The IB Teacher Starter: Inquiry Cycles, ATL Skills & Assessment (PYP/MYP/DP)

Hi, and welcome to the IB Teacher Starter. Over the next ninety minutes, you are going to do something most teachers who want to move into International Baccalaureate schools never do: you are going to leave this course holding three physical, portfolio-ready artifacts — not just notes, not just inspiration — three documents you can bring to an interview or an observation. Artifact one: a rewritten Essential Question that turns a topic you already teach into a genuine inquiry. Artifact two: an ATL-by-Inquiry matrix — a tool that shows you can teach skills explicitly, not just mention them. Artifact three: a mini unit-planner segment that answers the number one question in every IB interview: "Show me a unit you designed." Here is how the course works. Each section is short. After each concept, I will give you a ten-minute task, and there is a downloadable worksheet for every single one. Pause the video, do the task, and keep the result. By the final lecture, those results become your portfolio. This course is for you whether you are brand new to the IB, you are moving from a national curriculum into an IB World School, or you have been teaching PYP, MYP, or DP for a while and you want your planning to finally look the way coordinators expect it to look. One more thing before we start. Have a topic in mind — a real topic you are teaching this week or next. Everything we build, we will build on your own content, not a made-up example. That way, everything you produce here is usable in your classroom tomorrow. Ready? Let's look at what actually separates a curriculum teacher from an inquiry teacher.

Let me tell you about Maria. Maria taught middle-school science for nine years. She was, by every measure, a great teacher. Brilliant classroom management. Deep subject knowledge. Her students loved her. So when she was hired at an IB World School teaching the MYP, she did what every experienced teacher does: she brought her best lessons with her and taught them exactly the way she always had. Two months in, she had her first MYP observation. It went badly. Not because she was not good — she was. It went badly because she was teaching a curriculum, not an inquiry. Students sat in rows. Students took notes. Students copied a definition of photosynthesis from the board. Everything was accurate. Nothing was investigated. Her coordinator's feedback was one line long: "Where was the inquiry?" Here is the part nobody tells experienced teachers moving into IB: inquiry is not a vibe. It is not enthusiasm, and it is not group work. The IB classroom runs on a visible structure — an inquiry cycle with named phases, skills that are deliberately taught, and assessment that gives students feedback while the learning is still happening. Coordinators can tell, within about thirty seconds of walking through your door, whether that structure is there. Maria's problem was not her teaching. It was that nobody had ever shown her the blueprint. She had the talent; she did not have the language, the tools, or the artifacts that IB schools hire for. That is exactly the gap this course closes. In the next section, we take the mystery out of the word "inquiry" by breaking it into six concrete phases — and I will show you the two phases almost every new-to-IB teacher skips, and why skipping them is the fastest way to fail an observation. But before we go there, do this. Think of your last "good" lesson — one you were happy with. Hold it in your mind. As we walk through the six phases, you are going to test your lesson against them. Most teachers discover their good lesson hits two, maybe three phases. By the end of the next section, you will know exactly which phases you are missing — and in Section Five, we will rebuild the lesson the IB way, together.

So what is the inquiry cycle? The version most IB schools use comes from educator Kath Murdoch, and it has six phases. Write these down — they are the backbone of everything else in this course. Phase one: Tuning In. This is where students connect what they already know and care about to the topic. Good tuning in is not a hook — it is students surfacing prior knowledge and first questions. Think: "What do we already know about this? What do we notice? What puzzles us?" Phase two: Finding Out. Students gather information — research, experiments, field work, interviews, data. The key shift here is that students locate and generate the information, rather than receiving it from you. Phase three: Sorting Out. Students make sense of what they found. They compare, classify, graph, sequence, and connect. This is where raw information becomes understanding. This is also the first phase most teachers skip — more on that in the next lecture. Phase four: Going Further. Students who now understand the basics dig into the questions that genuinely interest them. Differentiation happens naturally here, because students choose directions. Phase five: Taking Action. Learning becomes doing. Students apply the understanding — solving a real problem, creating something for a real audience, teaching someone else, changing a behavior. This is the second phase most teachers skip. Phase six: Reflecting. Students look back on what they learned and how they learned it — content plus process. Reflection builds the "Reflective" attribute of the IB Learner Profile, and it is what turns one good unit into a permanently better teacher. Now, test Maria's photosynthesis lesson against these six phases. Students listened — that is passive tuning in at best. Students took notes — no finding out of their own. No sorting out, no going further, no action, no reflection. One phase, weakly, out of six. And here is the reframe: the same topic, taught through the cycle, is a completely different lesson. Students first list what plants need and what puzzles them about how leaves work. Then they run two small investigations — light versus dark, water versus dry. Then they sort their results into what helped the plant and what hurt it. Then each pair investigates a question of their own. Then they design a tiny "care guide" for the school garden — that is taking action. Then they reflect on what they would test differently next time. Same forty minutes of science. Completely different pedagogy. That is the difference an inquiry cycle makes.

Let's spend one full lecture on the two phases I flagged: Sorting Out and Taking Action. If you only fix two things about your planning after this course, fix these. Why is Sorting Out skipped? Because it feels like wasted time. Students are quiet, they are organizing, comparing, drafting. It does not look like teaching. It looks like a lull. So teachers rush it, or skip it, and move straight from gathering information to the test. But here is the truth: evidence that students gather but never organize does not become learning. Sorting out is where the learning actually happens — it is the difference between collecting facts and understanding a concept. When you skip it, you get students who can recite but cannot explain. And on your observation, you get the same note Maria got, because a classroom in sorting out looks purposeful to a trained eye — purposeful silence is a hallmark of an IB classroom, not a gap in it. Why is Taking Action skipped? Because it is hard to grade. Action means students do something with the learning — persuade an audience, design a solution, teach a younger class, improve a real process. It takes time, it is messy, and it does not fit neatly into a quiz. So teachers end the unit at "understanding" and never let learning become doing. But action is the phase that makes learning matter. The IB calls this authentic learning, and it is tied directly to international-mindedness — students learning that what they understand can affect the world around them, even at the scale of their classroom or school garden. Your ten-second diagnostic from now on: when you plan, scan your plan for sorting out and taking action. If they are missing, you do not have an inquiry lesson — you have a regular lesson with an IB sticker on it. Coordinators can tell from the door. In the next lecture, we put this into practice. You will take your own topic and rebuild its entry point — the Essential Question — so students are pulled into the inquiry cycle instead of being led through content.

Time for your first artifact. Download the worksheet called "Essential Question Rewriter" from this lecture — we will use it right now. Take your topic — the one you picked in Lecture One. Now write it the way you normally teach it. Most topics arrive as a question like this: "What are fractions?" Or a title like "Photosynthesis." Or "The Causes of World War One." Here is the problem: those are content labels, not inquiries. They have one right answer, they sit at the bottom of Bloom's taxonomy, and they signal to a coordinator that you plan by coverage, not by concept. An Essential Question does three things. One: it is open — it cannot be fully answered in one lesson. Two: it is conceptual — it points to a transferable idea, bigger than the topic itself. Three: it is worth asking — a student would actually care about the answer. Watch the transformation. "What are fractions?" becomes: "How do systems help us manage quantities that aren't whole?" Suddenly the inquiry is about measurement systems — music, money, time, cooking — and fractions are one answer inside it. "The Causes of World War One" becomes: "How do small conflicts grow into global ones?" Now students can bring in the news, their own conflicts, and the history. "Photosynthesis" becomes: "How do living things turn energy into life?" — and you can trace that question from the school garden to the food on their plate. Now it is your turn. On your worksheet, in the first box, write your topic as you normally teach it. In the second box, write one open, conceptual question that the topic helps answer. Use this test: could a student argue about your question for ten minutes? If yes, you have an Essential Question. If no, zoom out one level and try again. Pause the video. Take the ten minutes. I mean it — the whole course works only if you actually write it. Done? That sentence in box two is artifact one of your hiring portfolio. Keep it. In the next section, we make your lesson teach skills, not just content.

Now we move to the second pillar of IB pedagogy: Approaches to Learning, or ATL. The five ATL clusters are: Thinking skills, Research skills, Communication skills, Social skills, and Self-management skills. Every IB programme — PYP, MYP, and DP — treats these as a formal, planned part of the curriculum. Not as a bonus. Not as an accident of doing group work. And here is where almost every new-to-IB teacher gives themselves away. Ask them how they develop ATL skills and you hear some version of: "Well, we did group work, so... social skills." That is implicit ATL. The skill is assumed — not named, not taught, not practiced, not assessed. The students who already collaborate well got better. The ones who do not, did not. Nothing was actually taught. Explicit ATL looks completely different, and it has three marks. Mark one: you name the skill to the students, out loud, before they use it. "Today we are practicing self-management — specifically, prioritizing your sources. Here is what that looks like and here is what it does not look like." Mark two: you give the skill a task, not just an activity. The group work is not the skill. Ranking sources by reliability and defending your top pick — that is the skill, inside the activity. Mark three: students can tell you which skill they used and why. Ask any student in your class "what are you getting better at today besides the content?" If they can answer, you are teaching ATL explicitly. If they look at you blankly, you are not. Coordinators can smell the difference in about thirty seconds of conversation. It is the difference between a teacher who has read about the IB, and a teacher who plans with it. In the next lecture, I give you the ten-minute tool that makes explicit ATL automatic — the ATL-by-Inquiry matrix. It is the single most useful planning tool I know, and it becomes your second portfolio artifact.

Here is the tool. It is a simple grid, and it changes how you plan. Across the top, five columns — the five ATL clusters: Thinking, Research, Communication, Social, Self-management. Down the side, six rows — the six inquiry phases from Section Two: Tuning In, Finding Out, Sorting Out, Going Further, Taking Action, Reflecting. That is thirty cells. And here is the secret that makes this tool work: you do not fill all thirty cells. You pick two or three cells, deliberately, and you teach those skills at those moments. The matrix is not a checklist to complete — it is a spotlight to aim. Let me show you what aiming it looks like. Take the fractions Essential Question from our last lecture: "How do systems help us manage quantities that aren't whole?" Cell one: Research skills, in the Finding Out phase. Students locate two real-world uses of fractional systems — music notation, a recipe, a sports statistic — and record where they found them. That is research: locating and recording information. Cell two: Self-management, in the Sorting Out phase. Each student ranks the sources they found by reliability, picks the top one, and writes one sentence defending the pick. That is self-management: prioritizing and organizing. Cell three: Communication, in the Taking Action phase. Students explain their chosen fractional system to a partner in under sixty seconds, and the partner asks one clarifying question. Three cells. Three sentences in your planner. And suddenly your lesson teaches a named skill, at a named moment, in a way a student could describe — which is exactly the explicit ATL we defined in the last lecture. Notice what the matrix does to your differentiation, too. In the Going Further phase, students choose which cells to aim at themselves — one student practices research, another practices communication. Same class, same unit, different skills. Differentiation stops being extra worksheets and starts being built into the plan. There is a downloadable version of this matrix in the next lecture, with the grid drawn out and my three example cells printed at the bottom. Let's fill yours in now.

Download the worksheet "ATL × Inquiry Matrix" from this lecture. You will see the grid — five ATL clusters across the top, six inquiry phases down the side — and space beneath it. Here is the task. Take the topic and the Essential Question you wrote in Lecture Five. Place them mentally into the inquiry cycle. Then choose two or three cells — no more — where a specific skill, at a specific phase, would genuinely make your students better learners of this content. Write each chosen cell as one sentence in this format: "In the [phase] phase, students will practice [skill cluster — specific skill] by [task]." One sentence per cell. If your sentence does not name the phase, the skill, and the task, it is not a cell yet — it is an intention. Two rules of thumb. First, choose cells where the skill genuinely serves the content — not cells that sound impressive. Communication in Taking Action beats Thinking in Tuning In if your lesson actually ends with students explaining something. Second, spread your cells across the cycle. Two cells in Finding Out is one skill moment, not two. Pause the video and take ten minutes. Fill your cells. This is artifact two — keep the sheet. While you write, notice what just happened to your planning. You did not add a single activity. You aimed the activities you already had at skills, deliberately, by name. That is what IB coordinators mean when they say "integrated ATL" — and it is why this one-page matrix impresses them more than a binder of glossy lesson plans. Next section: assessment. Because great inquiry without feedback is just a pleasant afternoon. We will make yours assessment-ready.

The final pillar: assessment. And I want to start with the single most important sentence in IB assessment: IB assessment is criterion-referenced. Students are measured against published descriptors of quality — never against each other, never against a class average. That one fact changes everything about how you give feedback. In a norm-referenced world, feedback says "you did better than most." In a criterion-referenced world, feedback says "here is where you sit on the criterion, and here is the specific move that moves you up." That second kind of feedback is what the IB is built on. Now the two families of assessment. Summative assessment is assessment OF learning — it judges the finished product against the criteria at the end of a unit. The MYP essay scored on criteria A through D. The PYP summative task. Worth having, but it happens at the end, when improvement is no longer possible. Formative assessment is assessment FOR learning — it happens while the learning is still in progress, and it exists to change what happens next. And when I say it exists to change what happens next, I mean it is not formative unless it changes something. If you give a quiz, record the marks, and move on, that is not formative assessment — that is a small summative with a loss of trust. The evidence behind this is enormous. In 1998, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam reviewed hundreds of studies in their landmark work "Inside the Black Box," and their conclusion stunned the education world: improving formative assessment produces bigger learning gains than almost any other classroom intervention — bigger than reducing class sizes, bigger than increasing homework. The "black box" was the classroom itself: instead of pouring in more inputs from outside, improve what happens inside the box. Three practical rules make formative assessment real in your classroom. Rule one: share the criteria before the task, not after. Students cannot aim at a target they cannot see. In IB classrooms the criteria and descriptors are public from day one. Rule two: feedback must be task-involving, not ego-involving. "Your second paragraph used two sources but did not yet link them — add one sentence explaining how they agree or disagree" — that is task-involving, and a student can act on it. "Good effort, B+" — that is ego-involving, and a student can do nothing with it except feel something about themselves. Rule three: the evidence must change your next lesson. Exit ticket shows a third of the class misunderstands? Tomorrow's starter re-teaches it a different way. That closed loop — elicit evidence, interpret, adjust — is the entire engine of formative practice. Notice how this connects back to the inquiry cycle. Your formative checkpoints sit inside the phases. A quick question in Tuning In reveals what students already believe. Sorting Out produces visible evidence of understanding. Reflection is itself formative — for the student and for you. In the next lecture, we build the two tools that make this concrete: an exit ticket you can use tomorrow, and a rubric frame that turns vague grading into criterion-referenced feedback.

Two tools in this lecture, and both are in your download for this section. First, the exit ticket — the smallest complete formative assessment in existence. You will use it constantly, so let's build it properly. An IB-aligned exit ticket asks one content question and one reflection question. The content question targets your learning goal for the lesson — one question a student who met the goal can answer and one who did not cannot. The reflection question asks about the learning itself — "What is one thing that confused you today?" or "Which step are you most unsure about?" The download gives you the template with worked examples. Here is the discipline, though: when you collect the tickets, sort them into three piles — got it, partially, not yet. Those three piles are tomorrow's starter. Not a grade. Never a grade. The moment an exit ticket carries a mark, students stop telling you what confuses them — and you lose the evidence. Second, the rubric. Most rubrics fail in the same three ways: the descriptors are vague, the levels describe effort instead of quality, and students never see the rubric until the work is returned. An IB-aligned rubric does the opposite of all three. Look at the rubric frame in your download. Across the top: criteria — the dimensions of quality, like "Use of evidence" or "Organization" — not the task's sections. Down the side: achievement levels with descriptors. In the MYP those levels run zero to eight for each criterion; the exact numbers matter less than the principle: each descriptor names what the work looks like at that level, in language a student could read and understand. The test for any descriptor: could two different teachers read it and award the same level for the same piece of work? If not, the descriptor is too vague — rewrite it with concrete markers: how many sources, what kind of reasoning, what organizational features. And the final move — this is the one coordinators look for — hand the rubric to the students before the task and have them self-assess against it before they submit. That single routine makes students partners in assessment, builds the Reflective attribute, and cuts grade disputes to nearly zero, because the student already knows the criteria better than their parents do. Your ten-minute task for this section: take the worksheet, and write one exit ticket for the lesson your Essential Question will open, and one criterion with three levels for its Taking Action task. Pause here and complete it. In our final section, we assemble all three artifacts into the one-page planner segment — and I show you how this becomes a hiring portfolio.

Let's assemble everything. You now hold three artifacts. Your rewritten Essential Question. Your ATL-by-Inquiry matrix with two or three cells. Your exit ticket and rubric starter. The download for this lecture is the one-page planner segment — take your three artifacts and slot them in: the Essential Question at the top, one Statement of Inquiry, your chosen ATL cells, and your formative checkpoint with its feedback move. One page. And here is why that page matters more than any certificate alone. The number one question in an IB job interview is: "Show me a unit you designed." Most candidates freeze, or hand over a textbook scheme of work with their name on it. You will answer in ninety seconds with a page that shows an inquiry-driven question, deliberately taught skills, and criterion-referenced assessment. That page proves you plan with IB structure — which is exactly the evidence coordinators say is missing from most applications. A quick word on honesty: this mini-course gives you the artifact. It does not give you the credential, the practicum, the instructor feedback, or the guided pathway to the IB Certificate in Teaching and Learning. Those come from deeper study — which brings me to the bonus part of this lecture. If you want to go further: the full IB Pedagogy and Programme Development Certificate is an eight-module program that takes what we did today and scales it — full unit planner design, one-on-one coaching and revision sessions with experienced IB instructors, a teaching practicum with structured reflection, and a finished Portfolio of Evidence that supports the IBCTL pathway. If that interests you, there is a link in this lecture's resources to a free five-day IB Assessment Crash Course that continues from here — it arrives by email and it is genuinely free. Either way — do not let today's work sit in a folder. Use the Essential Question in your next lesson. Use the exit ticket this week. Take the planner segment to your next observation or interview. You started this course as a teacher with IB ambition. You are ending it as a teacher with IB evidence. That difference is what gets hired. Thank you for spending ninety minutes with me — now go build something with it.