History and development of the IB Middle Years Program[edit]
The Middle Years Program was developed significantly later than the Diploma Programme, and in parallel to and independently of what would become the Primary Years Programme.[31][32][33] The Middle Years Programme's "birthplace" is considered to be the International School Moshi, in Tanzania, today known as the United World College East Africa, which had been the first school to introduce the IB diploma to the African continent.[34][35] In the late 1970s the school identified a pedagogical disconnect stemming from teaching the British O-levels curriculum to students aged 11–16, and then the International Baccalaureate Diploma for students 16–18. The headmaster at the time, Lister Hannah, led discussions on the potential of developing a new two year pre-IB curriculum at the Association of International Schools in Africa conference in Nairobi in October 1978. Hannah, together with the heads of the International School of Lusaka, Zambia, and the International School of Tanganyika in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, engaged in discussions with the International Baccalaureate Organization and the International Schools Association (ISA) about establishing a new pre-IB programme. In 1980, the school hosted a conference of the International Schools Association (ISA) in Moshi, titled 'The Needs of the Child in the Middle Years of Schooling (ages 11–16)'.[36] This conference recommended the development of a course to meet the needs of students aged 11–16 years, with a focus on six key 'needs', which were described as Global, Intellectual, Personal, Physical, Creative, and Social.[32]
Further workshops and conferences (Lusaka in 1981, New York in 1981, Wersen in 1981, London in 1982, and Cyprus in 1983) brought additional schools into the conversation, including the International School of Geneva (Ecolint), the United Nations International School (UNIS) in New York, and the Vienna International School, and established a framework for what would become the ISA curriculum (ISAC), and later the Middle Years Programme. It was during this time that Gérard Renaud, previously a teacher at Ecolint and then Director General of the IB,[37] and Robert Belle-Isle, who was the director at UNIS and had previously been the superintendent of the Chambly school district in Quebec, became involved in the initiative.
From 1983 to 1990 the discussions crystallized into a five-year curriculum for students aged 11–16, rather than a purely pre-IB course. At the 1987 ISA annual conference in Svendborg, it was decided to pilot the newly designed curriculum. Three schools took part in the initial pilot: the MacDonald Cartier High School in Quebec, Canada (in Belle-Isle's former school district of Chambly); Het Rijnlands Lyceum in the Netherlands; and St Catherine's School in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Vienna International School joined soon after, and other school boards in Quebec became interested in the program at MacDonald Cartier, and around 20 schools soon began implementing the experimental program.
The ISAC programme was taken over by the International Baccalaureate Organization in the early 1990s, officially becoming the IB Middle Years Programme in 1994.[38][39]
Discussion[edit]
Evidence of benefit[edit]
The Chicago Tribune reported that in 1998 in that city's Beverly area, only 67 students in the 8th grade chose to attend a local public high school offering an IB curriculum. When a cluster of Beverly schools introduced the IB Middle Years Programme in the 1999–2000 school year, the number of 8th graders who chose to attend the local high school then increased to about 150. One student was quoted, "I had really good teachers in the IB."[40]