Another step along our IB path
The International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme (IB MYP) is the latest addition, from the suite of the International Baccalaureate’s curriculum programs, to Wesley College’s teaching and learning offerings. From the beginning of March 2013 each of the Melbourne campuses became a recognised candidate school for the IB MYP. This means that each is now ready to take the second significant step – the trial implementation phase – towards full authorisation as an IB World school for the IB MYP – a status that Wesley College already enjoys with respect to the IB Primary Years Programme (IB PYP) and the IB Diploma Programme (IB DP).
Given the many features it shares with the IB PYP (and also the IB DP), the introduction of the IB MYP as the main curriculum framework within which teaching and learning is conducted from Year 7 through to Year 10, means that the compulsory years of education (and beyond) at Wesley College are now guided by a transparent, coherent, clear and consistent set of standards and practices relating to our:
- Educational philosophy, vision and values
- Capacity as an institution to organise our own leadership, structures and resources in ways to suit our own Wesley needs
- Recognition of curriculum as a living and breathing culture of learning
Clearly, these standards and expectations provide us (and others) with ample opportunities to measure and evaluate our practice of a true education in the best interests of all our learners – students, teachers, school leaders, parents and our community.
Introduction of the IB MYP to Wesley College is also remarkable for the very real prospect it offers us for ensuring that our students, regardless of the particular campus at which they enrol, are engaged in an equivalent learning experience – harnessed properly, the IB MYP should serve to make even truer for the Wesley College community one of its most valued aspirations, All of us are one!
All of us are one - this aspiration ought to serve both as our inspiration and challenge as we work assiduously towards becoming a fully authorised IB MYP school. It must be the guiding intelligence that distils and defines for us those practices and approaches to teaching and learning deserving of inclusion and/or relegation as we seek to make concrete and invest with vibrant life what it means, at Wesley College, to know, to do, to live with, to be with innovation and wisdom.
