Article Post
07 Jul 2022
How DK's IB Collection supports the Diploma Programme
The new DK Learning supplementary materials for the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme courses are bold, colourful and clearly presented with specifically tailored IB content making them excellent resources for DP students and teachers.
I have been teaching the DP Language and Literature course since the IB first introduced it. In my experience, students enjoy the course for its variety and diversity in voices and perspectives as well as in styles and texts, which as a teacher, I, too, appreciate. The newest iteration of the course, framed with areas of exploration, driven by concepts, and encouraging students to make real text-to-world connections through global issues, it does a great job of making learning vibrant and vital for everyone involved. It’s excellent for its academic rigour, and for inspiring student agency in learning. There’s a lot of choice in terms of the course, from the teachers’ decisions about which texts to include, to the students’ decisions about which direction to take an assessment, such as the Individual Oral or the HL essay. With so many requirements to fulfil and choices to make, having a handy supplementary resource is a huge benefit for both DP students and teachers.
The DK teacher resources for the DP are, like their MYP counterparts, bright and accessible supplements for teachers and students, and are extremely useful in terms of guiding students through the various choices they would need to make when making decisions about their assessments, as well as guiding teachers through course construction options.
The resource for the Language and Literature course is called The Literature Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained and is a great resource to refer to for building contextual knowledge and conceptual understanding around texts and authors studied, particularly under the Literature part of the curriculum.
Because the framework for the Language and Literature course is nearly identical to that of the Literature course, the resource would be handy for teachers and students of either, plus the chapters prompt thinking in relation to course components and assessments.
The free-to-download teacher guide, which accompanies the DK IB Collection: Diploma Programme (DP), highlights how the content fulfils certain requirements for the course. With DP learners in mind as the audience, useful prompts are provided to help the students develop understanding of the texts they study in class in terms of the areas of exploration and course concepts. For example, one question in the resource is headed as “Concepts”, lists the seven course concepts, and asks students to analyse how the chapter or text they read “relates to one or more course concepts that [they] have studied”. Not only is this useful in promoting conceptual thinking about texts, but practically speaking, this would be helpful for students in the initial stages of developing their HL essays.
The resource also makes relevant use of some Visible Thinking routines, such as the Claim-Support-Question routine, from Harvard Project Zero, to support students’ efforts to critically assess the texts they are required to read. It is set up as question prompts that either teachers or students can use and adapt for pretty much any text they are studying. A quick and easy-to-use resource to prompt students to think about their course reading, particularly in the independent reading stage, this is a very welcome resource which will help with class discussion and deeper thinking tasks.
The material supports textual understanding and analysis which remains central to the course, whilst helping readers to see how the various chapters fulfil the course requirements. These materials would certainly be a welcome addition on any DP Language and Literature or Literature class bookshelf.
Jennifer Gryzenhout is an IB MYP and DP English Language and Literature teacher based in Amsterdam.
