Description:
SWITCH TO MYP, is a tailor made program for the students of grade 7, made and run by me and my friend Mohak Agarwal. The idea behind this program is that the difficulties we face, the trials were borne with, should not be experienced by another batch since we were the first ones and the difficulty of this program should not be passed to the next batch. So me and Mohak, though to deliver our MYP journey and at the same time tell the current batch of grade 7 how we overcome our challenges and even at the same time getting them prepared for their first exam.
Learning Outcomes:
LO1 – Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
I myself am a person who loves studying and would like to make myself be the best one at school, so I think I can use this strength of mine and transfer my experience of MYP to these young minds. The biggest challenge over here is to remember all those things which we did as it had been 4 years, since the start of MYP and that was the most difficult part I guess we had to cater to, so I must be the reflective part of our MYP journey. So knowing my weaknesses I knew that I had to counter them and find a way so that it doesn’t affect the quality and the quantity of my learning in the current batch of grade 7. Other than this at the same time we had to do a ton of research on the new changes in the MYP and we had to apply our thinking hats at the same time to decide what information we had to deliver to them.
LO2 – Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process
To get all the past experience, we had to skim through a lot of data which was not possible in such a period of time, so what we rather did was went out and asked the Grade 7 team leader, what she expected from us to deliver and accordingly, we made our task specific to the contents our team leader asked us to deliver as this would make the program more beneficial for the students and at the same time specific so that they don’t waste their time learning something which won’t benefit them. But still our task was not completed yet, so me and Mohak had a lot of meetings and listed down things which we felt were important and then made a plan, presentation and found resources which would be helpful for the students, so by this we finally overcame our weakness. So at the end of this we developed ourselves as better thinkers, researchers and reflective persons. This skill learning and the challenge required for us to undergo was like compulsory as without this the course would have no backbone to stand on, so I don’t think without this our program would have some great content. In addition to this we can use our this task experience to replicate in future as to learn what we learnt in the past if ever required.
LO3 – Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
Planning is a tough job to do and time consuming at the same time, but after planning activities for SWITCH TO MYP it really made me understand that planning helps us focus and give us a direction or path to proceed with at the same time we are prepared as to what is required to deliver. I am a person who is more of an on the spot idea person, so planning for me is definitely hard but I think I made sure that it doesn’t undermine the quality of this program, and my teammate over here made sure that we were going in the right direction. But I feel after this planning, planning in future will be easier for me as for this course we planned and discussed a 8 week course from the first day.
LO4 – Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences
This was a 6-8 week program so maintaining commitment was really hard and important at the same time. Committing like 6-8 weeks of time was a hard job for both of us, for that we split the responsibilities and I guess that made easier to commit our time for this program, moreover we had to adjust according to the grade 7 time, which we already had understood through our form, so I guess that made it easier to select the best time for max attendance but it made it hard for us, as we had to adjust our schedule according to it. I guess showing commitment here was hard but rewarding as the exams were near for both us and the students so we had to complete our syllabus and at the same time teach them their syllabus so if we were not on track we would not be able to complete this program and it would have been a waste of time for all the people part of it, so commitment really helped us sail through.
LO5 – Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively
Working with others is generally hard for me but Mohak was really helpful and understanding and adjusting so I guess, collaboration was not that harder than my usual experience. Moreover working in a team was really helpful as we could easily understand each other’s ideas and perspectives which brought up the quality content delivered by us but at the same time helped us spend less time on this as we could split up tasks.
LO7 – Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions
The ethical issue involved over here was whether we wanted to maintain all the practices which are school maintained while teaching or should have shared methods which would have made their tasks easier. So practices like plagiarism, using wikipedias, citing sources, using no copyright stuff, was somethings which we had to keep in mind while we were making and delivering the content as that is something IB MYP course is really strict against, so we maintained this integrity of things but we shared kind of some resources which were truly helpful like some questions made from the past year paper which have helped the students understand the course better and even gave them an competitive edge over her friends. So although we maintained the IB rules to the extent required but still we did deliver some content which was helpful for the students, but even made them aware about implications of use and made sure we didn’t cross the boundary.
Final Takeaways:
To conclude, I would like to say that this project was made me an better reflective person, thinker, researcher and communicator as making content, delivering it, coordinating with teachers, students and my team mate was a really tough job but in the end I think it was all worth it for my time and pain, which I got to know through the feedback shared by the students. Other than that this course had a lot of learning for me as well, I understood how to deliver and make contents which skill can be used for many future projects and group works. In addition to this I have helped these students overcome many challenges I faced as an MYP student which will make their journey so it feels like the hardwork has paid off.
Evidence:
