Planning with IBDP CS Standards

by: Mery Tellez

This week I had the opportunity to go through the process of starting the planning process of a unit for my IBDP Computer Science class using the Understanding by Design technique.  I was introduced to three of the processes required for planning: Unpacking a standard, planning assessments and activities for a unit based on the results of the unpacking, and lastly, defining SMART objectives for each one of the lessons derived from the previous stages.

The entire process was very interesting for me, particularly due to the fact I was working with IBDP standards, and this is a process I haven’t consider before for the IB course.  I liked the fact that by looking at the standard I was able to have a much clear vision of what my learning activities needed to be, and it seemed like it was all clicking as I was progressing towards the activities.

I must say that I was not very enthusiastic about the topic when I started.  Unpacking the standard seemed like an almost logical and unnecessary process to go through, I kept thinking to myself that I knew what was it that I needed my students to do in order to show achievement of the standard, so I was not positive at all while going through what seemed like a grammatical revision of the standard. 

It wasn’t until the second step when I realized that by looking at the verbs, and by trying to define what they meant, I was able to visualize a much clear path in front of me, and a productive one I must say.  I realized that I made a couple of mistakes in the past by limiting the variety of activities and even assessments that I was providing for my students with a similar unit (this is my first time teaching IB, but the content itself is not new to me, as some of it is also covered in different degrees and expectations by the AP program).  I realized that was probably why they were mostly memorizing and not successfully able to apply the concepts and knowledge acquired in this unit in later stages, and why in many cases I needed to go back over this content in later stages, because once the tests passed, the information seemed to evaporate from my students’ brains.  

I believe that the simple process of defining and making a conscious effort to understand the verbs and its implications made a difference in the way I planned the assessment and therefore the teaching or learning experiences I will be providing for my students.

I am yet to experience the rest of the planning process, although so far It wasn’t as annoying as I was expecting for it to be, and it does seem like something that I might be able to do in the future, particularly for those units that I still have to figure out, or for those that hadn’t proved to be so effective in the past.