École Père Mercure has announced it is in the final stages of creating an International Baccalaureate Primary Years program for students aged three to 12.
The process to create an IB program was started in 2009 and will be finished before April 2012. After the April deadline, the school and its completed IB program must wait 18 months as a candidate school before it will officially become an IB school.
The school worked with L'École Canadienne Française in Saskatoon in developing its curriculum. In order to create an IB-certified program, teachers have had to change classes, reorganize teaching schedules, appoint teachers to different positions (for example, creating a position for a teacher who is in charge of a subject over all grades) and break up classrooms which used to contain three grades so they contained a maximum of two.
Teachers have also taken professional development classes, and the school has had to change its appearance to represent an international perspective.
Throughout the process, the school was in contact with an educational consultant to make sure no material was repeated and to make sure all the material in the IB curriculum fit into the six transdisciplinary themes of IB education: who we are, where we are in place and time, how we express ourselves, how the world works, how we organize ourselves and sharing the planet. After the program is completed, students will spend somewhere between 40 to 60 per cent of their time on inquiry-based IB programs.
The IB program can be partially described by its educational goals. Regardless of the class, the IB program aims to be interdisciplinary whenever possible, and aims to produce learners who have a large range of skill sets.
IB is designed to produce students who are inquirers, thinkers, communicators and risk-takers, knowledgeable, principled, open-minded, caring, balanced and reflective. Each aspect of the IB program is meant to cultivate one or more of these qualities.
Despite the lofty goals of the programs and the great changes that have had to take place, students at the school reportedly did not notice a great difference. Students between the ages of three and 12, after all, are naturally curious, and shifting to a more inquiry-based approach to learning fits well with their way of thinking.
