Department work
Your units, your criteria, your students, worked on until something in the department changes. Scope depends on what the department is carrying.
What this involvesConsulting and professional learning · Design across the IB programmes
Work with the department that has to teach it.
Sustained work with one Design team on the problem they have named, rather than a keynote to a hall. Curriculum mapping, criteria alignment, and the sequencing decisions a Head of Department cannot delegate.
MYP-deep, DP-aware, and narrow on purpose: one discipline, two programmes, and the enhancement reshaping both.
The Design HoD masterclass
For the person accountable for a Design department through the enhancement. Pricing on enquiry, cohort dates announced once the first group is scheduled.
Ask about a cohortTools that carry the method
A concept-based planning suite in daily use, plus Design instruments shared department to department while the enhancement is in draft.
See the tools- Certified CBCI Trainer
- Six years teaching MYP Design
- 12 years in international education
- Full time on this work
What conceptual teaching actually is
Three units. One idea underneath them.
Students meet these as three separate projects across three years. They are not. Each puts a designer in front of a situation they did not choose and cannot fully control, and asks them to work out what the problem actually is before touching a solution. Each class solves it for their own place, which is the point: the problem is shared, the constraints are local.
Grade 6 · SDG 6Water that arrives
clean. Safe at the source, not always safe where it is used. Design the journey between.
Grade 7 · SDG 7Cool without power.
Food, medicine or seed, kept cool with no electricity. Evaporation, shade, airflow, mass.
Grade 8 · SDG 8One person, one load.
Something a single person carries, sets up alone, and works from.
Constraints shape the problem before they shape the solution.
That sentence is a generalization. Students are not told it. They build it from cases, then take it to a situation none of us has seen.
01 · The work right now
Three things are moving at once.
The Enhanced MYP Design framework
The framework is being rewritten. Publication is scheduled for 2027, first teaching for 2028, first eAssessment for 2030. Departments that wait for the guide will meet it as an administrative event. Departments that start now meet it as a design question.
Which of your current units would survive a criteria change, and how would you know?
MYP into DP
Design does not stop at MYP5. The habits a student builds there carry into Design Technology, Computer Science and Digital Societies, and the enhancement is explicitly written to feed that transition. Planning one band without the other leaves the join to chance.
Where does your Design pathway lose students, and is it the subject or the seam?
Where this comes from
Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction runs from Erickson and Lanning through Marschall and French. This practice sits inside that lineage rather than beside it, and works in the one discipline where the rules are being rewritten in public.
Is your department teaching a method, or teaching the units it inherited?
02 · Tools and walkthroughs
The tools are the argument.
Anyone can describe a method. These are the instruments the method produces, built for a working department and used in one. Open them, use them, decide for yourself.
The KTL Planner
A concept-based planning suite across seven subjects, with a developmental guide behind it and a marker that questions weak generalizations while you write them. Built for teachers who plan units rather than fill in templates, and in daily use.
knowthinklearn.comEnhanced MYP Design, SoP-aligned
The enhanced criteria mapped against Lanning's Structure of Process, so a department can see what each strand asks a student to do rather than what the command verb suggests. Shared directly with departments while the enhancement is still in draft.
Ask to see itProcess web builder
Build the conceptual web for a process-led unit: strands, concepts, and the generalizations that have to hold across all of them. Most useful before a unit exists, which is the opposite of when most planning tools get opened.
Ask to see itThe enhancement is still in draft, so the Design instruments are shared department to department rather than posted. That is a deliberate choice about accuracy, not a gate.
03 · Working together
Departments, not audiences.
Most professional learning is delivered to a room and evaporates by Monday. These are built the other way round: your units, your criteria, your students, worked on until something in the department changes.
The Design HoD masterclass
For the person accountable for a Design department through the enhancement. Curriculum mapping, criteria alignment, and the sequencing decisions that cannot be delegated.
Pricing on enquiry. Cohort dates announced once the first group is scheduled.
Ask about a cohortWorking with a department
Sustained work with one Design team rather than a keynote to a hall. The department names the problem it actually has, and we work on that one. Support is questions before answers.
Scope and length depend on what the department is carrying. Ask.
Start a conversation04 · Books and writing
In progress, and said so.
Beyond Planning
What a unit plan is for once it stops being a compliance document. Written from the units themselves rather than from a guide. In development.
In progressBeyond Bloom
On critical thinking in Design, and why verb taxonomies stopped being useful somewhere around the point they became a poster. In development.
In progress05 · About and contact
The short version.
Twelve years in international education across Malaysia, the Philippines and Korea, the last six of them in MYP Design. This is now full-time work rather than something done alongside a timetable. Certified CBCI Trainer, working within the Erickson, Lanning and French lineage, with a specialism in MYP Design and the enhancement now reshaping it.
The through-line is simple enough to state and hard to do: students should leave able to name a problem worth solving, and to work out for themselves what solving it would take. Everything else, the planners, the criteria work, the books, exists to make that ordinary rather than exceptional.
Know, Think, Lead is the institutional side of the practice, an alignment diagnostic for international schools. knowthinklead.com
KnowThinkLearn is the software: a concept-based planning suite for seven subjects, in daily use by teachers. knowthinklearn.com
Tell me what your department is carrying and what you have already tried. That is a more useful first message than a brief.