At ISNS, we plan and teach science in a fun and engaging way to ensure that our students from G6 all the way to G12 are fostered their critical and creative thinking about research and design, as well as the identification of assumptions and alternative explanations. 

This week, we interviewed our Biology Teacher Mr. Brian Delsandro to find out about the Biology subject and what the cyclic approach means in the teaching and learning. 

When the students enter high school, they have chemistry, biology and physics for each trimester. We use the IB framework to establish the skills and the New Brunswick standards to set the biology, chemistry, physics content that we want to focus on for each of those three trimesters. We plan around what skills each student should develop in the biology, chemistry and physics to make sure that they're getting the full breadth of what they should in the MYP program to prepare them for DP. 

Once they get into the DP program, there are four choices: DP biology, chemistry, physics or environmental systems and societies. Once they get to that level, the content, breadth and depth is extensive and the skills that they will have developed in MYP should help them when it comes time to practice and prepare for their internal assessments and standards that are required by the DP program.   

We can take a topic a good way is with this cyclic approach, where students were introduced to science phenomenon, something in the world that is interesting that could potentially catch their attention. They are allowed to explore that in a way that can be working collaboratively with classmates, planning and implementing lab procedures and experiment then gathering and analyzing the data around that. At the end of that cycle, we try to come back together and explain what you learned, show me how this makes sense in the broader spectrum of each of the science domains. 

DP is a lot more prescribed content, which is good because that's the IB telling us: these are the things that students should know and be able to do by the time when we assess them externally. 

For IBDP (specifically this is the information that your students need to know), these are the skills that we're going to look at students’ ability to do for the exam paper. DP biology has three papers one, two, three. Students will have their standard science multiple choice questions, but they'll also have questions like:  

• Here's this lab set up that you've never seen before;

• Here's this brand-new situation;

• Here's a scientist, who ran this experiment; you know what you know about running experiments and using lab equipment and analyzing data to arrive at some conclusion about that.   

  
  

That's where they would apply the skills that they developed through MYP to DP. And then for the internal assessment, there's no boundaries on it, which is nice. It's like a totally open inquiry. The students should have the skill set that they developed and some foundation in all the science that they would need to just go out and find some phenomenon that they are interested in investigating.