All the teachers at the workshop

Teachers from our school showing their poster

DP Chemistry Teachers Participated in the IB Workshop at Hong Kong

Three chemistry teacher from the DP department participated inthe IB science workshop held Discovery College in Hong Kong.

The workshop and training included 12 sessions covering topicslike IA, TOK, Group 4, EE, paper marking and curriculum review update. Wefocused on the IA or Internal Assessment the first day during which we closelystudied the text of the IA précis, discussed it in groups with teachers fromother IB schools and practiced how to evaluate the IA reports. The mostinteresting part was that we got the chance to take part in experimentalactivities in the laboratories where we experienced different means of teachingexperiments. From the IA training, we found that our chemistry department couldimprove our methods of choosing experiment topics and our writing of instructionsheet and we should try to link the academic questions with real world problemsfor the application of experiment results.

Though the time we spent on TOK discussion was not much, it leftus deep impacts because of the discussion questions raised by the leader of theworkshop. One question was “Do you believe what is said by the scientists inyour country? For instance, Japanese scientists said that the radioactive waterleak from the Fukushima nuclear plant would do no harm to people’s health.” Atthe end of the discussion, it seemed that teachers from western countriestended to believe the scientists sayings while most Asian teachers didn't. Itwas a excellent piece of food for thought.

In the end, the teachers participated in the workshop sharedtheir resources with us and recommended several useful websites, interesting videoclips and their IA instruction sheets from which we received some veryimportant information.

The workshop not only improved our educational skills but alsoprovided us the opportunity to greet teachers from other schools and observedifferent teaching methods from various schools.