The Leo Baeck Day School is a candidate school* for the the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme. This school is pursuing authorization as an IB World School. These are schools that share a common philosophy - a commitment to high quality, challenging, international education that The Leo Baeck Day School believes is important for our students.

*Only schools authorized by the IB organization can offer any of its three academic programmes: the Primary Years Programme (PYP), the Middle Years Programme (MYP), or the Diploma Programme. Candidate status gives no guarantee that authorization will be granted. For further information about the IB and its programmes, visit http://www.ibo.org.

In the pursuit of continuous improvement, the Leo Baeck Day School chose to implement the International Baccalaureate programme to make a great school even greater. Since our IB investigative and feasibility project, completed over four years ago, our school has made remarkable progress in our journey towards becoming a "World School". This initiative is an important element of our strategic plan. Our hard work and efforts in this regard have been acknowledged by the IBO who have granted us IB "Candidate School" status. This is the final phase before we are permitted to apply for full IB authorization.

Over the past four years, our school has undertaken fundamental modifications of how we develop and deliver curricula. Restructuring our curricular leadership team has augmented these changes. The design and growth of Lead Teacher teams, which include Subject Lead Teacher and, more recently, Divisional Lead Teachers, have become the basis by which all future curricula will be planned. These curricular teams collaboratively support the development of all transdisciplinary inquiry units of learning. Collaboratively, Subject Leads support the continuity of learning in a subject throughout the grades, while Divisional Leads develop interdepartmental connections between the subjects for a particular age group. This framework provides children with a stimulating, structured context in which they are encouraged and empowered to take ownership of their own learning, and to pursue deep inquiry through critical thinking and open-ended research. These teams will also continue to attend to the complex work that still lies ahead to achieve IB authorization.

Philosophically, the adoption of IBO values and beliefs has been found to be an easy fit with the LBDS mandate and mission. This is particularly evident in the enthusiastic practice of the IB "Learner Profile" and "IB Attitudes" school wide and beyond. These two sets of ideal attributes provide a vision of the long-term type of education that our school fully endorses and nurtures.

Our "Early Dismissal Mondays" are now an established opportunity for our entire faculty to collaborate in all curricular matters and to engage in continuous professional development. In this regard, we have nurtured "Best Practice" training to augment IB implementation through a series of in-school workshops. Our faculty has benefited greatly from these by becoming more conversant with the most effective current teaching methods and ideas. These, in turn, translate into excellence in the classroom.

We have engaged our parent community in several "Mingles" to extend the broad base of understanding of specific elements of the IB progammes. Teachers have shared units of Inquiry with our whole community in the various school publications.

Apart from the highly effective professional development offered at our school, almost fifty staff members have received official IB workshop training at locations all around North America. A "critical mass" of staff training has been reached that is accelerating the transformative change sweeping through our school. The culture of inquiry driven learning is reflected in our dynamic classrooms.

Apart from the excellent professional development offered at our school, a "critical mass" of staff training has been reached that is accelerating the transformative change sweeping through our school. The culture of inquiry driven learning is reflected in our dynamic classrooms. Grounding this curricular evolution at LBDS, is our adoption of the Ontario Ministry of Education subject curricular guides as our benchmark documents. We have meshed the provincial curricular ‘scope and sequence‘ data with our Leo Baeck Day School expectations and the IBO programme requirements. These blended educational documents are available on our website under "Programmes". Also, teachers use electronic IB Unit Planners to develop units of inquiry. These are submitted to a central curricular unit bank in our Goggle email system. This process makes it possible for the immediate sharing of IB units of inquiry between our two campuses.

Our final year of IB Middle Years Program Candidacy (08/09) began buoyed by the very positive comments made by an IBO appointed consultant, Ms. Kimberly Motoska, who visited our school in late spring and examined our documentation and our implementation process to date.

Some aspects of our IB Action Plan that we have put recently into effect, and which will mature as we implement, discuss and review them include:

- We have now articulated fully our Lead Teacher Structure by complementing our Vertical (Subject) Teams with a set of Divisional (Grade) Teams. These team structures promote flexibility and creativity in terms of collegial dialogue and curricular planning. Teacher teams seek and plan authentic, holistic connections between subjects, and between subjects and the world.

- Curriculum "mapping" is gathering momentum as a creative, valuable and viable graphic method of seeking and communicating the alignment of subjects' core themes, skills and content to promote and facilitate transdisciplinary learning.

- We are launching a "Community and Service" programme for Middle Years Program students as an extension to our school's active Tzedakah and Tikkum Olam commitments. This "CAS" program will respond to the IBO's social action component, and will place each student at the centre of self-initiated community involvement and action.

- We are introducing Middle Years Program "Technology" as an integrated subject within all Middle School subjects. Middle Years Program Tech explores the role of technology in historical and contemporary contexts, and raises students' awareness of their responsibilities as world citizens and consumers who make decisions and take action on technology issues.

- We have begun a significant, challenging and lengthy academic discussion regarding student assessment, evaluation and reporting. This dialogue will evolve over the coming year, and it is expected to develop assessment policies, procedures and methods of reporting to parents that reflect International Baccalaureate philosophy and objectives.

- Middle Years students designed a set of icons to represent the five "Areas of Interaction", the fundamental framework elements of the MYP.  These symbols, now located in the front of the Student Agenda (along with other information regarding IB), will be used as an approach to learning by recognizing and noting connections between subjects, and between subjects and the world's real-life issues.

- We have introduced a revised Middle School Homeroom curriculum document which explicitly, and intuitively, develops and explores activities and issues focused through the "Areas of Interaction".

- We continue to build the capacity of our Professional Learning Community by offering PD to our faculty, with workshops and conferences around North America. To date about sixty staff members have received specific International Baccalaureate Organization training.

These goals and activities build momentum towards becoming an IB world school. Kimberly Motoska, in recognizing our progress in implementing IB philosophy and pedagogy, says, "your school has such a solid foundation... I truly believe that you are well on your way to a successful authorization during the 2009/2010 school year".