My Virtual Evaluation Journey ....

 As a fresh coordinator, it was overwhelming to grapple with my new schedule. Planning for PDs, weekly meetings, going through the documents, attending SMT (senior management team) meetings, providing support to my team members, planning events, conflict resolution amongst team members...….. along with all of this I had to understand and work on the second IB evaluation of our school. 

It was a great learning opportunity nevertheless the journey did get nerve wrecking. I had a great support from my team and senior leadership team. With their support, I was able to not only get though online schooling but also a virtual evaluation. 

This is how my evaluation  journey enfolded....

The Self Study Process

Phase 1:

We began the journey into self reflection as a school nearly 18 months before the evaluation visit. We started by going through the Standards and Practices as a staff, understanding what each practice meant. What were the different expectations of IB. 

Once we got a fair understanding, we came together and brainstormed the benchmarks we would use to rank ourselves. We looked at the four rankings that IB expects the schools to mark themselves post the self reflections. This is what we came up with.

Our agreed upon rubric as a team

Phase 2:

Based on the criteria we collaboratively came up with we set out in our teams to look at Standard A. Each team of subject teachers or homeroom teachers sat together and assessed how we were doing as a school on each Standard and Practice of A. The teachers also started linking evidences to justify the ranking they were giving. Once each team had done their assessment we came back together as a whole school and compared our markings and came up with a ranking we all agreed to as a team. 

We repeated the process for Standard B1, B2,  C1, C2, C3 and finally C4. 

While we were reflecting on each practice we also discussed how we can further improve on it. What steps would we take and added the same into our action plan. 

This process was long and deliberately given a long time in order to get an authentic reflection from all the team members. Through this process the teams understanding of the Standards and Practices grew and helped the team deepen their understanding of the IB requirements and where we as a team can still grow in.

Relooking at the Policies 

As we moved forward in our preparation for the IB visit, another area we relooked at as a team were our policies. Before we presented the policies to the team, all SMT members sat and reviewed the policies. Do they represent our philosophy ? Our practices at school? Changes in the IB requirements?

Post that we reviewed the same with our team of teachers. Our principal lead this session. She divided us in different groups and each one was given a policy to study, read, understand and then present the same to the other teams. Each team was also asked to come up with a headlines for each policy that they were assigned to. These are some headlines the teams came up with - 

Image credit: https://rb.gy/7obghq

  Admission policy group  - The key to a brighter future

Assessment policy group  - To begin with an end in mind

Inclusion Policy group - Sharing similarities, celebrating differences

Language policy group - Read, Write and Inspire

Academic honesty policy group - The best way is                                                                                        the honest way

Image credit: http://surl.li/cokwu

             Once the teams had some time to read and go through                   the policies, each team presented the same to the other                  groups. Moving ahead using the Jigsaw strategy, we                      took one member from each team and the "expert" of                    each policy  then shared their learning and                                    understanding. They asked each other questions and                      relooked at the policies to know which answers they                     didn't know.

              This process helped the teachers have that "Ahaa"                        moment, that they are actually following and                                conducting their daily affairs as mentioned in the                          school polices. This gave them the feeling of                                                                                               ownership.

Gathering the evidences 

Phase 3:

Now that as a team we knew where we stood, we began with the humongous task of gathering the relevant evidences and data to showcase why we gave ourselves the rating we did. As we gathered the required documents, videos, pictures etc. we began organizing the same under relevant practices as seen below 👇

Links to Standard A3 evidences


As seen above we made folders for each standards and made sub folders for each practice where we put in all the evidences as PDF documents for the evaluation team to find easily.

Alongside working on the evidences we also worked on an action plan based on our reflections. as a team we reflected on how we can improvise and gain a better rating in the practices we had rated ourselves poor in. Thus started our journey of the Action plan till 2025.

Phase 4:
We began uploading our Policies, Transdisciplinary document, Programme of Inquiry, Unit planners, Self study documents and other mandatory documents to be uploaded on IB concierge.

Phase 5:

Covid had made all of us helpless, but as true IB learners and educators we faced the situation with grit and resilience. As the evaluation team could not come visit our school physically we had to put together a video to showcase our classrooms, our labs, our learning resource center and other areas of learning for the team to get a glimpse into our premises.

Phase 6:

Once we were done with collating our documents, we started work on conducting surveys with our parents and students. We sent out a survey to invite them to participate in the meeting with the evaluation team. We didn't want to choose who would speak to the team, so we asked the parents and students to volunteer for the same. 

Here is the Google form we shared with our parents and students to collect evidence. 

Phase 7:

As the time for the visit grew closer we met the Team visiting members along with our IB School manager to fix up the schedule for the requirements of the visiting team. Post a discussion we worked on the agenda for the two days of the visit.

                                      Here is a glimpse into the agenda we made. 

The D days.....

Phase 8: 

The days we had all been working for as a team finally arrived. We were all excited and confident in ourselves. As a team we were looking forward to get into a discussion and identify the areas that we as a team can do even better as, how can we improve our practices to serve our students even better.

The two days with the team members was an insightful and a reflecting process. The questions they asked helped us to further think and identify our areas of improvement at the same time gave us moments to be proud of what we are doing well.

                             The Final Destination …..

In January, we received our report from the IB. I am proud to say that we did not get any MTBA's, 20 Commendations and 6 recommendations. The hard work of the team truly paid off!!!