IB Docs (2) Team
Stages of Support
InThinking has published a page for students to support them in the process of creating an Individual Oral. If students go through that process, it is also incredibly important for us at InThinking to support you in supporting them! The goal of this page is to do just that.
In that student page, found here, students were taken through six different stages - with the last stage being the final Individual Oral being delivered to you. But the question remains, what do you do during all of this?
Confer, confer, confer!
Have as many conversations with students as you want, but make sure to stay within the rules. Students should not rehearse with you. They can't practice their IO and you can't "hear" their introduction to make sure it's on track. But you can have a bunch of different types of conversations with students to support them in the assessment. Of course, there are different conferences/conversations you can have, but this gives you an idea of what you can talk about and how you can support your students in this process.
You might also read this page and find all of it unmanageable for you and your students in your context. That's okay! You don't have to do every one of these conferences! They are there to show teachers the various kinds of conversations that might take place, not to suggest that a teacher has to do each of these. There are also many other ways teachers can go about supporting students. This is just one of those ways.
Finally, you will note that this is not an actual student. In a training I gave at my school, I developed these resources by doing my own Individual Oral which will also be published on the site, along with all my work - annotations, clean extracts, unofficial outline, official IB outline, and more. In other words, I (Tim) am the "student" and the teacher is a close colleague and my Head of Department. We collaborated on this training together to make sure all of us were on the same page in terms of how to support our students.
Documents Needed to Understand the Conferences
1. Annotated extracts from Macbeth and a WW1 propaganda poster
Annotated WW1 propaganda poster
2. Unofficial outline
3. Clean extracts for Macbeth and a WW1 propaganda poster
Clean extract for a WW1 propaganda poster
4. Official IB Outline
Initial "What to do" Conference
In this initial conference, you will want to talk to your students about what they want to do and why. The goal here is to help narrow them down into a manageable IO that has the potential for success. This includes making sure they've followed the rules (a literary work and non-literary text from a body of work), a global issue that is narrow enough to work in the IO, and anything else that comes up - and something always comes up!
By the end of this conference, you will want to do one of the following:
1. Approve their ideas for their IO and tell students to proceed.
OR
2. Tell them to do something completely new because their ideas are just too off-the-wall or wrong.
OR
3. Let them know some type of revision needs to occur before you will approve of their IO.
Audio only versionExtract Length Conference
In this conference, students will already have been "approved" by you (see above). Now that they have their global issue, literary work, and non-literary text from a body of work, students will need to select extracts.
By the end of this conference, you will want to do one of the following:
1. Approve their extracts.
OR
2. Tell them to pick completely new extracts as they are somehow wrong or do not work for the task at hand.
OR
3. Let students know some type of revision (most likely cutting the extract down) needs to take place.
Audio only versionA Conference About the Order of the Individual Oral
In this conference, which can easily be combined with any of the other conferences, you will talk to students about the ordering of the Individual Oral.
By the end of this conference, you won't do anything. Instead, students will have to decide to:
1. Keep their initial order (non-literary text then literary work)
OR
2. Change their order (literary work then non-literary text)
Finally, you might be able to sneak into this conference a question about the overall organization. Do students start with the extract or the whole? Is it the same order for the literary work and the non-literary body of work (extract to whole OR whole to extract) or is it a variation of that?
Audio only versionAuthor's Choices/Annotations Conference (Extract and Whole/Body of Work)
In this conference, you will talk to students about their annotations and their understanding of the whole literary work and non-literary body of work. In the conference, they will discuss what the author is doing and why and you will push them in their thinking.
By the end of this conference, you will have given feedback to students about:
1. Focusing on the author rather than the character (or something to that effect).
2. Focusing on the choices or techniques used and the effect - actually naming them and connecting them to their global issue.
3. Framing their analysis that sounds more analytical than descriptive.
4. Connecting the extracts to the whole/body of work as well as the larger authorial choices used and why.
5. Anything else you think is necessary here.
Audio only version Outline Conference
In this conference, you will discuss the official IB outline the student has created.
By the end of this conference, you will have:
1. Given students feedback about their outline.
2. Provided any additional feedback about anything from the author's choices to the global issue to balance to connecting to the wider body of work or literary work to zooming in and closely analyzing the language of the extract (and so on).
Audio only version One Massive Conference (Doing it All)
This is a massive one time conference where you try to do all of the above. It takes time and this isn't for everyone or for every student. The second one is a longer conference about the author's choices and my annotations.
Massive Conference
Longer Conference About Annotations
Audio only version Audio only version
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