
Real-world relevance: What are the connections to the CRS and the real world?
Knowledge and Understanding: What knowledge and understanding do you hope to build here and where will it be revisited?
Activities and Resource links: What activities and resources at this particular time would be most appropriate? Do they allow the students to demonstrate their ideas and learning deliberately, explicitly and visibly?
ATL skills in focus: Are their particular ATL skills areas in focus here?
Learner Profile attributes: Is there an opportunity to explore the significance of a particular learner profile attribute? Is there a reflection moment here?
Links to other subjects and units: How does this theme/topic/lesson link significantly to what is being taught elsewhere in the course?
Formative and Summative assessment: How will students respond here and why in that particular format? Is there an opportunity to experiment with a different format? Could they explore the different formats of the reflective project here as a way of responding?
Establishing the foundations of your PPS course or redirecting it is an excellent opportunity for collaboration with key stakeholders and interested parties. As a PPS course developer/CP coordinator, use the following activities and questions to develop not only your own understanding but also to create a common understanding and intention for your course with your CP Core team.
The Five Themes
The five themes of Personal Development, Intercultural Understanding, Effective Communication, Thinking Processesand Applied Ethics are central to your school’s personal and professional skills course. These five themes do not need to be taught discreetly and, indeed, ideally a course would utilise topics that promote a holistic take on the themes and students experience activities that utilise more than one theme.
What do we do already to explore these themes?
How could we build/change/expand/adapt this?
What opportunities do we have here to do something completely different?
What personal and professional skills do our students need?
What are the needs specific to this year's cohort?
Is there a synthesis between what the students, staff and parents believe the students need in terms of PPS?
PPS and the CP
Creating a PPS course that is appropriate to each unique context takes time and involves collaboration with all CP teachers. There are multiple perspectives to consider as well to ensure the way PPS is set up meets the overall aims of the CP as well as the IB mission statement itself. Consider what is fixed and what is fluid in your course design; eg the use of debate as a fixed monthly event but the sources and topics are current and updated regularly.
What role do we want PPS to play within the core?
How will PPS explore the local/global context?
How can we utilise PPS effectively to prepare students for the reflective project?
Are there key school events such as debating we want to incorporate into our course?
Can we visualise what a successful PPS project in our school will look like?
When do we have time to collaborate?
Who are the key stakeholders here who could help shape this course?
The next stage of PPS course design
The way that a school approaches its design of its Personal and Professional Skills course can be really effective in reviewing and renewing its understanding of Approaches to Teaching and Learning.
IB teachers can often be concerned if they are meeting ATL skills and how they go about achieving this. Often skills are implicit in the subjects that the students are taking but this only goes so far in helping students; skills need to be explicitly taught so students are absolutely aware that they have that skill in their toolbox to use within a range of contexts.
This is where PPS can really come into its own as there are so many opportunities to respond truly to the needs of your students and colleagues by focusing explicitly on ATL skills in the five key areas; Social, Communication, Self-management,Thinking and Research.
Closer inspection of the five key PPS themes will lead to the conclusion that there is a clear parallel beween ATL and PPS.
Using a collaborative approach to PPS course design not only makes for a contextually relevant curriculum with staff buy-in, it also completely ensures that the IB philosophy of constructivist education is the backbone of what you create. You may have a staff with a huge array of experiences and many years of IB teaching under their belt; remember the term 'lifelong learner' is for everyone and creating opportunities for staff, irrespective of experience, to review and reflect upon their understanding of the Approaches to Teaching and Learning is very important for the creation of a positive school culture. Not to mention important for your 5 year evaluation.
Examples of the Approaches to Learning skills areas
Social and Communication skills
- be able to interpret and use modes of non-verbal communication
- be able to paraphrase successfully
- be able to effectively structure information in different modes such as summaries, essays and reports
- be able to organise information and display it logically
- be able to communicate with a range of audiences using a variety of media confidently
- be able to work both peers and experts using a variety of digital environments and media
Self-management skills
- be able to be mindful and create strategies to focus and concentrate
- be able to persist and persevere
- be able to reduce stress and anxiety
- be able to analyse and understand reasons for failure
- be able to be resilient and deal with change
Thinking Skills
- be able to use visible thinking strategies to generate new ideas and lines of inquiry
- be able to consider a range of alternative solutions including the unlikely or impossible
- be able to make unusual connections between ideas
- be able to create original solutions to real-life problems
- be able to identify underlying assumptions and bias
Research
- be able to communicate ideas to multiple audiences using a range of media and/or formats.
- be able to collect, record and verify data
- be able to make connections between a variety of sources of information
- be able to effectively use critical-literacy skills to analyse and interpret communication
- be able to find multiple perspectives from a range of sources
Collaborative skills-based learning design
Select a skill from one of the above areas that you see as particularly relevant to both your course and real world application. Take turns to develop ideas and discuss the following questions:
1. How is it a skill that is developed in my own specific subject and what sort of learning activities do I use to develop this skill implicitly?
Give an example of an activity or learning engagement
2. Without drawing on content specific criteria, how could this skill be developed explicitly in an interactive and relevant way to the students?
Design an activity
Collaborative discussion on meeting the needs of students through Approaches to Teaching and Learning
Now build on this initial discussion. Make a wider selection of skills from the ATL areas to discuss how these skills are met by the individual DP subjects.
1. Where is there commonality and what does the same skill look like when transferred to a different context and subject?
2. What might the value be in explicitly teaching students this skill in terms of their future career?
3. Students begin the CP with many skills in the developing stage. Where do you think strengths lie and where do you think they struggle?
4. Are there skills where students can become the teachers? Where can you find opportunities to empower them within different courses as well as during core subjects?
CONCLUDING QUESTIONS:
What skills do we want OUR students to leave school with?
What personal and professional skills do we want OUR students to leave school with?
Initial connection of ATL and the PPS themes
As a CP core group, respond to the following questions:
1. In what ways have you seen the ATL skills area relate to the PPS themes of Personal Development, Intercultural Understanding, Effective Communication, Thinking Processes and Applied Ethics?
2. What initiatives/clubs/projects/trips/events already take place at school that relate to the 5 PPS themes?
3. What projects would CP students really benefit from doing?
4. Are there further skills we would add to our initial list of ATL skills that we prioritise our students needing throughout and after their CP course?
PPS course developer notes for CPD/collaborative session
Working backwards, what you want to achieve by the end of these activities is a list of skills your team recognise that are especially key to your students' development. Your next job will be to link these with the PPS themes of Personal Development, Intercultural Understanding, Effective Communication, Thinking Processes and Applied Ethics.
The key to these learning activities is that it draws together teachers to consider first how their subjects are skill-based and then to develop this by considering what skills are truly relevant to students in their school's context. This is a crucial step in the development of ATL articulation across your school; this could be within the CP course itself, across the DP and CP courses and/or through schools with continuum programmes, running PYP, MYP, through to DP and CP. With this development of ATL identification and real world relevancy, getting staff investment into the PPS course is a logical next step.
The first question in the first collaborative design activity clearly asks your team to draw upon their experience and context; recognise these strengths. However the really impactful part is to collaborate to create effective skills-based learning activities that transcend subject boundaries. Start with recognising what is implicit and assumed in their everyday teaching before building out to creating an explicit teaching of a skill in isolation.
The second activity very much builds out from the first and asks your team to consider the skills more generally. Do keep the focus on what your students particularly need in your context - your aim here throughout all your course design is to contextualise the PPS element.
The third activity brings everything together so the renewed and contextualised ATL understanding can be applied specifically to the needs of the CP students and the creation of the PPS course. There are further exercises below that go into more detail on the PPS themes and learning outcomes which can extend the results of these collaborative activities.
Throughout all this, do respond in way collectively that reflects a multimodal approach (eg powerpoint, whiteboard, googledoc collaboration ... one person taking the minutes). Whatever is going to work for you as a PPS course developer.
When we say experienced ...
... we mean those who have worked within the CP long enough to embrace the evolving nature of its core and how it really does reflect lifelong learning for the teacher. Every teacher knows that everything is always a work in progress and what might have worked one year really well, will need reviewing for the next year.
What is like committing to finding connections?
'It's also constantly evolving and not quite working for us! Yes- we are all so much more aware of overlaps and where we can refer to / build on things which are happening in other subjects - and where we can team teach. We try and plan for that at the start of each term - but we are still missing connections. And we need to also document what did actually happen as - for example - [one DP teacher] used the plane crash stranded on a dessert island scenario as part of decision making theories lessons and the [CRS] teacher was going to use that the following week for decision= making in teams. Neither realised that they were looking at decision making. And I use is it in September in PPS as part of decision making models leading into decision making for uni. Will we remember this next year at this time? Or - do we re-schedule the DP and CRS lessons to fit with PPS (as initially planned)? Finding the time to keep it live is tough and since we are all teaching in a new environment to a different rhythm it'll take a few years to all even out. Finding time to really reflect on the order of teaching accross the different curriculum even harder.'
CP Coordinator 2022
Consider this viewpoint in your own context. Which bits do you identify with the most?
Building in connections pastorally
'The other thing which ... has turned out really well is that we have a 15 min mentor session each day and each week day has a theme. For example:
Monday - what's in the news which we should know [for their CRS].
Tuesday - something about looking after themselves - mentally / phsyically - a mini PHSE ([DP] teacher).
Wednesday - team game - often related to vocab & English as an EAL thing (English teacher).
Thursday is about ethics in context [PPS coordinator].
Friday - 2 stars and a wish. The students can do this publicly (white board) or privately (post it note) and it's a great way to connect and create that community spirit. A time to reflect and say thanks. It's an amazing way to end the week. Everyone is expected to be there - teachers also join in too!'
