Curriculum: personal lessons from the International Baccalaureate

Mr Robert Owen Jones Santiago College Santiago, Chile

There is no doubt that the biggest challenge we face today as educators is providing our students with a curriculum that will help them succeed in the 21st century. When my father went to school in the 1930s, curriculum meant little more than learning the 3Rs. He left school knowing how to read, write and do a few sums and was thus well prepared for the few agrarian and industrial jobs available at that time. When I went to school, my curriculum seemed mainly focused on getting me to absorb enough ‘knowledge’ in order for me to pass the exams necessary to get to university.

What has changed today? We frequently hear that we must prepare our young people to live in a ‘global world’; however, I do not get the impression that most schools, through curriculum reform, have taken on the challenges of this. It seems to me that for most kids going to most schools in most countries their references are regional not global. I do not see that school curricula have really changed that much. So, what should we be teaching our kids? What should our curricula look like? What do kids need to know these days to be prepared for the global marketplace?

Unlike my dad or I, my own children have enjoyed the many benefits of learning in schools that are not restrained by the political straitjackets of national educational systems. I believe (and more importantly, so do they) that they and their classmates are global citizens. Why? Because the curriculum they followed, and the schools they went to, were international and not national in nature. They attended schools offering the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, a curriculum, or more precisely, a philosophy of education that is truly international. I believe there are many elements of the IB that governments around the world should study carefully when they enter into a discussion on how they can reform their own curricula.

What’s so special about the IB? It was created, and is revised, by groups of educators, not politicians. Academics, teachers and educationalists are responsible for the evaluation and delivery of the program. It does not serve the purpose of any one political group that frequently uses education for its own political agendas. It strives to make the world a better place through education; ideals that many educators working within the IB believe in. It stresses the similarities between subjects and tries to teach concepts and ideas, not just facts. It works on a student profile, based on values and principles, not simply on a set of results. These are just a few of its strengths.

Let me give a few examples of what I believe we could learn from the IB. One of the key skills for the student of the 21st century is research. All IB students must carry out research (a 4000-word research paper is a graduation requirement of the IB Diploma) that is interdisciplinary and frequently practical in nature. For example, my eldest son was looking at why people who had been vaccinated against polio during the Pol Pot era in Cambodia still contracted the deadly disease. The research was not just biological and mathematical but political and historical. In grade 10, for his IB Middle Years Program (MYP) Personal Project, my second son produced a cartoon comic booklet on endangered species that could be used as a teaching tool for teachers in rural schools in developing counties, where many students are illiterate. Practical research, with practical applications, in the real world. These are just some of the many examples of ‘useful’ research that I have seen from IB students. I believe that research projects such as these should be a graduating requirement of all schools in developed countries.

Languages are another area that many national curricula do not sufficiently address, especially in English speaking countries. The IB stresses proficiency in at least one other language other than the student’s mother tongue. This is a key area, where many of our national education systems are still failing, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. We are still producing far too many monolingual graduates whose terms of reference are solely national, not international. Our schools need to insist that the learning of a second language be part of the graduation requirements, as does the IB. We must start teaching languages earlier and invest more resources into teaching foreign languages. The multi-lingual IB graduate who has the open-mindedness, not only to speak another language, but also the ability to grasp another culture, has huge advantages over his or her monolingual and monocultural equivalent in today’s world.

How should today’s curriculum adjust to constant changes in technology? Increasingly, we need to teach kids to be discerning consumers of information. As educators, we see more and more that kids today belong to the ‘cut and paste’ generation. Homework, class projects, research essays are increasingly based on a quick Google search and a ‘cut and paste’ job. It’s a quick fix world and the cut and paste is the microwave dinner for today’s generation. We must help our students evaluate the objectivity of a website and the reliability of a resource. How do we do this? In international schools, offering the IB, one of the ways is through the Theory of Knowledge (TOK) program. This interdisciplinary course, which strives to show the links between knowledge in different subject areas, can really help students interpret information and assess its objectivity. These are essential skills that today’s students need to be taught. We cannot take for granted that students today, because they are so technology savvy, can recognise bias and misinformation. Many IB students, especially when they get to university, learn to really appreciate the lessons of the TOK course. Many graduates find TOK helps them to look at situations from different angles and take the views of others into account. I believe that a course of study such as the TOK, with its philosophical underpinnings and its holistic approach, would help all our students make more sense of today's world.

The 21st century student is going to be faced with a problem that is of the utmost urgency. Our planet is in imminent danger (mainly because of all the abuse that we and our forefathers have subjected it to). How are students today going to learn enough about their environment to save the planet in the future? Is our curriculum doing enough to teach our students about such issues as pollution, global warming, population management or the depletion of scarce resources? Part of the IB Middle Years Program (MYP) focuses on just this. It asks students: ‘what are my responsibilities as a global citizen and what impact do I have on the environment?’ The IB aims to make students more aware of the environmental impact of their current lives. Such areas are so important they should be a compulsory part of all curricula. No subject should be taught in schools today without a discussion about its environmental impact. In my opinion, environmental issues should be incorporated into all elements of national curricula.

Perhaps, most importantly, we need to provide our students with values that will prepare them for the challenges of today’s multicultural world. Today we want our students to be not only knowledgeable, critical thinkers but also caring global citizens. However, teachers around the world increasingly feel alone in this task. For me, one of our main challenges as educators is to provide the curriculum that is embedded in the following values: tolerance of others, ability to work in a team, and respect for different learning styles. Teachers in every country increasingly feel that they alone are upholding such values as honesty, integrity and respect. They feel they are getting less and less support from parents and the community. Teachers feel that they alone are teaching kids the differences between right and wrong. These values are as important today as they were to my father or myself. One of the great challenges for us all - teachers, educational leaders and parents - is to provide a curriculum underpinned with such values, and to give the resources to teachers to deliver it.

One of the ways the IB deals with this is through the Community and Service Program (CAS). Students in schools with the IB curriculum must devote time to CAS projects. My kids, along with their IB classmates, taught street children to swim; spent hours playing with AIDS-affected children in a local hospital and helped build houses for families living in slums. Such activities can easily be included into the curricula of all schools. They are not enough in themselves but they help our children to give something back and not just to take everything for granted. Such activities help young people to learn to respect themselves and others.

The IB is not perfect and it makes no claims to be a model for other educational systems. However, from my personal experience of 25 years, teaching in different schools in different parts of the world, with different curricula, I do not think we need to look much further than the IB if we want to seriously improve the quality of our curriculum and help prepare students to succeed in the 21st century. I think that schools would be better if they incorporated into their curricula such courses as the ‘Theory of Knowledge’ program, ‘Community and Service’ activities and extensive research projects. We need our students to be more proficient in languages and more aware of environmental issues. We should encourage all teachers to use a more interdisciplinary approach that focuses on ideas and concepts, not just knowledge acquisition.

I also believe we would have much better curricula in our schools if decisions were made more by independent groups of educationalists, with experience from around the world, and less by national politicians with their own agendas. If we want our curriculum to help our students really look beyond the confines of national boundaries, then let's look seriously at the one truly successful international model that is available to us.