Middle Years Programme (MYP)

As part of the International Baccalaureate (IB) continuum of international education, Harare International School (HIS) is proud to offer the Middle Years Programme (MYP).

At HIS, students in grades 6-10 participate in the Middle Years Programme (MYP) across all of the subject groups. The MYP is a challenging framework that encourages students to make practical connections between their studies and the real world. Through the explicit use of ATL (Approaches to Learning) skills as well as the Learner Profile attributes, students in the MYP acquire knowledge and skills in subject groups that are similar to those found in schools around the world:

Language and Literature (English)
Language Acquisition (French or Spanish)
Individuals and Societies (Social Studies/History)
Science
Mathematics, Visual Arts
Physical and Health Education
Design

In each of these subjects, an emphasis is placed on the understanding of key concepts within a global context. Students are challenged to explore these concepts through inquiry-based learning practices that help them answer factual, conceptual, and debatable questions. The level of higher order thinking fostered by the MYP and the further development of transferable skills provides a strong foundation for students’ work in the Diploma Programme (DP) and beyond.

To help ensure that students are the centre of the learning process, assessment in the MYP is referenced against criteria. Each subject group assesses using four criteria, which reflect aspects of student learning that are crucial to student development and growth. The levels of achievement reached by the students in each of these four areas are used to award the student a grade at the end of the semester. Learn more about the IB Middle Years Programme assessment at HIS HERE.

The three IB programmes (PYP, MYP, DP) share a common philosophy and a commitment to a high quality, international education that HIS believes promotes our ability to thrive and reach for excellence. Across the continuum, our teachers are committed to the principles of an IB education, promoting inquiry-based teaching strategies and conceptual-based learning that support the IB Learner Profile and foster students’ growth in the Approaches to Learning (AtLs).

For further information about the IB and its programmes, please visit https://www.ibo.org

Curriculum
Assessments

Curriculum

Every MYP parent at HIS has access to an overview of their child’s curriculum via ManageBac (MB). We encourage parents to use MB to explore what their MYP student is learning by looking at the individual unit planner overviews for each course.

As part of our curriculum, MYP students participate in the Wider Wednesday (WW) program. Through the WW activities, students engage in MYP service as action, creativity and activity, as well as in well-being sessions with topics linked to social emotional learning.

As an IB Continuum school, we use the IB framework for teaching and learning to shape our unit planners. These planners incorporate the chosen departmental standards which, in conjunction with the global contexts and the key and related concepts, guide the content we choose for our inquiry questions (factual, conceptual, debatable).

The departmental standards inform our vertical alignment of the skills and knowledge acquired by students and are used in our curricular design process by departments. They guide teachers to meet developmentally appropriate lessons and units.

Within the scope of the larger MYP framework, we utilize backwards design to create our unit planners. To this end, we design authentic and developmentally appropriate assessments and use relevant approaches to teaching strategies. We further embed the development of our students’ approaches to learning (AtL) skills and IB Learner Profile attributes in our lessons and unit planners.

All of these aforementioned individual elements are combined symbiotically to form our MYP curriculum.

Assessments

At HIS, we believe that the concept of assessment is multi-faceted and broader than a narrow set of pedagogical guidelines. In line with our IB framework for teaching and learning, we believe assessment is a continuous, ongoing process to be used for 1) the assessment of student learning and growth, i.e. summative assessment, and 2) for the purposes of shaping student learning experiences and teacher planning, i.e. formative assessment. We have, therefore, organized our conceptual understanding of assessment around the broad ideas of formative and summative assessment. While these two categories of assessment provide us with a framework for shaping our assessment philosophy and practices, we acknowledge that assessment is much more than the brief definitions provided above.

In addition to our internal HIS assessment, there is an external assessment component within the MYP Programme for students in MYP 5 (Grade 10). The Personal Project is an individual project in which students are required to design a product and write a report about their journey. They will showcase their product in the MYP Personal Project exhibition to the community. The final report is sent to the IB and assessed externally.