Reflection

Before I attend this course, I was thinking that course is going to be the duplication of Science Subject Guide and is not going to be efficient for my teaching practice and I regretted not to apply category 2 course. However, I was wrong. On the contrary of my expectations, the course was so stimulating for me. First of all, I was the “most experienced MYP trainee” with my 8-month teaching experience in the group, other teachers were from non-MYP schools who are willing to join MYP or they just started to apply MYP curriculum in their schools. This is why, I had a chance to contribute to my group, to understand what I have learnt in the last 8 months by practice at IICS and  to do connections in between what we do at school and  MYP science curriculum. Everything that we do at school (lesson plans, assessments, projects etc) started to make more sense in terms of MYP taught/written/assessed curriculum, ATL and IB profile.

During the training, we have had chance to work in groups with different teachers all around the world for preparing unit plans, assessing tasks and preparing assessments. It was very inspiring to work with different people because they were basically non – MYP teachers and we all have different ideas but we compromised in the direction of MYP curriculum and even in a limited time, we managed to prepare good products.  

Although, course was on MYP sciences, most of the information could be applied to MYP Math, especially after reading MYP Math Subject Guide.

Action Items

After this course, I am willing to take active role for preparing unit and lesson plans and even assessment tasks for different subject fields.

1. I will prepare one unit plan for 7th Grade Science Unit: Healthy Living and 7th Grade Math Unit: Angles, Lines, Parallelism and after that I want to share those with subject teachers to get their feedback.

1. Be more involved in planning process especially for interdisciplinary units.

1. Check OCC MYP Science and Math Documents to explore more about MYP.

1. Ask library for PD resources to broaden my knowledge.

1. Search about Eden Project and inform Science Department.

1. Apply Category 2 Course Science and/or Math

Improvable areas for our school

During the conversations and sessions, I realized some points that we do not do or we do not do efficiently at our school. Of course, those points are discussable. However, I wanted to share those points with you as well.

1. While talking with the teachers and the instructor I realize that the other schools have “the host country’s language” as a compulsory lesson for MYP. I think that this is what we miss at school and it avoids kids to be more integrated into community in Turkey.

1. We need to assign more time for unit planning and interdisciplinary unit planning.

1. It was a bit confusing for me since 6th grade is MYP 1st year but it is PYP at our school. There is nothing wrong with it but we need to plan science/math subject units aligned with PYP for avoiding any duplication or missing part in MYP curriculum.

1. There should be more time for both horizontal and vertical planning.

1. Applied trainings for new teachers. 🙂

Beneficial Documents (Especially for Biology)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B1t5f-Eo3SHORWhmeDNRZi1QM0k?usp=sharing