What IB curriculum planning is, and what the IB leaves to the school
The IB publishes frameworks and guidance rather than a finished school curriculum. In the PYP and MYP a school designs much of what it teaches within the framework, and in the DP the subject guides set the content while the school decides how to sequence and teach it. In every programme the IB expects, in broad terms, that planning is collaborative, that the curriculum is written down, and that teaching and assessment are planned deliberately.
That makes planning the school's work, and the thing that most often goes wrong is not any single document but the way the documents fail to connect. A useful way to think about IB curriculum planning is as a system with layers, each answering a different question and each feeding the next.
The layers of a planning system
A school that can say what each layer is for, and who owns it, rarely ends up with three versions of the same plan.
| Layer | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Scope and sequence | What do we teach across the years, and in what order? |
| Curriculum map | Where and when does each part of it happen? |
| Unit planner | How does one inquiry run, from concept to assessment? |
| Lesson plan | What happens on Tuesday? |
| Assessment plan | How will we know what students have learned? |
| Review | Did it work, and what changes next year? |
The layers in more detail
The top layer is the scope and sequence, which fixes the shape of the whole. The curriculum map places that learning in time, and an IB curriculum map template is a sensible starting structure for each programme. Below them the unit planner is where inquiry becomes a sequence of learning, and lesson plans are the day-to-day detail.
The layers should be read from the top down when planning and from the bottom up when reviewing. A unit that does not fit the map, or a map that does not deliver the scope and sequence, is a signal that one of the layers has drifted.
Planning in the PYP: the programme of inquiry first
PYP planning starts from the programme of inquiry, a whole-school framework organised around six transdisciplinary themes. Each unit within it has a central idea and lines of inquiry, and teachers plan them collaboratively, so that the same theme is not met in the same way year after year.
The practical implication is that a PYP team plans across grades before it plans within a class. Whether a central idea is well written, and whether the themes are spread sensibly across the school, are questions for the team. See PYP central ideas examples and how to plan a PYP programme of inquiry, and for the cycle in depth, IB PYP curriculum planning.
Planning in the MYP: concepts, contexts and criteria
An MYP unit is built from a key concept, related concepts and a global context, brought together in a statement of inquiry. The unit then works through inquiry questions, approaches to learning and the assessment criteria the unit will address, each subject group having four criteria assessed on a scale of 0 to 8.
The planning decision that matters most is which criteria to assess in which unit, because across the year each criterion has to be assessed often enough to support a defensible final judgement. Ticking every criterion in every unit produces rushed judgements. The detail is in how to write an MYP unit planner and MYP assessment criteria explained.
Planning in the DP: pacing two years
The DP is different in kind. Subject guides set what must be covered and how it is assessed, so a school's planning is largely about pacing: how the content fits the two years, when internal assessments fall, and how the extended essay, theory of knowledge and creativity, activity, service work alongside the subjects.
The IB does not prescribe a format for DP planning, though it offers template unit planners organised around inquiry, action and reflection. The choice of format matters less than whether teachers plan explicitly and the coordinator can see the calendar as a whole, which is what a DP coordinator's deadlines calendar is for.
A planning calendar for the school year
Planning goes better when it has a rhythm. This is one shape that works, to adapt to your own terms.
| When | What the team does |
|---|---|
| Before the year begins | Confirm the scope and sequence, assign unit owners and book the collaborative planning time. |
| Each unit, before it starts | Plan together; write the unit; agree the assessment and the evidence to collect. |
| During the unit | Note what works and what does not while it is fresh, not months later. |
| End of each unit | Reflect briefly and record it; update the map if the unit changed. |
| End of each term | Check assessment coverage against what was planned; review a sample of student work. |
| End of the year | Review the whole against the scope and sequence and decide what changes next year. |
Planning meetings that produce something
A planning meeting that ends without a changed document has not planned anything. Agree before the meeting what will be decided, bring the previous unit's reflection, and leave with the plan written where everyone can see it, with an owner and a date against each open question.
Time is the constraint that decides whether this happens. Collaborative planning that is fitted around teaching gets skipped, and the school then has plans that describe what one person intended.
How skodle helps
This section names our own product, so weigh it accordingly. Every layer above works on paper, in shared documents or in any platform, and many schools begin there.
skodle holds planning as records rather than files. A PYP unit carries its central idea, lines of inquiry, key and related concepts, approaches to learning, learner profile attributes, assessment and reflection, and moves from draft to review to coordinator approval; the programme of inquiry is a grid of those units by year group and theme, read from what teachers edit. MYP units are records too, curriculum maps hold their units and lessons and are versioned by cloning and activating a new version, and DP and CP components are tracked per student with milestones, drafts and due dates. For PYP and MYP units a gap report flags concepts that unit after unit repeats or that no unit uses, objectives that are unmapped or unassessed, and units missing evidence or assessment. The curriculum copilot can draft unit ideas from the school's recent PYP and MYP units, and the lesson planner drafts lessons for a teacher to edit. Every new school starts with a free 30-day trial, so a team can plan one real unit in it: start the free trial. See curriculum planning and the IB Engine.
The limits, plainly. skodle does not write a central idea or judge whether it is a good one, and the gap report counts only what people link, so it is only as good as the links and cannot see year-by-year progression. It covers PYP and MYP units, not DP or CP planning. Lesson records are light, a title, objectives and a planned flag, and the year a map covers is a free-text label. A Cambridge syllabus or CBSE scheme is not modelled the way an MYP unit is, so the curriculum engine is an IB-programme tool. The DP and CP components hold no marks or assessment criteria. skodle does not carry the official IB route for registration and coursework submission.
Planning with assessment and evidence in mind
Plan the assessment when you plan the unit, not the week before it. A unit whose task is decided last tends to assess what was easy to mark rather than what the unit set out to teach, and the evidence a school later needs, for reports, standardisation or an evaluation visit, is thin.
The habit that pays back is to decide at planning time what evidence each unit will leave behind and where it will be kept. What an IB evaluator looks for is largely whether the planning, teaching and evidence agree with one another.
Mistakes that make plans drift
These recur in schools of every size.
- Several versions of the same plan, in different places, with no way to tell which is current
- Planning done alone and shared afterwards, so nobody has challenged it
- Criteria or objectives ticked without a plan for when they will be assessed
- Reflection left until the end of the year, when the detail has gone
- A map that describes intentions and is never compared with what was taught
- No named owner for each layer
