What 'the big picture' means in the MYP
Taught subject by subject, the MYP can look like eight separate curricula that happen to share a school. Seen as a whole, it is one framework: sixteen key concepts and related concepts give subject groups a shared vocabulary, six global contexts situate units in something beyond the classroom, Approaches to Learning skills are meant to be taught and practised across subjects rather than once, and a subject's assessment criteria are meant to connect to what the unit was actually teaching toward.
The big picture is what a coordinator holds that an individual subject teacher usually does not need to: where the same concept is being taught twice with no connection made explicit, where a global context has become decoration rather than direction, and where the personal project sits relative to everything a student has already practised.
Why interdisciplinary learning is worth the coordination cost
Interdisciplinary learning asks two or more subject groups to combine their knowledge and approaches to produce an understanding neither could reach alone — science, geography and mathematics investigating climate change through causes, impact and evidence together, rather than three separate units that happen to share a topic.
It is genuinely harder to plan than a single-subject unit, because it needs a shared statement of inquiry, agreement on which subjects' criteria apply, and a timeline that survives more than one teacher's term. The reason it is still worth doing is the same reason meaning making matters in the PYP: understanding that only exists inside one subject's frame is understanding a student cannot transfer, and transfer is the point of a concept-based curriculum. For the mechanics of planning one, see MYP interdisciplinary units.
Where coordination actually breaks
The same few points fail across most schools, whatever the subjects involved.
- A global context chosen because it fits the unit already planned, not because it changes what students do
- ATL skills claimed in a plan and never explicitly taught
- Assessment criteria ticked in every unit rather than distributed deliberately across the year
- An interdisciplinary unit with two teachers and one shared plan that only one of them updates
- The personal project planned as a single term's event rather than built on skills practised across three years
The personal project, in the big picture
The personal project is where a student's approaches to learning are meant to show up without a teacher directing the work: self-management, research and reflection, applied to something the student chose. Seen alone it can look like an add-on at the end of MYP5; seen in the big picture it is the payoff for ATL skills built deliberately across every year that came before it. The supervisor's actual responsibilities — the process journal, the meeting cadence, the criterion-by-criterion mark sheet — are covered in full in the MYP personal project guide; this is only the reminder that it connects to everything above it, not a separate track.
A coordinator's view: what to check each term
The big picture is easiest to hold with a short, repeatable check rather than a yearly audit.
| What to check | The question behind it |
|---|---|
| Key concepts | Which are repeated across subject groups, and which are never used? |
| Global contexts | Chosen for direction, or fitted after the unit was already planned? |
| ATL skills | Named in the plan and actually taught, or claimed and skipped? |
| Assessment criteria | Distributed across the year, or ticked in every unit out of habit? |
| Interdisciplinary units | Genuinely combining subjects, or two units sharing a topic? |
| Personal project | Built on ATL practised earlier, or arriving with no foundation? |
Where skodle fits
This section names our own product, so weigh it accordingly. Every check above can be run on paper or in a spreadsheet; a school does not need skodle to see its own big picture.
skodle holds MYP units as records with their key and related concepts, global context, ATL skills and assessment criteria, and a gap report flags, for PYP and MYP units, concepts a school's teams repeat or never use and units missing evidence or assessment. Interdisciplinary units, ATL tracking and standardised criterion assessment run in the same platform rather than separate spreadsheets. The personal project is tracked as its own record — goal, process, evidence and reflection — created and supervised by staff, with the mark sheet and moderation detail covered in the guide linked above; students do not log it themselves. See the MYP programme page. Every new school can test this on a real unit in the free 30-day trial: start the free trial.
The limits, plainly. skodle does not supply the curriculum itself, and does not judge whether a global context genuinely fits a unit or was fitted to it after the fact — that is the team's call. The gap report covers PYP and MYP units and depends on the mappings people approve. Personal project entries are staff-created, not student self-service. And skodle does not carry the official IB registration and coursework submission route.
Building the habit of seeing the whole
The teams that hold the big picture well tend to do one unglamorous thing consistently: someone — usually the MYP coordinator — looks across subject groups at least once a term, not just at the end of the year when it is too late to change anything. What they are looking for is not perfection, it is drift: the concept nobody has used since September, the global context that has become a label rather than a lens, the criterion nobody has assessed since the last review.
Comparing notes with the rest of the programme
The big picture does not stop at the MYP's own edges. What a unit teaches through causation in the PYP is the same lens a Group 3 unit teaches through when it asks why a policy exists, so a coordinator who reads what the PYP team is doing with a concept often finds a shortcut to teaching it well in Year 6 or 7 — see meaning making in the PYP for that side of the same idea. A school comparing platforms across every IB programme rather than just the MYP is better served by an IB-wide buyer's guide than by a single-programme feature list.
