Blog

Two PP points! 1. Show me pictures (“visual evidence”) There must be visual as well as written/text documentation of process. It should be obvious – but of course just writing comments and explanations is not...

Why teach the International Baccalaureate above another programme? What sets it apart? First, a little history The very idea of the IB was conceived within the International School of Geneva back in 1962. Schools participating...

In my experience, the biggest problem students have with EE’s is picking the right thing to investigate. Students will tell me they want to carry out an EE in chemistry and have no idea what...

We live in a world which seems to be obsessed with the idea of amassing knowledge. So much of our energy seems to be devoted to the production, acquisition and application of knowledge whatever it’s...

Do you have your students work collaboratively on art-making projects? In December 2015 I posted a blog about collaboration (To collaborate, or not to collaborate – that is the question!) But the issue has come...

A week or so ago I read a BBC blog post that I thought I should share on this blog.  Then a few days later I read the same story on Petapixel.com, a photography blog. ...

Over the years, all of us have struggled with the vexed question of ‘who is speaking’ in a poem or in a first person narrative, or in an autobiographical essay.  And of course it troubles...

When gathering his students outside the Academy, did Plato urge them to sit in the shade of (already) ancestral olive trees or did he urge them to stand in-between the shadow of its imposing columns?...

I’ve just finished my summer reading book, Ken Follett’s novel World Without End. If you haven’t read it, I would thoroughly recommend it, although it is the second book of a trilogy (book 1 is...

Does your school offer life-drawing? By this I mean do you, as a visual arts student, have the opportunity to spend time drawing and/or painting a naked human being who is posing so that you...

The summer months are ideal for making forays into neglected intellectual territories. Existentialist novels are traditionally reduced to two major works: Sartre’s Nausea (1938), a rich study of a character in search of historical as well...

At some point, sooner or later, whether you are a HL or SL student, you’ll see that IOC coming toward you.  You’ll be thinking such things as ‘how am I going to get through this?’...