Hi Anne,

Thanks for the detailed suggestions. I’ll be doing the HL material in physics beginning with this semester, including one period per two week cycle that’s on HL only material. I originally planned to push off the HL material because I wasn’t sure who was signing up for physics, and whether students would need a semester to decide their HL commitment. Luckily, that hasn’t been an issue. I’m going to be mixing it as much as I can with the SL material. I have one student at the HL level, so it’s not a huge stretch. We are starting semester 2 with gravity, (with the HL student doing some work with gravitational PE and orbits), and then beginning waves.

I’ve also found some ways to make it easier to monitor students on individual standards without going crazy. It’s through some spreadsheet magic that I just learned about this semester. I wrote about it a while ago here: http://evanweinberg.com/2014/10/14/standards-based-gradingsbg-and-the-sumproduct-command/

As for the last thing you said about the students interacting directly with the curriculum documents, I would have agreed with you up to the point when I actually worked directly with my students to do so. None of them are native English speakers – intermediate level on the ESOL spectrum at best. The language of the exam and the curriculum documents are too complex for them without a bit of scaffolding to help them out. This is something I’m going to put more time into moving forward so that it isn’t an issue. I’ll definitely take your advice and put the vocabulary in the objectives for each lesson though.

Thanks for the help!

I had a look at the Google document you posted through the OCC link. I am a second year IB teacher, although it’s my first year doing IB Physics. We also teach in HL/SL combined classes.

The document didn’t have any physics, but it looks very similar to our Schemes of Work (SOW). There are two schools of thought in organizing the HL material – mix or wait. I mix the HL topics into the class as they come along as we have found that students are extremely busy and stressed first semester of grade 12, which is when you would be doing all of the HL material. It does serve as a good review as you do many topics quickly, but only the HL students would be getting that review and the SL students twiddle their thumbs and forget so much over those months. We are currently in Topic 4 (waves).

I would also caution you about monitoring every student on every standard. Unless you only have 2 students in your class, this will get very time consuming. IB teachers are EXTREMELY busy all the time, as I’m sure you’re finding out! Each topic contains multiple outcomes, so you would need to label each section of the test with the outcome (yet the paper 2 questions will cover multiple, mixed, outcomes) and search through the test to see if they could answer multiple questions on that outcome correctly. If you’re going to do it, send the sheet to the kids and make them do it themselves – it would be a good learning/studying tool anyway.

It also looks like you re-wrote the standards to be in the “I can…” form with multiple standards mixed in each one. I’m not sure how it works in Math, but in Physics the students can understand the outcomes in the guide and use those directly. I tend to put the outcomes for today’s lesson right in the lesson ppt (copied directly from the guide), then pdf the ppt and place online for the students.

Cheers,
Anne