#IB curriculum#IB lesson planning#MYP curriculum#DP curriculum#IB teacher guide
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Try Guidelight FreeTL;DR: - IB curriculum planning is uniquely demanding — a single MYP unit planner takes an experienced teacher 8-12 hours to create from scratch. - AI tools can generate complete MYP unit planners including statements of inquiry, ATL skills, global contexts, and criterion-referenced assessments in minutes.
If you teach in an International Baccalaureate school, you already know the unique weight that comes with IB curriculum planning. It is not simply a matter of deciding what content to teach and when. The IB framework demands that every unit be threaded through with conceptual understanding, approaches to learning (ATL) skills, global contexts, and carefully aligned assessment criteria. A single MYP unit planner can take an experienced teacher several hours to complete — and you need multiple units per subject, per year group.
The result? IB teachers routinely spend their evenings and weekends wrestling with unit planners, curriculum maps, and assessment rubrics instead of doing what drew them to teaching in the first place: working with students.
This guide breaks down the essentials of IB curriculum planning for both the Middle Years Programme (MYP) and the Diploma Programme (DP), walks through the manual approach, and then shows you how AI tools like Guidelight can compress weeks of planning work into hours — without sacrificing the depth and rigour the IB demands.
The International Baccalaureate is philosophically different from most national curricula. Where a state curriculum might hand you a content checklist and leave the pedagogy up to you, the IB embeds its pedagogical philosophy directly into the planning structure.
What is IB curriculum planning? IB curriculum planning is the process of designing units of work that integrate subject content with the IB's conceptual framework, approaches to learning (ATL) skills, global contexts (MYP) or Theory of Knowledge connections (DP), and criterion-referenced assessment. The goal is to produce coherent, inquiry-driven learning experiences that are aligned across the entire programme.
Every IB unit must address several interconnected elements simultaneously:
Getting all of these elements to fit together coherently — while also covering the required content — is the central challenge of IB planning. And it is a challenge that multiplies across every subject and every year group a teacher is responsible for.
The MYP (Middle Years Programme, ages 11-16) uses a structured unit planner that guides teachers through a series of planning stages. Understanding these stages is the first step to planning efficiently.
The IBO's MYP unit planner follows a specific progression:
Inquiry — Establishing the purpose of the unit. You select a key concept (one of 16 overarching concepts like change, systems, or relationships), one or more related concepts specific to your subject, and a global context (identities and relationships, orientation in space and time, personal and cultural expression, scientific and technical innovation, globalization and sustainability, or fairness and development). From these, you craft a statement of inquiry.
Action — Teaching and learning through inquiry. This is where you plan the learning experiences, teaching strategies, and formative assessments that will help students explore the statement of inquiry. You also identify which ATL skill clusters (communication, social, self-management, research, or thinking) students will develop.
Reflection — Considering and reflecting on planning, process, and impact. After teaching the unit, you return to this section to evaluate what worked and what to adjust for next time.
The distinction between key and related concepts trips up many teachers new to the MYP. Key concepts are broad, transferable ideas that span multiple subjects. Related concepts are subject-specific and add precision.
For example, in MYP Science:
The statement of inquiry is not a topic title — it is a conceptual relationship that students will investigate. Getting this right is crucial because it shapes every other planning decision in the unit.
A curriculum map for the MYP shows the horizontal and vertical articulation of units across year groups. Horizontally, it ensures that within a single year, students encounter a range of key concepts and global contexts. Vertically, it ensures that conceptual understanding deepens as students progress from MYP 1 through MYP 5.
A well-constructed map includes:
Building this manually typically requires a coordinated effort across the entire teaching team, often spanning several planning days at the start of the school year.
The Diploma Programme (DP, ages 16-19) operates differently from the MYP. While the MYP is concept-driven and inquiry-based, the DP is more content-heavy and examination-focused — though it still requires careful planning to integrate the IB's broader educational philosophy.
Every DP subject has a detailed subject guide published by the IBO that specifies the content, assessment objectives, and internal assessment requirements. Teachers must plan their two-year course to cover all required content while distinguishing between Higher Level (HL) and Standard Level (SL) requirements.
The HL/SL distinction is not simply "more content." HL often requires deeper analytical thinking, additional topics, and more extensive internal assessment work. Your curriculum map needs to clearly show where HL and SL paths diverge and converge.
One of the most time-consuming aspects of DP planning is preparing students for their Internal Assessment. The IA is a significant, independently completed piece of work that is moderated externally. Planning when and how to scaffold IA skills throughout the two-year course is essential.
A strong DP curriculum map includes:
If you are building an IB curriculum map from scratch — whether for MYP or DP — the process typically follows these steps:
Step 1: Audit the requirements. Start with the subject guide or MYP framework documents. List every required concept, skill, content area, and assessment criterion.
Step 2: Determine the number of units. MYP subjects typically have 4-6 units per year. DP subjects are usually mapped month by month across two years.
Step 3: Distribute concepts and contexts. For MYP, ensure each key concept and global context appears at least once across the year's units. For DP, sequence content logically and identify TOK connections.
Step 4: Write statements of inquiry (MYP). This is often the most intellectually demanding step. Each statement must authentically connect the key concept, related concepts, and global context.
Step 5: Align assessment. Map each unit's summative assessment to the relevant IB criteria. Ensure all criteria are assessed at least twice per year (MYP) and that DP assessments reflect the format and rigour of final examinations.
Step 6: Build in differentiation and ATL skills. Identify how each unit will address diverse learners and which ATL skills will be explicitly taught and assessed.
Step 7: Review for coherence. Step back and check horizontal and vertical alignment. Are students building on prior learning? Are there gaps or excessive overlaps?
This process, done thoroughly, takes most teaching teams several full planning days. For a single teacher responsible for multiple year groups, it can stretch into weeks.
This is where the landscape has shifted dramatically. AI-powered teaching tools can now handle the structural and generative aspects of IB planning, freeing teachers to focus on the pedagogical decisions that require human judgement and contextual knowledge.
Guidelight is built specifically for curriculum-aligned planning, with deep support for IB frameworks. Here is how AI transforms each stage of the planning process:
Instead of manually cross-referencing framework documents, you select your subject, year group, and programme (MYP or DP). The AI generates a complete concept and context distribution across your units, ensuring balanced coverage with no gaps.
Crafting strong statements of inquiry is one of the most time-consuming parts of MYP planning. The AI generates multiple options for each unit based on your selected key concept, related concepts, and global context. You choose the one that best fits your vision, or refine it.
From the curriculum map, you can generate complete MYP unit planners — including inquiry questions, teaching strategies, ATL skill integration, formative assessment ideas, and summative assessment descriptions — all aligned to the criteria in your subject guide.
For the Diploma Programme, the AI produces a two-year course plan that sequences content logically, integrates IA preparation milestones, builds in revision time, and maps TOK connections. You can adjust the pacing to match your school's academic calendar.
If you are already using AI for lesson planning, extending that to full curriculum mapping is a natural next step. And if you are also using AI for assessment creation, the entire planning-to-assessment pipeline becomes seamlessly connected.
Let us walk through a concrete example. Say you teach MYP 4 Sciences and you need to plan a unit on ecosystems and sustainability.
Input to the AI:
What the AI generates:
Statement of inquiry: "The balance within environmental systems is influenced by human activity and determines the sustainability of global ecosystems."
Inquiry questions:
ATL skills focus: Critical thinking (analysing data on ecosystem change), Research (investigating local environmental issues)
Teaching and learning activities:
Summative assessment: Criterion B (Inquiring and designing) and Criterion C (Processing and evaluating) — Students design and conduct an investigation into a local environmental issue, process data, and evaluate their findings.
The entire unit planner — including formative checkpoints, differentiation suggestions, and resource links — is generated in under two minutes. The teacher then reviews, adjusts, and makes it their own. The AI handles the structural heavy lifting; the teacher provides the professional judgement.
Assessment alignment is where many IB curriculum plans fall apart. It is not enough to plan great learning experiences — every summative assessment must explicitly address specific IB criteria, and the progression of assessment across the year must ensure that students are assessed on all criteria multiple times.
Each MYP subject has four assessment criteria (A, B, C, D) with published descriptors. Your curriculum map should show:
For the DP, alignment means ensuring that:
AI tools can automatically check your curriculum map for assessment coverage gaps. If Criterion D has only been assessed once across the year, the system flags it. If your DP course plan does not include sufficient IA preparation time, you will see a warning.
This kind of automated quality assurance is something that previously required a coordinator to manually audit — and it often was not done until too late in the school year.
Common IB planning mistakes to avoid: - Writing statements of inquiry that are too narrow or topic-specific rather than conceptual - Front-loading all the "difficult" criteria assessments into the second semester - Treating ATL skills as an afterthought instead of explicitly planning their development - Forgetting to map TOK connections in DP courses until IB review time - Not leaving enough time for IA completion and moderation in the DP calendar - Planning units in isolation without checking vertical alignment across year groups
The MYP requires at least one interdisciplinary unit per year. These are notoriously difficult to plan because they require genuine collaboration between teachers from different subject groups — and the unit must demonstrate meaningful integration rather than superficial topic overlap.
AI can help by:
For example, a connection between MYP Sciences (systems, balance) and MYP Individuals and Societies (causality, sustainability) around the global context of globalization and sustainability practically writes itself — but the detailed planning still takes time that AI can dramatically reduce.
The shift from manual to AI-assisted IB planning does not mean abandoning the thoughtfulness that good IB teaching requires. It means redirecting that thoughtfulness from structural and administrative tasks toward the pedagogical decisions that actually matter: how you will engage your specific students, what local connections you will draw, and how you will respond to what emerges during the unit.
If you are spending your planning days filling in unit planner templates instead of thinking deeply about teaching and learning, AI can change that equation.
Here is a practical starting point:
For teachers already exploring how AI can save planning time, IB curriculum mapping is one of the highest-impact applications. The structural complexity of IB planning is precisely what makes it well-suited to AI assistance.
Guidelight supports MYP and DP curriculum planning with AI-generated unit planners, concept mapping, and assessment alignment. Start with your first unit today.
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