By offering the International Baccalaureate program, Valley is taking a step towards developing critical thinking skills for students, encouraging real world application in education and providing an environment similar to that of high education.
IB is a globally recognized program made up of college-level courses that offer students the opportunity to take challenging, inquiry based courses. These classes help students develop the skills necessary to learn, as opposed to simply memorizing information, which is how American education systems often present material.
This is taught through the course of the IB program. While American classes are only available for one year, oftentimes IB classes are taken throughout both years, requiring students to really know the material.
We can even see evidence of this by comparing IB and AP exams. An AP exam is only one test created to test your knowledge of the content and how much information you know.
IB has multiple extra factors built into the test. Not only is there an exam, there are also Internal Assessments students work on throughout the year. Mostly, these are papers written based on a topic chosen by the student based on the subject.
With these IAs, there can also be activities students must accomplish and reflect on in order to apply the information being studied to the real world.
While APs are extremely beneficial for students to learn content they are interested in, AP focuses on memorization and preparation for exams. In contrast, IB focuses on application of information.
IB prioritizes application and the involvement of current events. This helps students learn concepts while relating it to real life scenarios.
Even in classes like history that focus on the past, IB courses constantly relate information to headlines and even use it to predict how it could relate in the future.
Not only this, but the Diploma Program offers unique courses specialized in teaching students critical thinking skills. Theory of Knowledge is a course only available to DP students where they learn, apply and reflect on true thinking skills required for learning.
In the class, students study a variety of different philosophers and their ideas. In turn, they apply what they learn to situations they can relate to and analyze the actions of people based on these concepts.
Similar to APs, IB prepares students for higher education by providing rigorous work through college level courses. However, IB curriculum helps build students’ time management and offers individual specific work that better prepares students for the future.
Throughout the two years in the DP, students are required to complete an additional research paper, the Extended Essay, based on any IB class they have taken or are currently taking. This is worked on outside of class time, and the research question is specific to the student. They can create any question they are interested in studying.
Junior Aashmita Tariyal is analyzing how political actions play a role in debating empathy based on Uyghur Muslims. In addition, senior Kate Miller is evaluating how Jonestown has impacted the modern day discussion of cults and charismatic leaders. This highlights the variety of topics and shows students have extreme freedom when it comes to creating an EE question.
It’s strongly recommended to take IB for students who choose to prioritize research based, collaborative learning and truly want to understand material and application. It greatly prepares you for college and occupations after college and offers a strong knowledge of fundamental skills.
With the inclusion of this, on top of class work already given, it requires students to learn time management and adapt to a heavier work load. This encourages students to learn to balance their extra research with the work already given from classes, which helps students perform well with rigorous work and adapt to future professions.
