What IB teaching asks of a teacher
Teaching in an IB school is planned more openly and collaboratively than in many systems. Teachers plan units together, document them, and are expected to design learning around concepts and questions rather than simply working through a syllabus.
The IB expects teachers in authorised schools to have had IB professional development, and the quality of that training, and of the time a school gives to planning, is a large part of how well a programme is implemented.
The approaches to teaching
The Diploma Programme describes its teaching approaches as a set of principles: teaching based on inquiry, focused on conceptual understanding, developed in local and global contexts, focused on effective teamwork and collaboration, differentiated to meet the needs of all learners, and informed by assessment. The PYP and MYP express similar ideas in their own frameworks. The IB's current documentation is the authority on each.
What runs through them is that the teacher designs experiences from which students construct understanding, rather than delivering it.
Assessment as part of teaching
Assessment in IB programmes is not only the final examination. Formative assessment informs teaching as it goes, and internal assessment, including tasks assessed against published criteria, is done by the school's own teachers and moderated. That makes consistent judgement a teaching skill in its own right, and it is why standardisation between teachers matters.
What a teacher's week looks like
Collaborative planning time, unit planners, criteria-based marking, feedback, portfolio and evidence collection, reflection with students, and, in Diploma years, supervising internal assessments and the extended essay. The teaching is only part of it, and much of the difficulty is administrative coordination.
Where skodle fits
This section names our own product, so read it as that. Teaching is the teacher's craft, and it does not depend on any platform.
skodle gives teachers curriculum maps, units, lessons, assessments, a gradebook, portfolios and reports in one place, so a task planned against criteria feeds the marking and the report instead of being re-entered. Its AI can draft lesson plans with differentiation and formative checks, worksheets with answer keys, feedback from a score and notes, and emails to families, and nothing it drafts reaches a student or a family until a person saves, sends or publishes it. See the curriculum planning page and the IB Engine.
The limits. skodle does not decide what or how to teach, and its AI is an assistant, not the system of record. The lesson planner sees what the teacher types plus the unit's title, grade and subject, not the school's curriculum map, and mixed-ability planning is a request the teacher writes rather than something it works out from the class. AI requests are processed by an external model provider. It does not carry the official IB route for registration and coursework submission.
A collaborative planning meeting, step by step
Collaborative planning is where much IB teaching is really designed, and it goes better with a shape.
- Agree the purpose: which unit, which part of the programme, which understanding
- Start from what students already know and what evidence of understanding you will accept
- Draft the central question or statement of inquiry, and test it against the assessment
- Split the work: who plans, who prepares resources, who collects evidence
- Fix the next meeting and the review date before leaving the room
What to look for in software for teachers
Ask each vendor to show a teacher's actual task, not a feature tour.
- Plan a unit, assess it against criteria and generate a report from the same record
- Enter a piece of student reflection and see where it appears later
- Change a unit and see what else it changes
- Show what the AI can and cannot see, and who approves its output
Supporting teachers well
The most effective support is time and clarity, not more tools: protected planning time, a clear structure for units and a coordinator who reads plans. Software should make the structure lighter, not add to it.
Further reading
The student side is in what is IB learning, and the MYP unit planner is covered in how to write an MYP unit planner.
