What the MYP requires
The programme requires students to engage in at least one collaboratively planned interdisciplinary unit in each year of the MYP, involving at least two subject groups, and assessed using the interdisciplinary criteria. The IB's guide to interdisciplinary teaching and learning in the MYP sets the requirement, the criteria and the planning expectations; it is the authority and was revised recently, so a school working from an older version will plan against criteria the IB no longer uses.
The definition matters. An interdisciplinary unit is not two subjects studying the same theme side by side. It is a unit whose purpose can only be met by integrating disciplinary understanding: the students must use what each subject knows and does to produce an understanding, a product or a solution that a single subject could not.
What makes a unit genuinely interdisciplinary
The test to apply at the planning stage is simple: if you removed one of the subjects, would the unit's purpose collapse? If the history could be dropped and the unit would still work as science, it is a science unit with historical decoration.
- A purpose that needs both. A question about a real issue, a product to make, a decision to justify, where the disciplines each contribute something the other cannot.
- Disciplinary grounding first. Students need to know the relevant concepts and skills from each subject before they can integrate them; the interdisciplinary unit is usually best placed after those have been taught.
- Integration made visible. A specific point in the unit where students combine the disciplines, and a product that shows the combination rather than two separate pieces stapled together.
- Reflection built in. Students are asked what the integration allowed them to understand that one subject alone would not have, and what its limits were.
Planning it across two departments
The unit is collaboratively planned, which is where most of the difficulty lives. Two teachers with different timetables, different vocabularies and different assessment habits have to agree a purpose, a sequence and a task. The routine below fits into three meetings.
- Meeting one — agree the purpose and the disciplinary contributions. Write the statement of inquiry together. Decide what each subject teaches beforehand and what it brings to the integration.
- Meeting two — design the summative task and write task-specific clarifications for the interdisciplinary criteria. Decide who assesses what, and whether the disciplinary criteria are also assessed in the unit.
- Meeting three — sequence the lessons across both timetables and agree the moment of integration. Decide how students will reflect and where the evidence will be kept.
- After the unit — a shared reflection on the planner: what integration actually happened, what the students said, what to change.
The interdisciplinary criteria
Interdisciplinary units are assessed against their own criteria, separate from the subject-group criteria, each on the MYP's 0 to 8 scale. Read the current guide for the strands; in plain terms they ask three things.
- Evaluating — how well the student uses disciplinary knowledge to understand the issue and judges the contributions and limits of each discipline.
- Synthesizing — whether the student actually combines the disciplines into a new understanding, product or solution, rather than presenting them in sequence.
- Reflecting — how the student thinks about the interdisciplinary learning itself: what it made possible, what it cost, how they would approach it differently.
Assessing and reporting it
Use task-specific clarifications, mark with a best-fit judgement and standardise between the two teachers exactly as for a subject unit; two teachers from different departments read a descriptor differently more often than two from the same one. Record the interdisciplinary levels separately from the subject levels, because they are separate criteria and the school will need to report them separately and to show them at programme evaluation.
Whether the subject-group criteria are also assessed within the unit is the school's decision; many assess one criterion per subject to keep the unit from becoming an assessment marathon. What is not optional is that the interdisciplinary criteria are assessed, and that the school can show it.
Mistakes that make it harder than it is
The interdisciplinary unit has a reputation for being burdensome, and most of the burden is self-inflicted.
- Choosing a theme rather than a purpose, so the subjects run in parallel and never meet.
- Involving three or four subjects, when two is the requirement and two is enough.
- Scheduling it in the last weeks of the year, when neither department has time to plan together.
- Assessing every disciplinary criterion as well, so the unit carries more assessment than any other.
- Not keeping the planner, the task, the clarifications and the marked samples, which are the evidence programme evaluation will ask for.
