Introducing Grade 6 to MYP Assessment

A while ago I lead a session for all of our grade 6 students about MYP assessment. We actually start off by giving them 'Beginner' (1-2) 'Learner' (3-4), 'User' (5-6) and 'Expert' (7-8) as their grades, without the numbers for semester one, to get them to see that there are no good or bad grades and also to try and move to the focus away from the numbers. However, in the intro session I do tell them about the numbers, so that they are more familiar with how it works. Prior to this session I'd also done a fair bit of work with Grade 6 (I teach all three classes) in Design, where we have looked at the objectives, and the command terms, so they can see how to reach the 'higher' levels.
​

---

The session I led with Grade 6 was inspired by several things;

• The previous year's introduction - which I believe was created by several MYPCs at an AGIS (Association of German International Schools) meeting. In this previous session students evaluated a children's bedroom.
• This MYP Assessment Hyperdoc, used for PD at my previous school. Created by their lovely MYPC Carmen Samanes.
• The MYP Assessment Overview video created by Diane Smith

In my session students had to evaluate several classrooms. At first they gave 'formative' feedbacks, with no grades attached, just suggestions for improvements. Next we moved onto 'summative', where I told them they were to give a grade out of 8. I gave them no guidance (criteria) so it was interesting to hear how they graded the classrooms, and the huge range of levels they gave them. We then talked about criteria, and the students selected four criteria 'learning atmosphere', 'technology' 'cleanliness' and 'comfort'. (atmosphere and comfort seemed very similar to me, but the students said they were not! I would also recommend using 'safety' as a criterion'). This made much ore focussed conversations and helped the students articulate their feedback, but did not help get consistent grades. We then came up with a rubric which helped much more! This helped them understand criteria and rubrics.
We then looked at the classrooms again, and I asked, how would we evaluate them differently if we knew the subject in the class and the age range. This led to us talking about different objectives for different subjects, as well as the MYP1, MYP3 and MYP5 objectives! Students also get a document with all the MYP Objectives (based on Stephen Taylor's All Criteria in One Place).
I was super happy with how engaged the students were and how thoughtful their responses were. We'd also been playing a few games using the command terms in design, so I was thrilled to see them using this.

In semester two I will do a session about the final year grades. I've included those slides in the presentation too. Here is the link to the full presentation.

I really enjoyed this session and believe the students have a good understanding of MYP assessment now. How do you do this at your schools?