TIBS provides numerous scholarships and innovative teaching/training grants to deserving students and teachers each year. |
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TIBS 2022 eNewsletter, Fall Edition
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Dear TIBS community,
Welcome to the 2022 Fall eNewsletter.
We hope that your 2022-23 school year has felt a little more normal than the last three years, though we know that all schools continue to be affected by the challenges of teaching and learning during a global pandemic. We understand how difficult it is to fill gaps in learning while implementing the advanced standards and practices of all the IB programmes. We applaud your dedication and hard work to provide what is needed for every individual student. What a monumental task! We salute you!
We know you are looking forward to the upcoming winter holiday break, as this year you are all in need of a well-deserved rest.
This edition of the newsletter includes an article written by our own Executive Director, Karen Phillips. In addition, you will find a great MYP lesson, a tribute to an excellent teacher, a report on the recent PYP Round Table, some interesting community-building experiences, a successful fundraiser, an interesting ecology project, and some action projects happening around the state.
Thanks to those of you who made the time to share articles for our eNewsletter. We are grateful for your continued support, and we truly appreciate your efforts to provide the students in your schools with the best possible educational opportunities in spite of the difficulties involved. Don't forget to keep us updated with your stories, photos, and videos! Send them any time, as it will be time for the Spring eNewsletter before we know it.
We wish all of you happy holidays and a restful winter break.
Best regards,
Karen Phillips, TIBS Executive Director
Courtney Smith, TIBS Associate Executive Director
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- What We've Been Up To / What's Coming Up
- Recently Authorized Schools
- 2022/2023 Board Members
- College Fair Update
- Article By Karen Phillip
- Report on the PYP Roundtable
- Success Stories from our Schools
- Announcements
- Contact Us
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What We’ve Been Up To:
Summer IB Workshops
DFW (June 9 & 10): 321 trained
San Antonio/Edgewood (June 12 & 14): 103 trained
Austin (July 24-30): 832 trained
Houston (August 4 & 5): 289 trained
Round Rock (August 11 & 12): 126 trained
TAGT—Houston (November 30-December 2)
Houston IB Workshops (December 2 & 3): 59 trained
What’s Coming Up:
- TIBS Spring Meeting —Dallas (Late Feb--TBA)
- TAGT Leadership Conference—DFW (March 26-28)
- TIBS College Fair—Hurst (April 27)
- TIBS Austin Workshops (July 23-29)
- IB Global Conference—Toronto (July 27-30)
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Congratulations to our newly authorized schools in Texas! We understand the level of commitment involved in just getting authorized, and we are very proud of all of your hard work. If you are not on this list and have been authorized, please let us know.
- Cullen Middle School (MYP)—Houston
- Hudson Pep Elementary (PYP)—Longview
- International School of Texas (MYP)—Bee Cave
- Judson Steam Academy (MYP)—Longview
- Ned E. Williams Magnet STEAM Academy (PYP)—Longview
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Kelly Ritchie (At Large)--Alcuin School
Seby Meloni (At Large)--Houston ISD
Penny Tschirhart (At Large)--San Antonio ISD
Katie Biela (DP)--Uplift Education
Margaret Davis (DP)--Alcuin School
Toby Klameth (MYP)--Lubbock ISD
Jennifer Love (MYP)--San Antonio ISD
Kelly McBride (PYP)--International School of Texas( Austin)
Ashley Swindle (PYP)--International School ofTexas (Austin)
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College Fair 2023 will return to an in-person event. It will be held on April 27th at the Hurst Conference Center. Registration for students will begin on February 16th. Look for email with more details about student registration.
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IB Global Conference
Join the IB community at the global conference of 2023, held in Toronto on 27 – 30 July.
Date: 27 July 2023
Location: Toronto, Canada
Details to follow
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Change Your Socks...
Change A Life!
Your school can partner with We Help Two to make twice the difference in 2023!
There are 5 different ways to participate
Local Giveback:
At the end of your campaign, we will send you pairs of socks (based on how many packs you sell) to donate to people in need in your community!
https://www.wehelptwo.com
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Your Questions Answered
by Karen Phillips
DFWChild: What’s an IB school, and how common are they in Dallas-Fort Worth?
Karen Phillips: An International Baccalaureate (IB) school has earned the right to provide an IB education. The four IB programs serve students from age 3 through high school. Each program incorporates skills and opportunities to think at a high level, solve critical problems, make connections between disciplines, focus on 10 character traits—called the Learner Profile—and serve their community.
There are 181 IB World Schools in Texas, with a high concentration in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The schools are public, private and charter schools, and they provide one or more IB program: Primary Years Programme, Middle Years Programme, Diploma Programme and Career-Related Programme.
DFWChild: Tell us more about the different programs.
KP: Originally designed in 1968 for children of military attachés and diplomats serving at embassies around the world, the Diploma Programme (DP) is viewed as the gold standard program for students in grades 11 and 12. The six required courses incorporate university content, and students earning an IB diploma qualify for 24 hours of credit at any public university in Texas.
The Career-Related Programme (CP) provides access in grade 11 or 12 to IB Diploma Programme individual courses for students in career-related education. The Middle Years Programme serves students in grades 6–10 through curriculum framework across eight subject groups, providing a broad and balanced education.
The Primary Years Programme (PYP) runs from pre-K to 5th grade, incorporating the best practices of early childhood education and elementary education to create a comprehensive program, based on connected curriculum taught through inquiry and concept-driven instruction. For Texas public and private schools, the curriculum content for the Primary Years Programme and Middle Years Programme is the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS).
DFWChild: Do all students at an IB school participate in IB programs?
KP: On Primary Years Programme and Middle Years Programme campuses, all students participate in the IB program. At comprehensive high schools, the Diploma Programme and Career-Related Programme provide pathways for academically advanced students. Those programs are selected by the student as a high school pathway to meet the student’s academic needs and educational goals.
DFWChild: You mentioned the ability for high school IB students to earn college credit. What’s the difference between IB and AP, or Advanced Placement, classes?
KP: The IB is a complete program with school standards and required professional development for teachers. IB is internationally recognized, and many universities seek out IB students, as they know they are required to complete an extensive program that incorporates skills like time management, public speaking, metacognition, project development and research woven throughout the program. IB students can and do sit for AP exams. Alternately, DP exams and the benefits of an IB diploma are reserved for students who have successfully completed the DP.
DFWChild: What’s the value of enrolling your child in an IB school?
KP: There is truly no program quite like IB. Students are challenged on a personal and academic level to be their best while being provided the support and tools to do so. Many people see this as an opportunity for college credits while in high school. While that is true, the capacity for higher level thinking instilled in children from pre-K forward is unlike any other schooling experience. Students easily inquire about the world around them, but also IB also provides the tools for them to seek and find answers to their inquiries.
DFWChild: How do parents find an IB school or verify their school’s IB programs?
KP: The International Baccalaureate Organization provides parents with a search tool to locate IB schools. Parents can search using “find a school” on the IB website at ibo.org.
This article/interview was first published in DFW Child in August 2022,
with editing assistance from Leah Trainham and Margaret Davis
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PYP Roundtable Report
On Saturday, November 5th, the Central Texas PYP Roundtable was held at Chandler Oaks Elementary School in Round Rock. Over 85 teachers from around the state attended to share instructional practices and to build connections with each other.
The day’s focus was on the Programme Standards and Practices strand of Lifelong Learning. Teachers shared strategies about how to help students have more agency with goal setting, how to use books to develop learner profile attributes, how to use play to strengthen approaches to learning skills and the IB framework beyond the PYP.
Twenty educators shared their experiences and strategies with everyone. The first roundtable since the pandemic was positive and joyful as educators got to be with each other and meet face to face.
Submitted by Elizabeth Hall, PYP Coordinator, Chandler Oaks Elementary, Round Rock ISD
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Creating Learning Communities
At Imagine International Academy of North Texas, we are hosting conversations with our K-5 PYP student leaders to help meet our goals of creating a learning community that benefits all of its members, lives peacefully together, prioritizes relationships, and provides agency for taking responsibility. Watch this short video to learn more. https://vimeo.com/766521755
Submitted by Kimberley Wood, PYP Coordinator, Imagine International Academy of North Texas
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IB Seniors Camping Retreat
The L D Bell High School senior class decided to go Camping to celebrate the completion of their last, first trimester of high school and the completion of their Extended Essay. It was fun to spend time together in a relaxing setting at Grapevine Lake. Most of our campers had never camped before, so we learned how to set up tents and build a campfire.
One of our students served as a guide on our nature hike, and we all played soccer, corrn hole, Uno and other board games when we weren’t eating our camp food: Chili pies, cowboy beans, tamales and chips and queso. There was no electricity, so we learned how to use camp stoves and fire pits. No camping trip is complete without storytelling around the campfire and, of course, S'mores. It was a chilly, windy night, so we all snuggled into our tents that “mostly” stayed up through the night – then had a hardy breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausages, pancakes and assorted muffins and fruit. All had a good time – and we decided that we definitely want to do this again.
Submitted by Nancy Shane, DP Coordinator, L. D. Bell High School, Hurst-Euless-Bedford ISD
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Fall Fitness Challenge at Ramirez Elementary
At Ramirez Elementary in Lubbock, Texas, each fall and winter our PE coaches, Lindsey Inmon
and Hannah Wise, issue a challenge to students and families to make healthier choices for one
month. The Fall Fitness Challenge is a Bingo board (see below) full of not only physical health and movement opportunities, but also a chance to develop social emotional health. The short-term
reward for students involves earning a free dress day when they would otherwise be in uniform, but long-term goals include the hopes of supporting families with a healthier lifestyle at home, one that might last a lifetime.
During the Winter Fitness Challenge, students are asked to choose a high frequency word they have learned, even in the older grades, and for each letter of the word students perform the corresponding activity until the word has been spelled correctly. Parents and siblings are encouraged to participate as well; many parents report they would appreciate a “15-minute break” space on the fall Bingo board to give them a moment to catch their breath! It’s a creative and highly engaging way to get our PYP learning community moving and sharing compassion while incorporating core content, physical education, and social emotional health.
Submitted by Amber Faske, PYP Coordinator, Ramirez Elementary School, Lubbock ISD.
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Murals Become Greeting Cards at Westlake Academy
As a culmination to their unit of inquiry, "Who We Are," our kindergarten students engaged in teacher-guided action by sharing their learning through creative murals in the hallway. Each mural displayed the people and places that make a community function to bring the central idea, “Learning and working together builds relationships” to life.
As a keepsake of their artwork, the murals were turned into greeting cards! These cards were available for the school community to purchase. The students brainstormed with their teachers to decide what to do with the proceeds of the sell. Then, they created a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt_IChmVOVA) to promote their action.
In total, $8000 was raised. The students couldn’t decide on just one non-profit, so the money was divided between two food banks: Don’t Forget to Feed Me (for pets) and Community Storehouse (a children’s charity in Keller, Texas).
Submitted by Alison Schneider, PYP Coordinator, Westlake Academy
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Fenwick Academy Students Build Butterfly Garden
Fenwick Academy partnered with the National Wildlife Federation Monarch Heroes Program to build a garden for Monarch butterflies. The Monarch butterfly population has been slowly decreasing over the years due to lack of vegetation along their migration route. The vision of the NWFMH program is to sustain and grow the monarch population which will also maintain habitats for other pollinators.
After researching monarch butterflies, their migration route, and discussing the problem and potential solutions to the problem, students worked to create a blueprint of the garden with exact measurements along with a budget for the entire project.
We just received our funding in November and began construction of the garden. We are well on our way to being ready for the monarch migration next fall.
Submitted by Erica Guerra, MYP Coordinator, Fenwick Academy, San Antonio ISD
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How the 1985 New York Mets Helped My Class to be Better Students
When I was eleven years old, I started collecting baseball cards. I can still remember my favorite players and the teams they played on. The strange thing is I am not really a baseball fan. To this day, I have an odd file of baseball knowledge tucked away in my brain that was due only to my interest in my collection. Recently, I started brainstorming ways I could apply this concept to my World History classes. As a World History teacher, I have found that one of my most challenging tasks is getting students to apply the content in their writing.
Assigning the first persuasive essay can feel like you are tossing children into the deep end of the pool and hoping they remember your Power Point presentation on swimming. I eventually grew weary of using the assessment experience as an ATL lesson on failure and started looking for ways to give my students some floaties. I decided that my students could use some illustrative examples. I hoped that creating a trading card collection would add some variety to the note-taking process and make the writing process a bit easier.
The trading card activity was originally designed to be a way to give students a toolkit of illustrative examples they could use to support their writing. Students were instructed to find meaningful examples of people, events, and developments to create their trading cards. The assignment required that the cards be in groups of 3 and have a connection within one of five categories of politics, culture, economy, technology or interactions with the environment. Cards were then printed and placed within card collector sleeves that served as unit dividers in student notebooks.
After the first round of cards were created, something interesting happened. I watched two students sharing their cards, and they immediately started to trade cards. The negotiations started based on aesthetics and then shifted to the importance of the subject matter. My students were practicing evaluation level analysis for the fun of it.
For the second round of cards, I added a trading day to capitalize on my observations. Students were instructed to make a trade for a card they did not currently own. After the trades were completed, I asked students to reflect on whether they made a good trade based on the importance in history of each card.This led to an additional benefit. As we moved toward another unit of trading cards, students started
looking for the examples that would allow for better trades. Students were learning to sort the content and to prioritize information to maximize the value of their future trades. They were finally choosing information based on what they perceived as what was most important in the course.
I hope that my students will continue to use inquiry to sort the information they deem most valuable to their learning, but I will be perfectly happy to be the 1985 Mets.
Submitted by Keith Haney, World History Teacher, and Sarah Stack,
MYP Coordinator, Westlake Academy
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Utilizing Expert Panels to Build Key Skills for Exhibition
At Huffman Elementary, a public, Title 1 PK-5th grade campus, we started our PYP candidacy journey in 2017 and were officially authorized in spring of 2019. Throughout this process we chose to focus on the development of our PYP educators’ understanding of the transdiscipliinary themes and wait to dive into the complex beast of exhibition until we had completed the authorization process. In the fall of 2019, our fifth-grade teachers dived into exhibition headfirst and had planned for it to take place at the end of the school year. However, when March came around, the pandemic hit, and we did not return.
Through the ups and downs of pandemic teaching and getting back into the routine of school post pandemic, our fifth-grade teachers and staff have committed to refining our practice with the exhibition process this year. After a mad dash to complete the projects amid state and district testing within the timeframe of a normal unit last year, we opted to complete exhibition as a year-long unit.
The teachers collaborated to determine four key skills that are imperative to completing Exhibition: collaboration, research, action, and reflection. They designed one transdisciplinary day of focus on each of these skills that culminates with a Q&A panel of experts on the subject. These days are spread across two months as we introduced our new fifth graders to the process of Exhibition.
Collaboration Day:
The day began with a morning meeting topic that opened the discussion of what collaboration means and looks like. Students were then challenged to complete various mind missions in collaborative groups and engaged in only collaborative instructional activities during the entire day. Finally, students were given a graphic organizer to document their thoughts as they participated in a Q&A session with our collaboration expert panel.
This panel included various community members who collaborate within their daily and professional lives: the head football coach and athletic coordinator of our feeder high school, one of his student athletes who serves as a team captain (and was an IB DP student), our own assistant principal, and the president of our PTA who has a fifth-grade student currently. These individuals did a great job of explaining how collaboration plays such a large roll in their day-to-day lives in education, professional, family, and social settings.
Because our teachers did such a great job of preparing students for this day, they were able to ask extremely well-informed and topical questions such as “how do you work through collaborating with someone who you do not get along with” and “how do you address a situation where you are caught doing most of the work”. Students were actively engaged in taking notes and will be able to refer back to them throughout the Exhibition process.
Research Day
In similar form to Collaboration Day, all learning that students engaged in was done through research, again ending in a Q&A panel. This panel was comprised of university level researchers, medical researchers, a social scientist who conducted research to determine the needs of children in poverty, as well as our own librarian and the head of librarians for the district. As you would assume, students were extremely engaged in the conversations and interested to hear more about these different fields and how they conduct their research.
Action and Reflection Day are still forthcoming and will include the superintendent of our district, the mayor of Plano, a member of the district board of trustees as well as other community members.
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I was delightfully surprised by the willingness of our community to come be part of this process. Every single person I reached out to responded with an enthusiastic "yes! Many offered to bring additional participants to contribute, and our superintendent’s office even rearranged the schedule of board meetings so she could participate on our campus.
In using these days as the foundational introduction to Exhibition, our fifth-grade students have a stronger understanding of what will be expected of them in the process as a whole. Students have enhanced their research skills, communication skills, and social skills in a way that will better support the rigorous work they do in their Exhibition journey.
Submitted by Callie Anthony, PYP Coordinator, Huffman Elementary, Plano ISD
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Teacher of the Year, Renata Fernandez
At the October 18th IB Virtual Conference, IB Director General Olli-Pekka Heinonen stated that, “We have to keep learning in the centre of all we do….because, in the end, it’s the students that we all serve.” At Klein Oak High School in Spring, Texas, DP Language B: Spanish Teacher, Renata Fernandez is the true embodiment of an educator who places the individual needs of her students at the heart and at the center of her daily lessons and practices. Anyone, student or staff, who enters her classroom can immediately feel the warmth of the room as Senora Fernandez greets her students and ensures that each and every student is met with a smile.
She has cultivated a classroom environment in which IB students can be risk-takers; they feel safe taking chances and making mistakes in the classroom because they know that even if they err, Senora Fernandez is there to help them fail forward and grow without experiencing judgement or embarrassment in which students ask high-level questions, collaborate, and reflect. Even on the occasion that students speak in English, Senora Fernandez does not scold or shame them; she simply gives the students a gentle reminder that conversing in Spanish is the expectation by saying, “Yo no comprendo!"
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With the full support of Senora Fernandez, her students are eager to extend their learning beyond the classroom just so that they can come in the next day and share their experiences with her. Following graduation, her students share their gratitude for the foundation she laid for them; they entered college more prepared because of her. As a DP Coordinator, I know how lucky Klein Oak High School is to have Senora Fernandez as an educator within the IB Diploma Programme. She is an educator who is truly a servant of the students on their educational journey.
Elizabeth Bowling, DP Coordinator, Klein Oak High School, Klein ISD
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UPCOMING EVENTS:
- Spring Coordinator/Administrator meeting will be in late February, 2023. More information to follow.
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Registration for TIBS Austin workshops (Session 1, July 23-26 and Session 2, July 26-29) will open on February 1st on the TIBS website. Sessions will be in person. Remember: the IB organization and Kent State University have partnered to offer graduate credit for PYP, MYP, and DP training. Click here to find out more!
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We'd love to hear from you with any questions or concerns.
If you have feedback on the newsletter, please contact Judy Chapman.
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