IB Courses: Group 3 sample (History 2028 guide)

In this series, which I’m calling the IB Course Description Project, we’re building an audio catalog of International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (DP) courses and Career-related Programme (CP) core experiences for students, parents, counselors, teachers, and colleges around the world.

Each episode brings the syllabus to life by exploring the learning, teaching, and student experience behind every course. These conversations can support course registration, help colleges better understand IB courses, introduce new teachers and counselors to the curriculum, or simply provide a deeper understanding of what makes each course unique.

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Contact me (Jon Peterson) at IBMatters@mnibschools.org 

Our teacher guide for History is James Jones - IBEN Certified trainer

Links: 

DP History Guide (first exams 2028)

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Transcript

Jon Peterson 0:00

Welcome to IB Matters. In this series, we're building an audio catalog of IB Diploma Program courses and CP Core experiences designed for students, parents, counselors, teachers, and colleges around the world. Each episode gives voice to the syllabus, the real learning, and the student experience behind every course. I'll have the subject brief linked in the podcast notes if you'd like to use it as a reference while you listen. In this episode, we're describing the DP History course, and our teacher guide is Jim Jones. So hi, Jim, and welcome to this series that we're doing on various courses. We're going to talk to you about the DP History course. Why don't you talk or tell us a little bit about your current role and what other DP courses you might be teaching?

James Jones 0:42

Uh sure. First of all, I'm really excited to have the opportunity to do this. Big fan of the DP history course. Currently, I'm I teach DP economics, DP history, D in TOK, but I'm also teaching MYP, I'm MYP individuals and society courses as well. Let's just jump right into the highlights of the syllabus. For our particular history course, um, you know, it's really set up so that the students are able to not just like, you know, learn the story of what happened and learn all the trivia uh throughout history, which um, you know, is not unimportant. And frankly, as somebody who values history is is rather fun in my own mind, uh, but it's really designed more that we we have these kind of practical, transferable skills. We help kids think critically. And so if we think you know specifically about what the goals of the course are, we're trying to get kids to uh become inquirers, to learn how to investigate, how to explore and evaluate different historical arguments and how to examine these various topics uh in a in a in a pretty deep way. So it's not really set up to be uh a broad view of, hey, we need to learn every single thing about every single topic, because this world history is not that kind of a setup. It is still a I I would argue a very rigorous course, but the rigor is more in its depth than it is its uh its breadth of knowledge. Um now that being said, the entire syllabus is quite broad, but um those are options, those are choices that the schools and the teachers have to make when they're when they're presenting it. The course itself is kind of set up to be taught into these four different uh contexts, if you will. We have a focus study where we are kind of specifically assigned a couple of different um uh case studies to investigate. And so these are chosen again by the school. Um, for the focus study, we have the opportunity to explore climate and innovation, the challenges and effects those things have on the Norse and the Aztec. Uh we can look at the issue of independence and identity with the Haitian Revolution and Kenyan independence movements. We can look at political and economic transitions with the Meiji Restoration, the Russian Federation, uh conflict and displacement with post-war Europe and the Indochina refugee crisis, and protest and change, which looks at feminism in the US and revolution in Tunisia. And I should also point out in the focus study, um, I think one of the reasons that these are so specifically assigned is because it really, this this first context, as they call it, this first focus study is really about source analysis. And so having these specific things give us the opportunity to kind of be able to evaluate specific sources and and and and such along the way.

Jon Peterson 3:38

All right. All right. How about the thematic study?

James Jones 3:41

Yeah. So the thematic study is going to uh unsurprisingly focus on these themes, these uh I don't want to say the concept, because we also have our key concepts as well, but I mean they're just kind of these these bigger ideas. And this uh it really gives a lot of um uh freedom and agency to the various schools, the various teachers to kind of bring in some of the their own topics that they want to look at. So if we look at the key themes here, like the the idea is that we have to uh select one of these. So we much like with the focus study, we have the option to choose. And so we get to look at themes like conflict, innovation and transformation, authoritarian rule, or popular movements. And so we choose one of those four topics, and from that we have to use at least uh two examples, two case studies to explore. And the key thing is there is that we choose two case studies to explore. That's where our freedom comes in. We have the opportunity to really study what is most appropriate for our school's context, uh, what's most interesting to us as teachers and our students even. I mean, there's room for our students to explore some of their own topics. I think that's the the direction we we are are taking them in in my schools. We're gonna give them several examples, and then, you know, because over the course of this, you know, two-year course of study, the students are learning how to research, how to investigate. We're gonna set them up so that they can kind of investigate some of their own examples here as well. And, you know, within each of these themes, we have like some specific questions. So just as an example, uh, if we look at authoritarian rule, uh, there's gonna be four inquiry questions that we need to apply these to. So we're gonna look at why did authoritarian rule emerge? And so using at least two examples, different regions, we're we're gonna look at, okay, well, in the in the in this case, in the case of you know, Mussolini, uh, you know, the conditions were like this, uh, you know, and that's similar to how things were in uh you know Cuba with Castro or something like that, right? We can we can explore things in that in that way. Um and again, we're free to bring in whatever whatever case studies that uh we we we feel are most appropriate for that. What do you do differently in HL for the history course? So for the HL students, they have an additional paper, the paper three, and that's going to focus on a regional study. And so this is something that, you know, it's it's it's again selected by the school. It's chosen. We have a choice of different regions here. We can look at either Africa and the Middle East, we can look at the Americas, we can look at Asia and Oceania, and we can look at Europe. And so we decide ahead of time which one of those units or regions we're gonna study, and then from there, we have within that region, we have, you know, a total of 12 topics, and we choose two of those topics to really focus on. And across the regions, the the time period ranges from 750 CE right up to 2020. Um, and so really the history can get fairly recent here too. Uh but over that span, it's not expected that we're that you know, that we have covered every single one of those 12 topics, but within that we choose two of them.

Jon Peterson 7:06

Okay. Sounds good. So now the historical investigation is is the internal assessment that goes with this. Again, listeners who are aware of IB's general format knows that each uh DP course has some form of internal assessment. Uh, why don't you talk about that in this in the history course?

James Jones 7:22

So the historical investigation is our internal assessment, and it is uh in some sense, it's a it's a research paper. Um in the in that regard, it's not particularly unique. Students are gonna pick a topic, they're gonna form a question, they're gonna go out and investigate that topic, they're gonna find some resources. Hopefully, they're diving into, you know, the library, checking out databases online, that kind of thing. However, the format is maybe a little bit different. This is not just like a mini extended essay for history or or something like that. It really is gonna focus on things more conceptually. Uh students do have a lot of freedom in terms of their topic. There's no required topic here. So, you know, if a student doesn't want to study Europe in the First World War and look at conflict, you know, and they they'd they'd rather do uh something on civil rights movement or something like that, but it's not in our planned curriculum. This is their opportunity to explore that. So this gives them some freedom and some agency. Here, the the content isn't so much what's being assessed as the is the thinking, the understanding, the investigation, the you know, the research and analysis, that that sort of a thing. What happens here is it's essentially broken up into you know multiple parts. They are going to have to find at least, well, I should say at least, they are going to have to find seven sources that and and kind of explain how these sources demonstrate different perspectives of whatever the topic is that they're looking at. They need to be able to explain how these different perspectives are gonna help them answer their inquiry question. And then they're gonna synthesize those different perspectives and kind of evaluate, weigh the strengths and weaknesses of the various sources and their arguments to come up with some, you know, nice, holistic answer that demonstrates critical thought and historical inquiry and uh help hopefully helps them find an answer to their inquiry question. So uh they need, I may have mentioned this, they need to do that in 2200 words.

Jon Peterson 9:26

All right, so let's move on to the actual uh examinations. Uh, why don't you describe those for uh students that are taking this course?

James Jones 9:33

Yeah, uh the different history papers. So again, if we're SL students, they're gonna be doing uh paper one and a paper two, as well as a historical investigation. And if they're HL, they're gonna be doing a paper one, a paper two, and a paper three. Okay. And they are all kind of aligned with the different contexts that we described earlier. So um, if you think about the focus study, where we're looking at analyzing different sources on these, you know, assigned case studies, um, you know, North and Aztec for the for the climate one, for instance, um, they're gonna be given uh a set of sources. They're gonna have three questions. The questions will always be the same, regardless of the topic, regardless of the year. They're gonna be the same questions. They're gonna have to explain the content of the sources, they're gonna have to analyze how the context of the sources kind of influence how it helps them answer an inquiry question that they've been given, and then they examine how the different perspectives can help them answer that inquiry question. It's kind of interesting because the focus is not actually answering the inquiry question, but rather on how the sources themselves will help them answer that inquiry question.

Jon Peterson 10:39

Like you said earlier, understanding uh sources, in other words, evaluating sources is essentially what they're asked to do.

James Jones 10:45

Yeah, that's a real big takeaway, I think, from the from the history course. Yeah. And then in paper two for their thematic study, this one, much like the content, is focused on kind of these these bigger themes. This is really focusing on on kind of a conceptual understanding of this. Um the students, as I mentioned, are are gonna bring with them, not physically, they have to, you know, have these in in their minds at their disposal. They're going to have these kind of case studies that they're gonna use to answer these questions, and they will have to uh first kind of explain, you know, a general historical concept. And so so they'll draw from their examples to look at causes and consequences, and then from there, they're gonna zoom in a little bit more on their themes. They're gonna have a question directly related to the you know, the theme of of conflict or whatever, and they're gonna have to demonstrate that they have knowledge both of their example and how their example helps them understand the themes. So they're going to you know be synthesizing those examples together to answer, you know, a question on conflict or something.

Jon Peterson 11:51

And then just real briefly, let's just talk about how the HL, what their paper three has got. I think you said some things about it already.

James Jones 11:56

Aaron Powell Yeah, the paper three, again, it's based on the regional study. And so, you know, it's it's based on region and and those various topics. Uh, I will say the paper three is probably the most uh typical history essay kind of a uh paper that you would expect. Uh you're given a prompt, you've got to, you know, write yourself a multi-paragraph essay here, uh, and you have to do you have to do one from each of the topics that you've covered. They are all going to be based on these what we call to what extent questions. So it's really not just about tell us what you know. Uh it's not a narrative thing. It's about here's an argument, evaluate this argument. What are some different ways of looking at this argument? We've got to see that critical evaluation of the argument in there. And that's um, I think a really important thing, again, that kids take away is that there's not just the right answer, there's different ways of looking at these things and different arguments. Uh, you know, some are stronger than others, and that's that's a crucial thing to learn.

Jon Peterson 12:54

Well, I think one of the things I really enjoy about IB in general, but history specifically, is that uh I think uh lay people should be sale, people that are uh not in the education directly, and especially not in IB education, think of history as days and dates, and you're only smart if you can remember, you know, the date of something. Uh and in fact, uh this, you know, anyone who's listened this far has figured out that this is way more sophisticated than that. And we can count on these students to go find those dates and times if they need them. But uh understanding the context and the actual way in which history is understood and written about and uh uh uh used it sometimes uh is all much more important and and we'd be very happy to have students have this background as they leave and go out and make new history.

James Jones 13:40

It's absolutely true. But information is pretty cheap now, right? Like if we don't remember the date, I mean we can find it in in a matter of seconds. In fact, we did that, right? It's really more about how are we organizing our thoughts, how are we organizing our arguments, um, what different ways can we look at these things? And so like if a student comes in to get help with that, I kind of that's that's what I tend to focus on more. That is, I would say, more important across the board, you know.

Jon Peterson 14:06

You want to address what you love about teaching the course and any final comments holistically?

James Jones 14:10

I I think what I love about this course is is is really what I love about history. You know, my background is in history. I studied history, and I didn't study history so I could do really good at trivia night. You know, like I didn't study history just so I knew everything. History is not just about telling story. I mean, some people do. Some people argue that's that's the point, is that you learn like your national narrative and it's all to me, history is about thinking critically. It's about searching for the truth, trying to understand how we know that this is truth. And I think we were surrounded with uh AI that is often wrong. We are surrounded with social media that uh has misinformation and disinformation. You know, there's conscious efforts to manipulate the information that's coming. History is not just about learning about, oh, you know, when did World War II start? It's not about that. It's about looking for lessons from the past uh that we can apply to the experiences we have now, you know, and it's looking at the statements that are being made, claims that are being made, and determine, you know, how confident are we that those statements are true? And I think history is the perfect vehicle to do that. And I think it's valuable for anybody, regardless of what direction they're going in, you know.

Jon Peterson 15:22

Well, good. Well, thanks so much, Jim, for for taking the time to uh give us an overview of this course, and I look forward to uh speaking to you again uh anytime, John. I really enjoyed it.