With my MYP5 students we are currently learning cumulative frequency curves and percentiles. We only have one class taking MYP5 and only 12 students are on the course. The students knowledge is quite differentiated since I have 3 students who are up for HL and are competing in the national math tournament and then I have 5 other who are new in our school and have large gaps in their knowledge and their agenda is that they just dislike math. Majority of them were not a fan of data based units but this unit has been quite a fun for them since I split them up in teams and they do surveys around the school on topics they desire to look statistics of and the learning process for the lower graded students has been exponentially faster and more entertaining and the HL students get onto more detailed survey topics that they can perhaps find outliers/medians/percentiles that are quite interesting even for us the staff. 

Anyone not IB in my country highly disagrees when we say differentiated in any sentence when it comes to schools yet they don't understand how bad education would be if we can't differentiate.

 

Giving a feedback is a very important part of education. I want to talk here about the importance of some details in giving a feedback. Our school works on a platform, where students upload their tasks and we can check them out. Teacher can leave feedback, and there are also some automatic tools, for example, using the platform you can ask student to correct their mistakes (which you mention in the comments) and to send their works again. The platform counts how many times they corrected their work (because sometimes it really takes 3-4 rounds). So at the end of every topic we meet personally with each student and observe our platform, so we can discuss not only what was good, and what they didn’t really understand, but how many “rounds” it took to understand the topic. 


Because sometimes we just look at a result (of course, this is really important, we always happy when students understand the difficult topic, no matter how many attempts there were). But for a detailed analysis it helps to look at all the process. Sometimes my students ask themselves: “Ok, what can I do to make it better next time?” Or we can look at this number of attempts and tell students: “See, you never gave up here! You can be proud of yourself, you can see how difficult it was, but finally you understand this topic!” 


And it also helps them to keep their previous experience in case if they will start to give up next time. They always can look at the platform and recollect their previous success.

 

Communication is key. And I think that this is something that I like the most about IB - a lot of teamwork, which develops communication skills at math lessons.

 We just went through the “Proofs” topic and there was a moment when one half of students chose one way of proving the statement and the rest of the students chose another one. So they divided into 2 groups, I asked them to give some arguments why their approach works better (even if it was not so elegant, they needed to find some positive things in their solution) and then they had a conversation when one group needed to present its arguments to another group, and the second group was developing their active listener skills but at the same time they could give some feedback and they were learning how to give it carefully, how to do it politely. 

When you can be opened to others’ opinion, you can gain insights, as it was well said in the video. But I think that we need to teach students of how to be opened. How not to miss thought of their groupmates, even if you don’t agree. How not to stay rigid. 

So, I use one strategy at my lessons, that can develop the skill of being opened to others' opinion. After solving math problems, I ask them: “Why is this approach of solution good? Let’s find 5 arguments” And then I ask them: “Why isn’t this approach of solution so good, comfortable, elegant etc? Let’s find 5 arguments”. (For example the graphic solution of simultaneous equations. visual solution - which is good, sometimes takes too much time, and you can make mistakes while expressing "y"- which is bad) So next time when they are in discussion and someone says something that they really disagree, they can still think about it. 

 

It’s one of the overall aims of the IB organization – the teacher says in the video.

I absolutely agree with this statement. In math lessons I consider this not only that they just have this a skill of working with the special calculator for example or working with wiki (as the teacher says in video). But as they have no fear when they encounter something new. They have this confidence that they can learn how to do it.

 I am new to IB, and I’ve noticed a big difference between non-IB learners and IB-learners at my school. The first group can feel a little bit lost when they need to learn something from the scratch, they have lack of positive experience when they just read instructions and see how the technologies work and help them to find solutions. And IB students investigate more, they explore real-life problems more and they use technology to calculate, to proof, to visualize, to help the, to present their results in front of the group.