2009

This session will provide a brief overview of IB Americas’ professional development services. Participants will learn more about the variety of workshops offered in North America and in Latin America. New developments will be highlighted with a focus on Level 3 workshops, including subject specific areas of interest, pedagogy, learning theory, and areas of scholarly inquiry.

This session will focus on how one school used new thinking to address student behavior challenges and an increasing achievement gap. The new thinking includes: adult learning around the issues of poverty, essential agreements, and the creation of structures that empower students to become more responsible learners.

In 2008, the IB celebrated its 40th anniversary; looking to the next forty years, the IB has been focusing on how to sustain the capability to meet the growing global demand for IB programmes, while adhering to our mission and without relinquishing our high standards of quality and rigor.

Come join members of the MYP staff in a presentation and conversation. This session will review changes to the MYP that have occurred over the past year, those that are coming in the future, and offer an opportunity to ask burning questions about the programme.

This session invites administrators and PYP/MYP coordinators to discover how a proven method has helped embed 21st century skills including critical thinking, collaborative learning, and global problem solving into a framework.

This interactive session will address the challenge of supporting students with a wide range of academic backgrounds to achieve success in the IB program. Presenters from Rampart High School will share successful intervention ideas and research findings that address the efficacy of these interventions as well as allow participants to analyze individual student profiles.

Tony Wagner, in The Global Achievement Gap (2008), outlines seven survival skills for today's students. This presentation will focus on how two comprehensive public high schools in Texas addressed Wagner’s survival skills through IB best practices.

Grisham Middle School in Texas, USA and Colegio CIEDI in Bogota, Colombia collaboratively studied the Amazon rainforest from the AOI of Human Ingenuity. Through online sharing via a moodle platform, Year 5 students at CIEDI became the teachers and even assessed the learning of the Year 1 students at Grisham.

Old Mill Middle School North has embarked on "The MYP Challenge" as they strive to become a MYP school, not just a school with a MYP. This session will focus on the creation of small learning communities within the school. These learning communities reflect on the school’s mission and vision as they create their goals for the year.

IB serves nearly 3000 schools and 750,000 students worldwide, through three main regional offices – the Americas, Asia Pacific, and Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. The three directors of these offices will come together in this session to share what is going on in their part of the IB world.