How Learning The IB Way Can Be Effective For Secondary 3 And 4 Students?

For many students studying locally in Singapore, the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) is thought of as a pre-university programme, an alternative pathway from the A Levels. However, there is actually a Mid-Year Programme (MYP) catered to students studying in Year 1 to 4. In addition to that, there is also a Primary Years Programme (PYP) that is targeted at students studying in primary school. From such, it can be observed that there is actually a thorough pathway from primary to secondary education that focuses on learning with the IB methodology. Regardless, students from those ages can benefit from the IB system.

Through the lens of my eyes, let me explain how I believe education through the IB curriculum entails and how it can benefit students of different ages.

More about Me

My name is Markus and I study in Singapore. I’ve going through the conventional educational pathway, comprising of the Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE) and the Cambridge Ordinary Levels (O Levels). After O levels, I wanted to pursue a more unconventional route, which led to me to research more about the IBDP. After thoroughly understanding the IB curriculum, I felt that it resonated with what I would like to achieve in my post-secondary education. Therefore, I enrolled in St Joseph’s Institution, which offered the IBDP and graduated in 2016, with a final score of 41/45 points.

Subsequently, I went on to found IB Lounge, a specialised IB tuition service in Singapore. I started IB Lounge after I could not find a tutor who understood the programme well enough to offer me sufficient guidance. I wanted to be able to support my juniors and fellow peers in understanding, appreciating and enjoying their learning. Thus, IB Lounge was born. (Find out more about our story HERE)

How the IBDP differentiates from the conventional educational pathway.

My thoughts on the local education system is that there is a big emphasis on the preparation for examinations. Majority of the school term is focused on helping students prepare for examinations and this results in students completing a significant number of practice papers, most of which are repetitive.  The emphasis was placed primarily on memorization of content and practice of past year papers.

Personally, I did not enjoy this style of learning due to the following reasons:

Firstly, I felt that there was no context to the knowledge being learnt. I was learning not by understanding the concepts but rather by repeatedly memorizing said concepts, so that when a similar question came up, I would be able to regurgitate that knowledge as the answer.

Secondly, learning brought minimal enjoyment to me. Perhaps this was because I had no idea why I was preparing for examinations or that I was unsure about what I was even learning, but I ended up going through the process without enjoying what I was learning, something I feel is extremely important to getting good grades.

Finally, I felt as if the system did not encourage students to ask questions or critically think but rather, to accept what they were being taught as absolute. There was a lack of engagement with students and most of the lessons were information download sessions.

Why I prefer the IB style of learning

I believe that learning can be a beautiful process. After years of wandering rather mindlessly through the education system, I was exposed to a whole new style of learning. I realized after completion of my IB education that my understanding of learning had been completely changed.

The IB curriculum encourages learning in a healthy manner. Specifically, it encourages learning in 3 parts: Understanding, Appreciating and Enjoying. To me, allows students to grasp what they are learning both theoretically as well as practically.

Let me explain this in greater detail.

One example of this are the subject-specific Internal Assessments (IA) that we had to complete in IB. In most of these assessments, students are allowed to decide what area of the subject they want to learn and research on. This means that students get to design their own experiments, implement them and evaluate their findings. Conversely, in the conventional education pathway, one is typically told what your experiment is, how you should conduct it and whether the outcome is right or wrong.

This self-directed style of learning is not present in only the IAs. The IB curriculum also ensures that students appreciate learning in a classroom setting. For example, in Economics, case studies are often used in conjunction with theory. Furthermore, said case studies are also utilized in the final examinations to test whether students are able to apply their theoretically knowledge when presented real life examples. This helps students to appreciate what they are learning as they are able to see the concepts occur in the real world.

Apart from just classroom learning, IB also encourages students to learn through observing and analyzing reality. This can be seen in the Global Education Program (GEP) which is a community involvement programme IB students are required to participate in. This exposes them to different cultures and encourages them to contribute back to society in ways that are necessary. In addition, field trips and outdoor learning opportunities also occurred frequently. For example, for certain Geography lessons, we might conduct our classes outdoors.

What are the advantages of allowing your child to pursue IB?          

1.      A greater willingness to learn.

Children love asking why. It is a innate human desire to want to know why certain things happen. With the IB placing a greater emphasis on experimental  l learning and how to apply concepts to real world scenarios, students will understand not only what they are learning but also why they are learning certain concepts. From my own experience, this has allowed me to be more willing to learn.

2.      The ability to adapt and apply.

With the emphasis of applying concepts to real world scenarios, students need to have a solid foundation. More than that however, they need to have the ability to recognize that concepts are just tools which need to be utilized in order for it to be useful. I believe that this is an important skill to have and will make learning a much more worthwhile process.

Why I believe the benefits of the IB can apply to students of different age groups?

The IB curriculum is not only useful for only pre-university students. Allowing children to learn in such a manner from an early age will encourage a health mindset to be adopted toward learning. This will also have a positive impact on the way they learn outside of the classroom. Lastly, skills such as adapting and applying knowledge in real-life scenarios is extremely crucial in today’s world where we often see concepts from different subjects being combined to solve problems.

Content, of course, is something that gets increasingly harder to grasp throughout students’ academic careers. However, the skills learnt and their attitudes towards learning can be improved over time.

How IB Lounge can help your child learn the IB way?

IB Lounge has a Secondary 3/4 division and we call it Reach. Reach was designed to comprise of skills that can be learnt in the IB curriculum and that has been adapted for students who are in other programmes. Having done the O Levels, I believe that the IB curriculum has plenty of merits. Thus far, we have taught students who are not in the IBDP with the teaching style that utilized in IB. This has actually garnered a positive response thus far as students become more engaged and passionate about learning. This results in students being more self-motivated about their learning.