IB MTS common mistakes
IB MTS · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Treating the IB mission statement and the IB learner profile as interchangeable slogans, so answers describe the learner profile attributes without linking them to the stated mission of international-mindedness and its stated purpose in the continuum.
Candidates memorise the ten attributes as a list and never study the mission statement as a text, so they cannot explain how the profile operationalises the mission or how the mission frames the whole continuum.
What to do instead
Learn the mission statement's key clauses (international education, intercultural understanding and respect, a better and more peaceful world, challenging programmes, rigorous assessment) and be able to say in one sentence how each continuum programme enacts them. Practise writing short explanations that cite both the mission and specific profile attributes together.
Describing the four IB programmes as parallel alternatives rather than a continuum, and failing to identify shared elements such as the learner profile, approaches to learning, concept-driven curriculum, and the role of the IB's central documents across programmes.
Candidates prepare programme by programme in isolation and never build a cross-programme mental map, so continuum questions expose gaps in structural understanding.
What to do instead
Build a one-page comparison grid of PYP, MYP, DP and CP covering age range, organising structure, ATL treatment, assessment model and culminating component. Then write a paragraph on each shared element showing how it appears differently in at least two programmes.
Confusing MYP minimum requirements: misstating the number of subject groups a student must study, the required years of study, or the conditions under which a student may take a reduced number of subjects, and treating the personal project and service as optional extras.
Requirements are scattered across framework documents and candidates rely on vague recollection instead of verifying the specific conditions and their exceptions.
What to do instead
Write out the MYP requirements from memory, then check each against the official MYP documentation: subject-group breadth, years of study, the personal project as a requirement, service as an expectation, and the defined flexibility provisions. Note the exact conditions and exceptions in your own words.
Answering questions on the areas of interaction or global contexts by listing their names only, without showing how a chosen context shapes the unit's conceptual understanding, inquiry questions, or summative task.
Candidates learn labels as vocabulary and never practise applying them to a unit design, so they cannot demonstrate the functional role contexts play in planning.
What to do instead
For each global context, draft a short unit sketch: statement of inquiry, two factual, two conceptual and one debatable question, an ATL skill focus, and a summative task. Practise explaining how changing the context would change the inquiry questions and the task.
Treating inquiry-based teaching as unstructured discovery, so answers reject direct instruction, teacher scaffolding, or explicit skills teaching as incompatible with inquiry.
The word inquiry invites a false binary between student-led exploration and teacher direction, and candidates answer from intuition rather than from the framework's account of structured, guided and open inquiry.
What to do instead
Study the distinction between structured, guided and open inquiry and the teacher's role in each. Prepare examples showing when explicit instruction and scaffolding are appropriate within an inquiry cycle, and practise justifying the choice of inquiry type for a given learning goal.
Producing curriculum plans that list topics and activities but omit the required planning elements, particularly the statement of inquiry, the conceptual understanding, the ATL skills addressed, and the alignment between inquiry questions and the summative assessment.
Candidates write plans the way they were taught to write lesson plans, focusing on content coverage and activities, and do not internalise the MYP planning elements as a checklist of required components.
What to do instead
Rehearse the planning elements in a fixed order: key and related concepts, global context, statement of inquiry, inquiry questions, ATL skills, content, learning experiences, formative and summative assessment. Audit three of your own plans against this list and rewrite any plan that has a missing or misaligned element.
Designing interdisciplinary units that are merely multi-disciplinary, where two subjects appear side by side but no genuine integration occurs, and failing to state the interdisciplinary grounding or the disciplinary understandings being combined.
Integration is conceptually demanding and candidates settle for thematic overlap, assuming that shared topics constitute interdisciplinary learning.
What to do instead
Practise writing an interdisciplinary statement of inquiry that requires knowledge from both disciplines to be answered, and specify the grounding discipline, the contributing discipline, and the new interdisciplinary understanding students should reach. Test each draft by asking whether either discipline alone could deliver the unit's summative task.
Misapplying MYP assessment criteria: using criteria descriptors as checklists, averaging criterion levels incorrectly, or treating the criteria as subject content rather than as descriptions of achievement across a strand.
Candidates memorise criterion names and maximum levels but not the assessment principles behind them, and they import grading habits from other systems.
What to do instead
Work through the assessment principles and the function of criteria strands. Practise awarding levels to sample student work against a chosen criterion, then justify the level by quoting the descriptor. Learn the rules for aggregating criterion levels and for reporting achievement, and check the boundaries you are unsure of against official guidance.
Describing approaches to learning as a list of skills to be taught separately, rather than as skills explicitly taught, practised and reflected on within subject content, and ignoring the role of ATL in the personal project and in learner development.
ATL is often introduced as categories and sub-skills, and candidates never see how the skills are embedded, monitored and reflected upon in units.
What to do instead
For one unit, identify a specific ATL skill cluster, describe how it will be explicitly taught, where students will practise it, how progress will be observed, and how students will reflect on it. Repeat for the personal project, showing how ATL supports self-management and research.
Answering collaboration questions with generic praise of teamwork, without naming concrete collaborative structures such as common planning time, shared unit planners, moderation of assessment, or the role of the programme coordinator and the IB community.
Candidates treat collaboration as an attitude rather than a set of required practices and structures, so they cannot describe how it operates in a school.
What to do instead
Learn the specific collaborative mechanisms: collaborative planning expectations, vertical and horizontal articulation, standardisation and moderation of assessment, and the coordinator's responsibilities. Prepare concrete scenarios describing how a team resolves a disagreement about assessment levels or unit alignment.