Collaboration and Communication, Vertical Alignment Meeting

Nov 14, 2018

One of our core values here at ARIS, is Collaboration and Communication. To share ideas, practices and work together in a teaching and learning community is imperative to holistic development.

With every Wednesday being a half day, our Faculty use the rest of the day for Collaborative Meetings and Professional Development; this Wednesday is no different.

For the first time, ARIS is having an official Vertical Alignment Meeting, where both the Primary and the Secondary School Faculty are coming together to collaborate on the basis of the IB PYP, MYP and DP! This brings parity into the teaching and learning practices in all 3 curriculums as our students go forth.

The first step for the Vertical Alignment Meeting is the Tuning Protocol. All the PYP, MYP and DP Facilitators in Departments and Coordinators, are tuning in to where they all are in their curriculum. The main focus is on the Approaches to Learning Skills. How are they within the PYP, MYP, and DP specifically, and how do they transition?

The main purpose of the Vertical Alignment Meeting is to mainly build on the Scaffold of Skills, in order to help students be successful in their Unit of Inquiry Tasks and Assessments, and eventually be successful in their DP Internal Assessments and External Assessments. The building of ATL Skills and its transition as a student goes through the IB Continuum, ensures that, the student is able to apply skills acquired during the PYP and develop them as they progress, through their reflection and action and various challenges.

For example, with regards to Research Skills and the principle of Academic Honesty – students in the PYP are learning about the importance of Academic Honesty and about acknowledgement and referencing, specific to their age, development and curriculum. Each facilitator in different classes will incorporate into their strategies how they will get the students to acknowledge and reference, for Academic Honesty. For example, a PYP Student will most definitely not have an MLA Format Footnote, unlike a DP Student on their Extended Essay.

The transition from the PYP onto the MYP and finally the DP, and the building on this Skill, has already infused in the students’ learning practice of acknowledgment and that referencing must be done a certain way.

Likewise, the department wise meetings is helping the PYP, MYP and DP Facilitators discuss subject area skills, strengths, weaknesses; in reference to their data, they will also be able to create a scaffold of skills to develop the whole school curriculum. This way, at each level of the continuum, there is the understanding of what are the ATL Skills needed for Science, Maths, Humanities, Languages, Arts and so on!

The 2 Heads of Schools, Mme. Alpana and Mme. Dania would then go around each of the departmental meetings and note down – “What we saw; what we hear and what we wonder”. This carries on the discussions.

We went around the campus and caught some pictures of our departments having their collaborative meetings.

Great things await! Stay tuned for more on the ins and outs of ARIS Collaboration.