The International Schools Review Forum

Hello, I am a primary teacher with 6 years experience as a DT in the US and Australia (husband's from Oz). We are beginning our international teaching careers in 2018 and looking to gain a better understanding of the IB PYP curriculum (and MYP science for my husband) and begin preparing content/units during some of my time as I have 6 months off with the different school year starts. A couple of questions.
1. Can you access the IB curriculum if you are not actively teaching at an IS? If not can you access it after taking an IB workshop?

2. What would be the most beneficial IB workshop to take as an experienced primary teacher without IB experience? From reading the IB Catalogue it recommends category one courses if you don't have IB experience. But then on another post on this forum I read that the category one courses are really not that beneficial if you have training and experience teaching in a western country. Has anyone completed these courses and can recommend the best training? We are looking into doing our training before starting at the school and seeing if we can use our PD allotment before starting so we're better prepared.

3. Is the online workshop options just as good as the in person ones or is it worth traveling to attend one. I would likely need to fly within the states to attend a workshop.. ?

Thank you, any insight or advice would be greatly appreciated as we begin our IT experience.

Access to IB materials is supposed to be only available through candidate or authorized schools. Accessing them privately shouldn't be possible, though you can probably scour the web for illicit copies. To be technical, it isn't a curriculum, though there are guides for the subject areas. Schools have to use the IB guidance and philosophy and develop their own curricula. Some use national/international standards like AERO or whatever, others develop their own standards, and others just use the scope and sequence documents from the IB, though those are often considered "vague" by curriculum experts and teachers in the classroom.

Initial training is quite straightforward. For PYP, it's "Making the PYP Happen", in the regular or Early Years version as appropriate. All teachers in PYP schools are required to have this training, so schools will be quite glad to see you've got it before they take you on and have to provide it themselves.

For MYP Sciences, take the "Sciences: Implementing the MYP Curriculum" workshop. It'll be the most useful to any beginning MYP Sciences teacher. PD requirements are different in MYP, so it's not an absolute requirement, but schools will still be glad to see you've got it.

I have a similar background and see that the PYP workshops listed on IBO are $600 for a one month 'course' and there are also certificate options (the one I have applied to is $5000 for a 5 month course). Are there other options (perhaps cheaper) I should be looking at? I have contacted a local IB school and they only said 'IB experience of any kind is highly recommended.'

Thanks for the help. Do schools care whether you take the in person workshop vs the online workshop? It's the same IB certificate but then wouldn't need to travel for it and it's about $100 less expensive. Any thoughts?

Makes no difference to the school.
The f2f workshop is probably a little more engaging and effective, but not by much. Commit yourself to learning as much as you can, and the online option is just fine.

Access to the PRC (which replaced the OCC recently) is limited to those who have an edu role within the IB at one of its member institutions. You can register for MyIB and login but you cant really do anything as far as access to the PRC. You can find the documents though online as many DSs publish them or make them available and they are pretty much floating around somewhere.
You usually get some limited access to the PRC as part of a workshop or your workshop provider will provide you specific access to documents exclusive of MyIB, depending on the provider.

CAT 1 workshops are basically for chalk and talk drill and kill DTs that come from a background that focuses on rote learning and older classical forms of meds/peds. Aside from that CAT 1 workshops expose you to the lexicon of terms and vocabulary used in the IB. You will find most of the CAT 1 workshops a waste of time and what you do get out of them you could of read in an hour.
Despite all that the best courses are still the CAT 1 workshops, as any relevant workshop will meet authorization requirements (specific workshops as @Sid indicated are no longer required) the most recognized are the CAT 1 workshops that traditionally were specific to authorization. For PYP this is Making the PYP Happen and for MYP its the Subject: Implementing the MYP series of workshops.

The IB is very much a curriculum in how it compares to other curriculum such as AP, IGCSE, GCSE, etc. An IS can use the framework directly and while its weak, there are plenty of workbooks and texts that make the Ib as much a curriculum ina box as any other program.

F2F workshops tend to be a little better as far as interaction and getting more of a sense of how the program works. They also have the benefit of providing you networking opportunities that you may be able to leverage into an appointment. however your going to really have to travel to go to one of the international ones, and its unlikely the cost would be worth it (assuming you have to pay for it yourself). Online workshops have the benefit of being more self paced, lower resource commitment and less expensive.

It might make a difference to some leadership and recruiters, but from a technical POV both venues meet the authorization training and PD requirements. Youre probably forced to read the literature more in the online workshops and you get more interaction in the F2F workshops, but both options are pretty rudimentary to a western trained DT/IT. Obtaining either option is likely to make any difference in recruiting.

@getoutside

No those are essentially the options. The workshops are the main pathway of training when it comes to PD and authorization requirements for the IB. The online workshops start at around USD$600 and they arent really much aside from a series of slideshows and then periodic forum contributions that show you read the material and participated. The T&L certificates are more for IB practitioners that want a deeper understanding of the IB (typically as part of a Masters program), have a lot of teachable areas, or dont have a professional credential and the T&L certificate provides them some credibility and career mobility. Very few leadership/recruiters outside of some of the flagship IBWSs and the IB offices care about the T&L certificates.

The rule is no amount of training equals any amount of experience, and a workshop certificate isnt really worth anything in IE especially at PYP.