Education By Design
The Education by Design podcast explores the architecture of learning environments—how schools are designed, not just operated—how culture is disrupted to make way for innovation and reaching potential.
Your host, Phil Evans is a career educator and creative. His guests bring inspirational and practical ideas into classrooms, all over the world. Join him as he engages with innovators who untangle the complexity of educational systems to align with shared values, common practices, and a common language to create powerful, human-centered learning experiences.
For any formal schooling system to have an impact, the central focus must be on learning. Let's learn together.
Dive deeper on the EduByDesign Blog: https://edubydesign.com/blog
Education By Design
S1:E10 Jenny Gillett on "Designing for the future: Systems transformation" PART 2
Join me as I dive into the future of education with Jenny Gillett, the lead architect of the International Baccalaureate's groundbreaking Systems Transformation pilot. In this episode, Jenny reveals how she and United World College communities co-create a two-year, transdisciplinary learning journey—tackling global challenges from biodiversity to river pollution—through systems thinking, design sprints, and challenge-based assessment.
You’ll hear:
- How students apply real-world problem solving under time pressure
- Why only three deeply reflective artifacts can tell a richer learning story than any exam
- The role of Principled Action, Systems Thinking, and Just Futures in empowering learner agency
- Strategies for training teachers in IB Approaches to Teaching and co-creative facilitation
- Insights on fairness, neuro-diversity, and scalable peer-powered professional development
Perfect for educators, school leaders, and innovators, this conversation showcases the power of collaborative innovation, accountable assessment, and community-driven change. Tune in and discover how to transform your classroom into a living lab of student-centered, systems-led learning.
To learn more about the pilot, visit Systems Transformation Pathway: Leadership for Just Futures or Leadership for just and sustainable futures A future-facing model for education
Here is a video featuring the student experience (YouTube)
You might also like to look at two curriculum overview documents: International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme Subject Brief: Systems transformation – Leadership for change and International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme Subject Brief: Systems transformation – Leadership for just futures
Follow the EduByDesign Blog to explore the podcast topics, further.
And please let Phil know what resonates with you, in the comments.
We've been refining the system for decades, but what if it's time to redesign it? Not from scratch, but from what we know works. You're listening to Education by Design. I'm your host, Phil Evans. Welcome back to the 10th episode and part two of challenge-based learning, where we explore how communities and organizations can co-create the future of high-stakes learning. Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Jenny Gillett, an architect behind the IB's groundbreaking systems transformation pilot. For well over two years, Jenny has partnered with the United World College communities from Atlantic College in Wales to Vancouver in Canada. The United Work Colleges movement began in 1962 when German educator Kurt Hahn opened Atlantic College in South Wales. Hahn didn't just set out merely to prepare students for university. He believed schools should be a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and sustainable futures by helping young people to develop resilience through real-world challenges. He famously argued that embracing both successes and failures through experiential learning builds the character and agency tomorrow as leaders need. Today, Jenny Gillett's Systems Transformation Pilot carries forward that legacy, weaving systems thinking and challenge-based assessments into deeply collaborative learning experiences. To start with, I think it's important to understand why this is so different from a traditional educational model.
SPEAKER_00:I think what's really interesting about the Systems Transformation Pilot is that It's transdisciplinary and it's assessed through more sort of authentic assessment tasks that are non-exam based. And transdisciplinary and non-exam based are two quite radical things for the IB diploma in a kind of high stakes assessment. We have little bits of those things. So we have transdisciplinarity in our theory of knowledge course, or we have, for example, art subjects that are non-exam based. But I think challenging two of those pretty fundamental tenets of our usual diploma, disciplinarity and exam-based assessment, it's super exciting to be able to put forward a course that really asks questions about both of those things.
SPEAKER_05:So what is it that students are actually going to be learning about?
SPEAKER_00:So the systems transformation pilot The reason it's called systems transformation is because it's half about kind of systems thinking and design thinking skills. So it's very much about the mindset and the skills of systems thinking. But the reason it's systems transformation rather than systems thinking is that we really wanted that focus on kind of that action orientation and that experiential element to the course. So it's not just about sort of passively thinking. understanding systems and mapping systems. It's really about how do you actually bring about change? How do you identify leverage points that are opportunities to bring about change in a system? So that's the sort of starting point for that course.
SPEAKER_05:And it sounds like it's almost impossible to assess in that regard because this sounds very big. So what does the assessment actually look like?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so... This experience, obviously, is meant to be the last two years of school. It's meant to be the culmination of their kind of high school experience. But it's really meant to have this practical, hands-on focus, this kind of getting out into the world, engaging with the community, not just kind of sitting in a classroom, studying about it from a book, but actually being exposed to the real world. And so because that's the focus of the course, we really wanted students the assessment to really reflect that kind of teaching and learning. We didn't want this kind of more radical pedagogy and then to have a more traditional assessment. We wanted the two to really feed into each other and to have a kind of positive relationship and a positive backwash between the curriculum and the assessment. So we figured the course is meant to be about complex systemic issues to do with kind of sustainability and social issues. So they're these complex things that don't fit into neat little boxes. And we really wanted an assessment that reflected that kind of that thinking and grappling and exploring a bit more rather than just giving the answer.
SPEAKER_05:That's super refreshing. Jenny, before you tell us what the assessment's all about, how do you decide what systems transformation topics the student are going to explore.
SPEAKER_00:So we've actually, because this is such a complicated project, we're starting with four pilot schools. And each of the four schools is doing something slightly different with their curriculum models. So they've all got pretty similar aims. They're all around systems transformation. But then the schools have been given the flexibility to put a particular emphasis on a particular area or to structure it in a particular way. So the first pilot school in the UK, they are really focusing on what they call these impact areas, these systems. So food migration biodiversity and energy so you're looking at the food system as an example of the system our second pilot school in Singapore their project lenses are around intercultural understanding sustainability and peace so slightly different lenses but actually getting a lot of the same underlying kind of issues and the same competencies that they want the students to kind of express but just coming at it from slightly different angles organizing it in slightly different ways. And that's part of what we want to learn from the pilot is, is there a more effective way to structure this? How do students find it accessible? How do teachers find it accessible to teach? So all of the curriculum is looking slightly different, but with these same sort of foundational tenets across all four schools. But as I say, because we had that kind of a curriculum, you need to have a different, interesting assessment. You can't have the same kind of assessment that we have in some of our other subjects. So we decided to design four assessment tasks, two project-based tasks, one case study-based task, and one competence portfolio-based task. So they do these four assessments. For the first pilot school they're doing one individual project one collaborative project one case study which is an unseen day-long bit like a kind of hackathon or a kind of design sprint format where they look at an unseen case study and then throughout the course they keep a competencies portfolio and they curate a small section of that portfolio to submit for assessment at the end of the course
SPEAKER_05:wow so students really have a great sense of agency about how they're being assessed
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and hopefully there is that agency. And the case study day is a really interesting example, I think. So we really wanted to design something that had the look and feel much more like their teaching and learning activities that they do in their regular classrooms and less like a kind of example. So the other three tasks that are all projects and portfolio based are very open ended and can take a really long period of time. And for some students that can actually be quite stressful. If you think about things like workload, you can have really conscientious students who will spend a lot of time on open-ended tasks. So we wanted to make one of the tasks more sort of contained and controlled. So we decided on this sort of one-day assessment experience, we called it. So it's not an exam, it's kind of an assessment day. But the idea is that they work collaboratively in the morning, unpacking this unseen case study, doing exercises like stakeholder mapping. So it's quite a kind of structured, scaffolded morning of collaborative activities. And then in the afternoon, they work individually. But what's really nice about it, as I say, is it has that look and feel. It feels much more like a classroom. And that was really intentional in the design of it. We wanted to give that time for them to explore and discuss.
SPEAKER_05:I mean, that must give students who experience test anxiety such a greater range of ways to demonstrate what they understand and what they can do.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And also, we wanted to give them an opportunity to show what they can do in different kind of formats. So the morning is collaborative active that are quite structured the afternoon is individual but also the three artifacts that they submit for assessment one is a visual it's a stakeholder map one is a oral presentation as a group they summarize their insights from the morning as a group and then the last piece is a written individual piece so it's got the visual the oral and the written components to the day so hopefully all students find something it's not all in one format you've got that diversity of modalities and that diversity of formats that hopefully just help it appeal to a range of students.
SPEAKER_05:So one aspect of this collaborative innovation is that you're really thinking and grappling with the type of curriculum and the type of content and the type of context for learning. But on the other end, you're grappling with team theory and group theory. And how do we meaningfully and authentically assess students in a collaborative setting?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, collaborative assessment is a notoriously kind of thorny issue. If you look in the assessment literature or anyone who's just managed group work in schools, I'm sure every teacher who's tried to deliver group work will tell you it can be a source of contention and fallouts between students. And it's, you know, it's got a lot of challenges, but it's also, if we talk about authenticity and we talk about, you know, preparing students for the world that they're going to live in, you know, this kind of collaborative activities are the things that we do all of us all the time and particularly with systems you know any systems work there's a phrase you know systems work is together work you don't transform a system on your own by definition you're you know you've got to do relationship building you've got to collaborate felt like it wasn't just making something collaborative to be trendy or for the sake of it it's because it feels like it's really deep rooted and authentic to the discipline but obviously the logistics of it and the kind of even the philosophical sort of rationale for is quite challenging because you, for example, if you've got students working in groups, you have a key question of whether you're going to award group marks for the performance of the group as a whole, or whether you're going to try to reward individual performance within the group and give individual marks. Most people argue that the the true collaboration, then you'll get a group mark. But then the problem for that is what do you do if one student isn't pulling their weight? What do you do if one student's off ill for that period of time or two thirds of it and is there for a third of it?
SPEAKER_05:And then you've got the reality of group dynamics too.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. So for example, you could have the IB saying, these are the randomly assigned groups. You could have teachers assigning groups so that they can avoid particular conflicts between personalities in the class. You can do kind of per purposely mixed ability groups you can there's all sorts of different options and each of those has pros and cons so if I put my kind of assessment hat on I have to think about things like if I put students in mixed ability groups and all of the groups of mixed ability groups does that squash all of my marks to the middle and make setting grade boundaries really difficult for example and you don't get a full spread of marks what we're doing across the four pilot schools is experimenting with a few different types of collaborative assessment so in this first cohort we have a kind of co-authored section of a report with a group mark so that's sort of one end of the spectrum is it's a completely co-authored product with a completely joint group mark for some others we have pieces where for example in the oral presentation in the case study each student is required to talk for two minutes about one stakeholder they're allowed to prepare it together but each student has to take on the accountability and responsibility of representing one stakeholder holder in the presentation. And then in some of the other components, we're exploring things like peer feedback. We're exploring things that get at some of the skills without being a collaborative task. So for example, a pitch to a panel. So you pitch your project idea to a panel that consists of a teacher, a peer student, and an expert from the community. And then you have to write a piece about how you've engaged with their feedback, how you've incorporated or rejected their feedback. So you're getting at some of those same skills around listening, engaging with feedback. interacting with people, but it's not a collaborative task. So across the pilot, we're trying out some different formats. But yeah, quite exciting, really, to help the IB think through this wider issue of our stance on collaborative assessment.
SPEAKER_05:You know, I just can't stop thinking about how important the relational aspect of this is. Like you're teaching students how to collaborate in contexts that may not be comfortable to them. Yeah. You know, this is a real world skill, you know, that sometimes the work has to be done and we might not always know how to approach different, you know, colleagues in our work. But the trick is to actually try, you know, and to do that through relationship building.
SPEAKER_00:I think it was really interesting. So I did some video interviews with some students at the end of the first cohort. They were just coming to the end of their time. It was their last week of school and I did some interviews with them last month and and then a lot of them actually pulled out the collaborative element as their sort of highlight from the course. But I think what was really clear from the student feedback was you can't do that kind of collaborative assessment in a more traditional course and without the groundwork that's put in over the two years in the class and the kind of cohort building and skills that are developed. I think if you tried to do that kind of assessment when the kind of groundwork hadn't been laid throughout the first year, I don't think it would have gone as well as it did so I think that was a really interesting learning for me and the feedback from the students was they all talked a lot about the the intentionality and the deliberateness with which the teachers had really tried to build those relationships the fact that they'd been often working in small groups on multiple small projects but constantly changing the group so there were 24 students in that first class and they were all working with each other in different various different sort of varieties of groups so across that first year they sort of all worked with each other and they got really used to all sort of you know who they were going to work with and it wasn't usually just had your group and that was it and then suddenly it would have been difficult to work with someone else they were all very used to kind of interacting and I think but for me I thought that was a really interesting point about that cohort building and that kind of relationship between the students that sometimes can get a little bit overlooked but I think even for example in the way they ended the course normally you know you end the course with people getting ready for an exam and then you might not see the students again. But because it didn't have that as an end to the course, the teachers were really deliberate about how they really ended that course and kind of had a sort of sense-making piece at the end and thinking about how you want to go on and be a kind of change maker in the world beyond school. And it built in the time for that right at the end in those last few weeks of the course that perhaps you wouldn't do in a course that ended with an exam because you'd be in sort of intensive revision kind of mode getting ready for the exam. And it was just a very different kind of headspace for the students and the teachers to be in. But I thought that was super interesting for me, the fact that As I say, the things like that that weren't necessarily as intentional or on my mind when we were designing the pilot have come out as just being really important and really... important foundations for the other pieces of work that were more obvious were going to be different to a normal course.
SPEAKER_05:Perhaps this would be a good time for us to listen to what some of the students said after they came out of that full day assessment day that you talked about earlier.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I'm very happy to share this feedback from these two students. So these two students had just completed the case study assessment day. And one of the teachers at the school recorded them reflecting on their day and reflecting on their experience. So I'm very happy to share that to give a sense, I think, of the enthusiasm for this pilot and also how it reflects some of the things that we think are really important, that ability to think critically and to apply those skills to something unfamiliar and to really kind of grapple and think through and explore a complicated issue in an assessment environment.
SPEAKER_01:Let's
SPEAKER_05:take a
SPEAKER_01:listen. Hey, Jenny. I've just asked two students who did the assessment on Tuesday to tell you what they think of it. Hi,
SPEAKER_03:I'm Ray. And I'm Elsa. And we're both from the grade 11 systems transformation class. And we just had a exhausting Tuesday.
SPEAKER_02:But we really loved it. It was so different to anything we've ever done in like an exam setting. And I mean, although it was very exhausting, it was also like Ray put it, exhilarating. Exactly. Like we're a part of this new beginning and journey yeah
SPEAKER_03:education and in comparison to other exams it felt less like i had to take all the knowledge i already know and put it on a paper it felt more like an actual test of my ability to critically think and figure stuff out in a very short period of time yeah because we were kind of confronted with this thing that we've never seen in our lives and then suddenly oh where how do i approach this and i found myself actually pulling skills from other subjects like philosophy like critical analysis i learned in philosophy like techniques i learned in philosophy and just like throwing that out and It was... something, the skills from that can be very widely applied. And it's a more of a really true test of academic, not really academic pressure, but real life pressure that you'll feel when you're on a deadline and you're in a room with other people and you have to work
SPEAKER_02:things out fast. I think the other thing is like you have, it's a bit of a hybrid of how do you collaborate with others and how do you understand group dynamics and take advantage of them so that you can all thrive, but then also looking at what can you do independently in this kind of situation. And so to have that like opportunity I found it really incredible that other people will be able to experience that at one point.
SPEAKER_05:That says it all, doesn't it? Just how powerful this educational experience is that students value the assessment experience just as much as they did in the classroom. It also reminds me of another testimony that one of the students said in a video that folks can watch in the show notes. He was just saying how we just don't get exposure to the complexity of these systems problems until well and truly after we've finished our education and we're now sort of it's years later and we're finally getting ourselves into industry and we're having to approach the actual problem in real time. And that's the difference. You're giving high school students the experience to be able to approach these complex problems and to understand and to even find an interest and maybe an area where they could make a contribution really, really early on. on.
SPEAKER_00:But I just want to pick up on something you said there that I think is really important which is that balance in this course that we're trying to get between really kind of that sense of agency and that sense of urgency but then also that kind of intellectual humility and that awareness of the kind of complexity because I think that's the balance with a course like this. It's like you really want to have students feeling inspired that they can make change but you also don't want them kind of you know running blindly off and starting projects without an understanding of the potential impact on the communities that they're working with. Or, you know, you have to just be really careful there. So, for example, with the first group, their projects, they were allowed to do near school, in the school, but they were also allowed to do them in any context of their choice. But it had to be a context that they had a meaningful existing relationship with. It had to be a context that they had like a kind of genuine relationship of an accountability with. So it wasn't just like, I'm going to pick a random country and go and do this project, that sort of voluntourism type approach at all. And I think it's been really important to us all the way through this pilot work, really. It's trying to expose students to the idea that things are more complicated than they might seem. There's people's different perspectives and perspectives even within particular groups. You can't sort of assume that a group will have a single perspective, but yet at the same time, not to overwhelm them with that difficulty and kind of paralyze them with that complexity and difficulty, but say, actually, you can still act and you can still do things, but you just need to have that awareness and that open-mindedness and that humility to realize that you're not necessarily going to solve something. You might help something, or you might help with a part of it, but not another part of it. But I think I asked the students that question I asked them has it been has the course been sort of depressing and all about kind of all the problems in the world or has it been sort of inspiring and they every single one of them that I spoke to said no it's been super inspiring to feel like you can make a difference and even that small things can make a difference this sense of kind of empowerment and this sense that even doing a small thing can in the end have a really big difference.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, absolutely. aren't really programs. In fact, they're just individual discrete courses that don't have a connection. Even if students take multiple courses within that same paradigm, they're not really designed to make connections. And for me, this is what education by design is all about. It's actually the intentionality. We should be looking for systems that help students to make connections because that is how we solve problems, by understanding how things are related.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think for me, what really impressed me about that video was not just the enthusiasm and the fact that it's kind of novelty it's a bit different to what they do before but the students were really so aware and so kind of clear on what they enjoyed about this assessment and the fact that they were able to take things from other subjects and apply them the fact that they could draw on these things rather than just kind of having to kind of dump everything that was in their brains onto a piece of paper that they really genuinely felt like they were being asked to think or the fact that they appreciated the fact that it was the collaborative and the individual parts to the day. And I just, what was really lovely having obviously worked on the design of that task is to see the things that you hope for and the things that you try to build into a design actually coming through into practice and the students picking up on them. And the other thing that didn't really come through on the video, but I thought was a really interesting piece of feedback that was we deliberately designed that task to be completed in the first year of the two years of that programme. The idea is that it will scaffold them towards then designing their own projects. So the idea is that they've kind of applied this thinking to a case study and looked at an intervention that someone else has tried to do in a system and evaluated it. But then the next step is before they go off and do their own projects. And that links to that point about that kind of intellectual humility of understanding what someone else has tried to do and what barriers they encountered and what the strengths and weaknesses of that approach were before they go off and start doing their own projects. And then the other reason we put it in year one of the programme was really to try to address the kind of issues of wellbeing and workload, to kind of spread out the workload a little bit. So for those two students, what's really nice is by Easter of year one, they've wrapped up a piece of their work that's worth 15% of their overall grades, just for, yeah, spreading out that workload rather than sort of everything coming at the end of the two years to have that piece out the way six months into the program.
SPEAKER_05:You know, it's just so interesting that we're talking about assessment for learning and so many education programs or systems, curriculums say that, you know, it's assessment for learning, but everything's sort of at the end of the course. But, you know, we're talking about students that are applying their learning and what they've gained from their assessment to their future learning. And, you know, that kind of spiraling on and that building and of, you know, it's lifelong learning in action. And I think that's just so important, that intellectual humility to kind of say, I'm still learning, I'm still grappling, especially in a world that's just so paralysed. I mean, this just gives me hope that, you know, that there's an education model, even if it can't be replicated in lots of different spaces, that it gives us sort of something to show that education and schooling could be different.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And I think this pilot's, you know, very on vicious but there are principles that apply in all sorts of different ways and all sorts of different places you know we talked about collaborative assessment that's something that the IB has in some of our art subjects but it's something that we could explore more generally a lot of these things the things that we do small amounts of but it's in this course it's kind of ramped up to you know dialed up to 11 you know it's like so it's not that we don't do these things it's not that the IB hasn't always thought you know this kind of thinking is it's really important but it's how do you incorporate it within a high stakes assessment system and university admission so I think the thing that really excites me about this project is also the thing that makes it quite challenging we're taking things that often might fit a little bit more comfortably for example in a co-curricular program so in our creativity activity and community service in our community engagement pieces and you're taking those things and you're making them the center of their experience and the center of the academic course and they're And underpinning them with really thorough research skills. And
SPEAKER_05:communication skills.
SPEAKER_00:And communication skills. So you're taking these things that can sometimes be pushed to the edge and really making them the central focus. And that's what's really exciting for this. But also, as I say, what makes it challenging is it would be super easy to design, you know, this kind of an experience without an assessment and not within the diploma and not within a high stakes environment just as a classroom experience. But I think what's really powerful about this is you're transforming from the inside and actually making it part of the program, part of the qualification, part of the diploma. And that's the thing that makes it hard, but also for me, the thing that makes it a really worthwhile thing to be trying to do.
SPEAKER_05:Tell us a little bit more about the relationship that the International Baccalaureate has with the United World Colleges Group.
SPEAKER_00:The UWC movement and the IB are kind of interlocking histories and kind of cousins. So UWC Atlantic was one of the very first IB schools. In 1968, when we did the pilot exams with nine schools, they were one of the original nine. And they both have... kind of philosophical alignment and kind of missions that are so aligned in terms of making the world a better, more peaceful place. And so right from the very beginning, UWC Atlantic was one of, as I say, our pioneer original schools that helped develop the IB and the IB diploma in the 1960s. So I think there's a really nice kind of symmetry there that they now are involved so heavily in this next vision and this next iteration of the diploma program for 2020. in the year 2030. But I think what's interesting is that this pilot is trying to take some of that original philosophical context that's so strong within the UWC movement and the IB and then combine it with some really contemporary influences. So if you go back to the beginning, the founder of the UWC movement, Kurt Hahn, he wrote about the decline of the modern youth and everything being quite passive and people not feeling that agency and not getting out of their comfort zone. And he found for example the Outward Bound movement which was all about kind of get out of your own head and walk up a mountain and push yourself out of your comfort zone or his original school in Salem the students were the volunteer fire service for the village you know it's this really remarkable focus on kind of service and on community and it's also really important at the IB if you go back to the origins of the IB you know it was set up in the 1960s as a way to try to avoid World War 3 you know for Philosophically, that was the point to develop international mindedness and intercultural understanding, but also to provide that kind of broad, balanced, conceptual education that people felt was missing in some places. They felt that education was becoming narrower at that 16 to 18 phase. And actually, what really matters at that age is that learning to learn and thinking like a historian and thinking like a scientist and having that breadth. So I think this kind of pilot... is very, very aligned with those kind of founding ideas and founding principles of the IB, but is then trying to really combine that with really contemporary influences in education. If you take books like Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Andriotti, or you take the work of institutes like the Villars Institute in Switzerland who do systems thinking. So it's trying to take those classic IB and UWC influences and merge them and combine them with some really consistent contemporary directions in education. And I think that's one of the things that makes this pilot really special.
SPEAKER_05:And I think it goes without saying, and our listeners will certainly agree, that that kind of mission and vision for education is what we need when we're thinking about how we want to transform education, especially now in terms of bringing peace and community and respect to And on that note, and before we finish up, Jenny, when we think about the respect for the profession and for the teachers, this is a really big ask for teachers who teach within a discipline in the high school and are not so accustomed to teaching in a transdisciplinary context.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. So the course is going to be demanding for schools to implement, but we are trying to be really conscious of that in the design. But I think for the teachers, what's really interesting is that it's going to be challenging, for example, because it's transdisciplinary. So for most teachers at that 16 to 18 age group, they're used to operating within their disciplines. They're used to operating within their sort of isolated subject. They're a maths teacher and they've studied maths at university. They're a biology teacher and they've studied biology at university. And I think what's interesting with this course is because of the transdisciplinary nature, It just doesn't fit in a box like that.
SPEAKER_05:And I imagine it really has turned up the reliance on collaboration and teamwork for the faculty too.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. It's really stressed the importance of collaboration between teachers, not just between students. So across the four pilot schools, we again have slightly different models. We have some of the schools are co-teaching it. So you have, for example, maybe an anthropology teacher and a biology teacher co-teaching the course together in the classroom. We have another model where it's a single teacher, but they've had a kind of advisory group or a kind of steering committee of other teachers who are advising And helping with the curriculum development side. So they're kind of drawing on that and they're bringing those teachers in as a kind of expert for a small workshop session or a kind of ask the expert session when it's that particular topic. It's particularly kind of relevant.
SPEAKER_05:Jenny, I think what you're illustrating for us here is something that we haven't actually really been able to kind of quite articulate properly in the podcast so far. And it's an important aspect about what it really looks like. looks like for an education system like the International Baccalaureate, a global system that does all this research and collaboration and collaborative innovation to design curriculum, to find out what the curriculum should be and how to assess that and how to really authentically join those things together through learning and teaching. But the role of the teachers and what it takes to what the expectations that are placed then on teachers to be part of that collaborative design and that co-design to bring that home for the students in a relevant and Yeah, and that's actually
SPEAKER_00:one of the reasons why this pilot is aiming to go mainstream in 2030. And one of the reasons it's quite a lengthy pilot is because we really recognize the need to build good support materials, exemplar materials, teacher training opportunities, and to build that capacity. This is not the kind of thing that you can just roll out, you know, kind of instantly. But just to go back to your point about collaboration, collaboration between teachers. I think that has been really key. And what we've noticed as well through the pilot so far is that there are just things that are just different to a regular course. So I mentioned that the assessment model doesn't have exams, but that means that you don't have exams to use for trial exams, or you don't have exams to use for unit tests or, you know, past papers to use for that. So the teachers are having to design slightly different kinds of classroom assessments compared to normal. Um, So there's just, you know, and how you do your anticipated grades for university might be slightly different. And so it has this kind of knock on. As soon as you start doing something differently, it is in itself a system. So you have these ripples through the system and lots of things that are a little bit different that require us to think a little bit differently. It requires teachers to operate a little bit differently to normal. I think for me, it's also on a personal level. I really enjoy working for the IB and it's an opportunity to bring about change that very few people have that privilege to be able to work on, you know? And it's like, I feel like in my job, if I can make an experience a bit better for students or a bit better for teachers, you can, you know, you can have that impact on hundreds of thousands of people. And that's an amazing, it's an amazing privilege and an amazing position to be in. It's also a huge amount of pressure sometimes, but it's an amazing position to be and to think something that you're working on and something that you can really take the views of teachers and represent them and try and translate that into an actual action and a change that they will be helpful to teachers and schools and students all around the world. And that's got to be hugely motivating, hasn't
SPEAKER_05:it? You've been listening to the Education by Design podcast. I've been your host, Phil Evans. If you liked this episode, please hit subscribe or follow and join us for our next episode. And until next time, stay curious.
