Reflection: Before I thought..., Now I think...

'''In this activity I discuss about the concept based curriculum following the strategy 'Before I thought, Now I think' which helps me to reflect on what I knew about this concept before researching about it and what I learned after reading and investigating about it. My reflexion was the following:'''

Regarding the concept based curriculum, Before I thought that this type of curriculum was based in an innovative way of learning, teaching and assessment. But I didn't really know what it consisted on and I didn't have a deep understanding of it. The basic ideas that I had about it were that it was based on an international approach, that it is learning was based on a more global context than other types of curriculum and traditional teaching-learning ways. It was what kept my attention about applying for that master and learning about IB schools, since nowadays, we live in a multicultural and international society, so I consider very important that children develop their knowledge across global contexts that will help to create a society without prejudices. Also, another idea that I had about this type of education was that subjects were teaching in an interdisciplinary way, so all of them were interconnected to get more motivated students. What I consider basic if we want to achieve a real understanding of concepts, intead of focusing on memorising. From my personal experience, I studied in a traditional context based on a passive learning more than active, and studying education made me realise that there are other ways to teach that could achive better results, for this reason I started to research about it and I wanted to learn more about it. In conclusion, I had a a positive but very general understanding of what IB schools and conceptbasic curriculum were, and these texts have helped me to know more about them.

Now I think that, even the general ideas that I had about this curriculum were correct, it is more than that. The curriculum of the International Baccalaureate programmes is based on a challeging model that produces an intellectual and emotional engagement in learning through threedimensional models based on concepts, principles and generalizations, using facts and skills to get a transfer through time, cultures and situations, so its aim is to achieve a critial knowledge across disciplines, that means linking key concepts to what is real and relevant in the world, using it to understand our world. These key concepts allow to create a connection with facts, instead of memorising them, and facilitate to transfer this knowledge throught time, cultures and situations. Consequently, there are many benefits to a concept-based model, more than I thought, there are, for example, developing critical, creative and reflective thinking abilities, an intercultural understanding (knowing about multiple perspectives of different cultures), motivation for learning through constructivist learning experiences, and facilitate a multilingual and learning being able to use different languages fluently.

In this curriculum is also important to learn in groups, as it said in the text 'different minds working together generate new ideas and solutions'. I completely agree with that idea, since collaborative learning help children to be active in their own knowledge, share experiences and ideas and learn from each other. However, there are challenges to implement this curriculum, such as it is necessary to develop a quality curriculum, also the teacher training is necessary, so they have to know very well how this curriculum works if we want to get a successful implementation, and the assessment is very important too, which must be part of the teaching training. Therefore, working hard is basic to get good results and a good implementation of such a challeging curriculum. Moreover, it is important to know the different programmes for the different ages, we can differenciate between PYP (Primary Years Programme), MYP (middle Years Programme) and DP (Diploma Programme) Each of them, even if they follow the same principles, they have their own specific structure to develop the neccessary knowledge to pass to the next programme. I am going to focus on the PYP, since I am an Infant and Primary teacher and I want to kwon as much as I can about how Concept-based curriculum works in that period. This programme is basic to achieve a good transition to the next one, si its aim to create a curriculum that engage primary learners in a relevant and challeging way. In this curriculum, all the academic and non-academic activities have to be included, since all of them have an impact on their learning in which learners construct meaning trough what they want to learn, how they will know what they have learned and how best they will learn. Aspects equally important in the development of the curriculum which has to be based on significant knowledge, concepts, skills, attitudes and demonstrations of their learning. All these aspects will be that make a PYP curriculum a great curriculum. In conclusion, the principle aim of this curriculum is to prepare citizens of the future for living, learning and working in global environments. Besides, I want to say that thanks to that articles, I have more clear what The International Baccalaureate programmes consist on, and I have to say that the more I know about them, the more I like, since I consider them a different and challeging way to teach, very different from what I know from my personal experience. For example, I have been working in an English academy, and the methodology that it follows is far from this one, focus on memorazing and translating, what I could see is that children ended up going to class forced, so if I would have been allowed to use this type of methodology, probably my students would have been more motivated and opened to Englis