Author: wrpvincent

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University

Creating a University & Careers Guidance Programme (Part 1)

Originally posted on July 20, 2016 @ 9:00 am

I was originally planning to write up my experiences in a single blog post but it got too long and so I have broken it up into four separate posts: this one which will focus on my efforts to organise the counseling space and resources. The second two posts focuses on a) building relationships with other institutions and b) the agencies you need to be registered with, while the final post deals with the internal dynamics of advising students and communicating with parents.

This last year has been incredible in so many ways but also very, very hard. This post is partly a record and reflection of my experiences but I also write with a few other counselors in mind whom I met this year who were in a similar position to me: working in small or new schools and carrying the responsibility of setting up the university and careers provision.

In August 2014 I moved schools. The aim of my new job was to begin developing a boarding program for my new school. Unfortunately for me, in early September of that year the company that owned the school took the decision to place the boarding program on permanent hold.

The resulting two years have been a period in which I have learned an awful lot, met and worked with some truly inspiring colleagues, and had the opportunity to really reflect on and experiment in my teaching practice.

Losing the boarding project opened the door to another really exciting opportunity: the chance to found, set up and run my own College Counseling Department or Higher Education and Careers Department or University and Careers Counseling Department (Yep those are the three titles we have run through this year and we are sticking with the last one!).

To say that this last academic year has been challenging and stressful would be an understatement but it has also been a real honour to build something from the ground up, make decisions and have the opportunity to advocate on behalf of an interesting mixed cohort of kids, from a variety of very diverse backgrounds. I have learned a lot about myself, my own perceptions, my own prejudice, my limitations and my strengths. I want to use this post to reflect on my experience in the first year of setting up a careers and university advisory service in a school.

I officially started the role in August 2015 but I began preparations for it back in April of the same year. This was a start up school environment that at the time had just, in March of that year, received authorisation to begin teaching the DP and were also prepping for our MYP authorization visit that would come in October of that year. Thus everyone was busy, not just with the normal rounds of lesson planning, delivery and reflection; not just on the unit planning, horizontal and vertical articulation that comes with the MYP but also with the additional paperwork that comes with trying to get a school authorized to deliver a curriculum.

So I was effectively on my own. Where would you start to plan a university guidance (at the time I thought it was just university guidance) program? You have an office space and thats it. You have no real background in the area save working in secondary teaching for six years, some of which you have been a sixth form tutor in the UK and a Boarding House parent for 16-18 year olds.

Organising the Counseling Space & Resources

I started by buying maps. Maps of the continental US, UK, and the World. Large ones around 1.2m x 1.0m to put on the walls. While waiting for these to go through our schools insanely long procurement process, I then downloaded the UK University League tables and registered online with every university as a students and ordered a copy of their prospectus. Those that wouldn’t post a copy to Europe, I downloaded a digital copy and saved. Later these were uploaded to the University Guidance Group that I created on ManageBac as a place to share resources with our G9-G12 students. Along the same vein, I wanted to make sure that our space set aside for guidance counseling was warm and welcoming, a place where parents and students felt that they could just drop into. Always at the fore-front of my mind was that we were a very new school, in a very competitive area (26 or thereabouts international schools in the area) and I believe that the university and careers provision that any secondary school offers has to aim to build confidence amongst the community of student, parents and teachers that it is competent. Parents will seek out the “best” schools for the their children and while you there are thousands of different views of what may make a school best, I feel that after a solid academics program (parents want to know there children are learning), a guidance program that helps students identify their strengths and interests and guides them to the next natural step after secondary school successfully is a major want for secondary parents. A school that doesn’t offer that, especially one that you are paying for, will surely send red flags. Hence, ordering maps and materials for the guidance office, to help build the environment for students and parents seemed like a natural place to start. At this time I also ordered books and guides and I continued to do this over the course of the next year. The books I now have in the office aside from the prospectuses are:

An additional resources that I came across last year that I make parents of students aware of is the gettingin podcast by panoply.

One of the essential tasks that went on alongside relationship building (see below) throughout the year was the creation of a variety of different resources to use both externally and internally of our school community. Early in the year I created the G11 counseling timeline and drafted the G12 counseling timeline which I will be finishing this summer. I scaffolded this process for myself by comparing the timelines produced by a variety of other schools that I had contact or a connection with.

At the same time I began to synthesise and summarise the key steps and information that lay at the heart of applications to the countries that my job description asked me to be responsible for – UK, US, Canada and Switzerland. For each of these countries I produced and essential information document, only two sides in total for each one that gave an overview for parents and students of the application process for each country.

Once all of these documents were created I decided to group them together into the first iteration of the University Guidance handbook, the development of which has carried on throughout the year as I have written new documents which have also been added to the handbook. I am hoping to be able to complete version 4 of the handbook over this summer break.

Early on in the year, and with input from a variety of the my colleagues, in  preparation for the CIS forum I created a school profile document. This document summarised our school, giving key information to admissions representatives. It was so liked by our marketing department that they subsequently hijacked it for use with prospective parents!

Throughout the year I also created a variety of forms to help with managing my meetings with students. These included permissions for students to miss class to attend university presentations, or open days, interview forms, teacher recommendation request forms and a university research form to help students build their shortlist of universities. I am not sure how useful some of these will be now that I am using BridgeU which provides a natural scaffold for structuring the timings of meetings with students which I will develop further for next year.

Towards the end of the year I worked with the DP and MYP coordinators to begin drafting policies for use in our community. These were the language course selection and university guidance policy, the predicted grades, teacher comments and recommendations policy as well as the attending university open days and guidance office events policy.

Finally in terms of resources, I was successful in April of this year in convincing the management at school that our community would benefit from the use of a guidance platform to primarily help students in their course and university research. I have blogged about the rollout of BridgeU here and here, so I won’t write too much here. In the final section of this blog on guiding students I will expand a little more as to why this was really important for me and my students.

Categories
Resources Teaching & Learning

Practical & Teaching Resource: Genetic Databases

Originally posted on April 3, 2016 @ 9:10 am

Preamble

One of the challenges I have found for teaching the new (2016) IBDP Biology syllabus is getting up to speed with the new content as expressed in the understandings, applications and skills sections of the syllabus. This has been particularly true when this new “content” implies an understanding of new technologies such as the huge rise in bioinformatics databases. To make matters worse, I am the only biology teacher in my school and I have been acutely aware of this when, stumbling across new requirements, I have had no one to bounce ideas off (or steal resources from! :))

So what do you do when you have new content that you have not taught before, that relies on an understanding of bioinformatic technology that wasn’t widely available, or covered on your masters in ecology eight years ago and you have no colleagues to help you? You go back to the drawing board…

When planning my course the year before I had shunned ordering the text book written by the chief examiner for the subject for my students on the grounds that it was too big and heavy. I had opted for a slimmer, light-weight textbook that was written by an old colleague. However, In preparation for times like this, I had purchased a copy for my own reference, not to teach from the textbook, you understand, but to refer to when I was unsure of exactly how much depth a topic needed going into (and therefore how much classtime to devote to it) or what the chief examiner had in mind when he wrote the course as part of the curriculum review committee.

While I applaud the move away from a list of learning statements as we had in the old syllabus, statements from the understandings section, like this one from topic 3.1 Genes:

“The entire base sequence of human genes was sequenced in the Human Genome Project”

often leave me wondering how much time needs to be allocated to them. This is where having a copy of the chief examiners textbook comes in handy.

The Practical

Earlier this term I was teaching the IB Biology core topic 3 – Genetics and while planning came across the following statements:

3.1 S1: “Use of a database to determine differences in the base sequence of a gene in two species“

3.2 S1 “Use of databases to identify the locus of a human gene and its polypeptide product”

These along with several other “application” statements in 3.1 an 3.2 left me slightly bamboozled as to how to approach teaching this, seeing as I had never used these kinds of databases in this way myself, and whats more I was left asking the question – aren’t the kinds of databases that these statements refer to way too complicated to expect 16-18 students to be able access?

Anyway, the instruction was there so I had to do something with it. In the end I referred to the Allott & Mindorf (2014) textbook along and the inthinking biology teacher resource website and combined and adapted two of their practicals to use in my classroom. The result is below:

  1. I designed a practical protocol worksheet which is available here, which could be printed out and handed to students. There is QR code which, when scanned, links to the following video.

Download (PDF, 70KB)

  1. I made the following video that takes students through the worksheet. They can be used together.

Reflections

The video and the activities together take about an hour or just over to complete and do count towards practical hours on the PSOW. I am hugely indebted to the work of Allott & Mindorff and David Faure at inthinking to be able to produce this. Students are able, if they have a mobile phone and QR scanner to link directly to the film and follow the instructions. Alternatively the video can be played on a projector. Students could also complete this as a homework task but this couldn’t then count as practical.

I think that the video and the activities could be broken up into smaller individual activities as I think this may help students to process exactly and clearly what they are doing. These databases can be complex to navigate and contain a lot of information which can be overwhelming for anybody who is new to this area.

While I personally like this part of the syllabus and think that there are some possible IA ideas here, especially when combined with evolutionary studies, I can’t help but think that this material is a bit too advanced for 16-19 year old students, particularly for SL students. It is fairly niche and I would be interested to know how many universities would cover this type of bioinformatic content in their first or second years.

Categories
Coordination

The DP Coordinators view: language level placement I

Originally posted on June 2, 2020 @ 3:20 pm

I am not a language teacher. In this post I want to share some scenarios surrounding language level placement in the IB DP and I would love to hear feedback to the questions raised.

In my experience, one of the most murky, opaque areas of the Diploma Programme is language placement in the group 1 and 2 subjects.

Having worked as a university guidance counselor and diploma programme coordinator for around five years in total (at the time of writing), I have been involved in the discussions around this topic in two schools on two continents.

It can be a highly contentious issue it seems; lots of people want to give their view, including me!

So whats the issue? Surely if a student is a native speaker they should take the language at group 1 and if non-native then they should take it at group 2, right?

Well, no. It isn’t that simple.

International schools can be very complex places and students language profiles are no exception to this. Add to the fact, that schools may have a medium of instruction that is different to the host country language as well as first language of the majority of students in the school, who may come from a country other than the host country or any country that uses the medium of instruction.

Let’s imagine a student. This student lives and attends school in country X where the local language is language Xphone but the schools medium of instruction is Zphone. This students family speak neither of these languages but students parents moved to country X from country Y for work 8 years ago.

The family speak Yphone. At home this student speaks Yphone every evening, but at school they are taught in Zphone for all their academic subjects and studying Xphone as the host country language is mandatory. Ever since this student was in upper primary they have studied at school primarily in Zphone and but also have had lessons in Xphone.

To make matters more challenging this student has been in the langugae aquisition stream for both language X and Z since upper primary and, whilst their language use of both language is strong, they are not fluent or at the level of a native speaker in either of the languages.

How should a student in this scenario be treated when undertaking their choices for the IB DP? None of the language teachers feel that they are strong enough for Language A courses and all recommend Language B HL. Should this student not be allowed to take the full IB DP because they can’t “do” a language A course?

The student in question wants to take school supported self taught literature A in Yphone. Should they be allowed to do this? What if they do not have the requisite skills to analyse literature in that language? They may have been speaking it at home all their life but they have not formally studied in it or with it for many years and so their reading and writing skills in this language skills are somewhat reduced.

What do you recommend? How should we approach this scenario as DP Coordinators?

Let’s imagine another student. This student holds a passport for country C because they were born there but their parents are from country D and moved back soon after this student was born. The family speaks Dphone at home. The school is located in host country D but teaches in language Cphone for most of its academic subjects.

Because of a quirk in the admissions process, despite being a mother tongue D speaker, this student was placed in D acquisition classes in upper primary and has stayed in these classes all the way through secondary. The teachers cite his slow progress in the acquisition class for language D and the fact that he holds a passport from country C as reasons that he has never moved into the main language D classes.

Now it comes to IB subject selections and the student is in acquisition classes for both language D and language C but cannot take both as group 2 subjects – one must be in group 1 but which one?

How do you decide which course would be most appropriate for a student? What would you do to resolve these issues if you were presented with them?

In next weeks post I hope to provide some thoughts of my own.

Categories
Coordination

The DP Coordinators view: Language orals

Originally posted on May 24, 2020 @ 10:55 am

I am not a language teacher.

I am a biology teacher by training but being diploma coordinator requires me to become a generalist in other subjects. In this post I want to summarise my understanding of the coursework requirements of these courses, so as to better understand their placement in an assessment calendar.

The changes in the International Baccalaureate group 1 and 2 courses in the last couple of years appear to have been positively received by the educators I have spoken to.

Aside from the exams at the end of the courses coursework components for these courses has been streamlined, a positive change for both teachers and students a like.

In group 1 subjects HL students will have an externally assessed essay to complete, which replaces the written task. At the time of writing, I suspect that this essay will be submitted as an early component. SL and HL group 1 students will have to complete an oral.

In group 2 subjects HL and SL students need to complete an oral.

The guide for group one subjects recommends that orals for these subjects are placed at the end of year 1 or the beginning of year 2 of the programme.

Teachers and experienced coordinators that I have spoken to recommend that group 2 orals are placed as close to the IA upload deadlines as possible, as this will give students the greatest chance to demonstrate fully developed speaking and listening skills, which makes sense for a language aquisition subject.

Therefore for my assessment calendar, in addition to blocking the internal assessment for the maths courses to occur at the same point in the year, I recommend:

  • Placing group 1 orals in June of DP 1
  • Students taking 2 group 1 subjects they can opt to take one or both subjects at this time or one of their subjects in a second slot in September of DP 2
  • HL essays to be completed between October and February of DP2. There is a potential conflict here, affecting HL group 1 students, with the TOK essay which also needs to be submitted in the early deadline
  • Placing group 2 orals in the middle to end of March of DP 2 allowing 2 to 3 weeks of processing and uploading to the IB eCoursework system.

Thinking about it, while all coursework needs to be checked for authenticity, language orals are the closest in likeness of an exam in terms of the conditions that they are held under. They are less likely to be affected by academic integrity issues.

Are you a IB language teacher? What do you think? I would love to hear from you.

Categories
Coordination

Quality Assurance?

Originally posted on May 15, 2020 @ 11:32 am

“I’m talking about quality assurance not quality control, they are two different things”

Yes, perhaps. But your insistence on checking every teachers work down to the exams they are setting for the end of the year is not only a MASSIVE waste of valuable time with a syzygetic opportunity cost but will only serve to undermine quality, long term, in the educational programs you are trying to assure.

Teachers are generally a hard working lot, who care about what they do. Yes, I have encountered one or two who genuinely were out for what they could get but that is not the modus operandi of most of the professionals I have met.

And I refuse to base management decision based on a few bad apples.

Subjecting colleagues to a work scrutiny is patronising at best and at worst sends the message that we don’t trust you. If I am a hard working colleague trying to balance a quizillion other work tasks alongside regular teaching this scrutiny is going to demotivate me, not inspire me to deliver my best.

Yes, I can think of reasons why you say we should do it too, but they are baloney compared to the long term impact it has on morale and therefore the quality of our educational product.

Of course, staff need to be held accountable but we need to allow them the space to make mistakes so that they can formatively develop. There is a difference between supporting someones development as a professional and operating on the assumption they can’t be trusted to get it right.

To my mind this way of thinking goes in the bin alongside, making personalised exam timetables for students for their mock exams: A massive waste of leadership time and a massive learning opportunity cost for the kids.