Why This Matters

You've built units. You've filled in every field of the planner, submitted them, taught them, and nobody flagged anything. So they must be fine — right? Then a coordinator sits down next to you, points at your global context, and asks, "How does this connect to what students actually do in the summative?" You don't have an answer. Not because you did something wrong, but because nobody ever told you what "good" looks like beyond "complete." Compliant and coherent are not the same thing, and until now you've only been checked for the first one.

Understand the Idea

A compliant unit has every planner field filled in: key concept, related concepts, global context, statement of inquiry (SOI — the conceptual thesis your unit is built to prove), inquiry questions, approaches to learning (ATL — the transferable skills like research, communication, or self-management that MYP names explicitly), and a summative task mapped to criteria. Nothing is missing. It would pass a paperwork audit.

A coherent unit does all of that and the pieces actually depend on each other — change one field and the others would need to change too, because they're load-bearing, not decorative.

MyIBHub uses five quality indicators to tell the difference. These are our own evaluative framework, not an official IB rubric — you won't find "coherence" or "feasibility" named this way in IB documentation. Think of them as a lens for self-review, not a compliance checklist.

  1. Coherence — do the SOI, inquiry questions, and summative task all point at the same idea? A reader with no other information could reconstruct your key concept just from your summative task.
  2. Conceptual depth — does the SOI say something arguable, or does it restate content ("Industrialisation changed societies")? Depth means it could be wrong, and students have to gather evidence to test it (see Article 13 for the four-part SOI test).
  3. Authenticity — does the context give students a real reason to care, or is it bolted on ("imagine you are a factory owner" with no actual task that requires that role)?
  4. Assessability — can you mark the summative against the criteria as written, without inventing extra expectations at the moment of grading?
  5. Feasibility — can you actually teach this in the time, with the resources and student readiness you actually have, or is it a unit designed for an idealised class that doesn't exist?

A unit is only as strong as its weakest indicator. Most units aren't uniformly bad — they're strong on four and quietly broken on one, and that one undoes the rest.

🧠 Teacher insight: The fastest way to find your weak indicator is to ask a colleague who's never seen your unit to read only the SOI and the summative task, then guess what students actually did in class. If their guess is close, you're coherent. If it's wildly off, something in the middle collapsed.

See It in Practice

Recall the Grade 8 Individuals & Societies unit on industrialisation from Chapter 03 (Article covered in earlier chapters): key concept Change, related concepts Systems and Consequence, global context Globalisation and Sustainability, SOI something like: "Industrial systems solve some problems by creating new ones, and who bears the consequence is rarely who made the decision."

Run the five indicators against it:

  • Coherence: strong. The inquiry questions ("What changed?" factual; "Why do systems produce winners and losers?" conceptual; "Who should be accountable for consequences created generations ago?" debatable) all trace straight back to the SOI's claim about systems and consequence. The summative — a source-based investigation into one industrial-era decision and its later consequence — asks students to use that claim, not just describe history.
  • Conceptual depth: strong. The SOI is arguable. A student could reasonably disagree with parts of it.
  • Authenticity: moderate. The context is genuine, but if the summative doesn't let students choose their own case study, it drifts toward simulated authenticity — you're telling them it's real-world relevant rather than letting the task prove it.
  • Assessability: strong, assuming the criteria descriptors were checked against the task before teaching (Article 15).
  • Feasibility: depends entirely on whether the school has access to enough varied primary sources for genuine student choice — worth checking before, not during, the unit.

Now the contrast. Picture a "compliant but hollow" unit: same subject, same key concept Change written into the planner, SOI reads "Industrialisation caused change in society" — every field is filled in, nothing is missing, and a compliance check would pass it instantly. But run the indicators: coherence fails because the SOI is too generic to predict anything about the summative; conceptual depth fails because the sentence isn't arguable — nobody would say industrialisation caused no change; assessability is weak because "change" gives the marker nothing specific to look for in student work. Every field is technically present. The unit still doesn't work.

🧭 Planning decision: In your own planner, write your SOI on a sticky note and place it next to your summative task instructions. If you can't point to which sentence in the task instructions the SOI predicts, that's your coherence gap — fix it before you fix anything else.

Apply It

Teacher Activity: Score a unit that is not your own.

  1. Get a colleague's unit plan, or use a sample unit from your school's shared drive — anything you didn't write yourself. Distance makes the flaws visible; you can't see your own blind spots as easily.
  2. Score it 1–5 on each of the five indicators (coherence, conceptual depth, authenticity, assessability, feasibility). Write one sentence of evidence per score — not a gut feeling, a specific reason pointing to specific planner text.
  3. Identify the single weakest indicator. That's the unit's real problem, even if every field is filled in.
  4. Now do the same five-indicator scoring on your own unit from Chapter 03 or Chapter 15 (Articles 11–15 territory). Compare: is your weak indicator the same as your colleague's, or different? Most teachers have a personal pattern — you tend to be weak on the same indicator across multiple units, because it maps to a habit, not a one-off mistake.

Artefact: two scored five-indicator sheets (colleague's unit and your own), each with a named weakest indicator and one sentence of evidence.

⚠️ Common trap: Scoring your own unit first. You'll unconsciously grade generously because you remember your intentions, not just what's on the page. Always calibrate on someone else's work first.

Avoid This

"I filled in every field, so it must be good." Completeness and coherence are different tests. Fix: run the five-indicator check after the planner is complete, as a separate step, not as part of filling it in.

"My SOI just restates the topic." Symptom: you can't imagine a student disagreeing with it. Fix: rewrite until it makes a claim someone could argue against (Article 13's four-part test).

"I only ever check my unit once, right before teaching it." Symptom: you find the flaw in week 3, too late to redesign. Fix: run the five-indicator check at the planning stage, not the delivery stage — this article's checklist is meant for before, not during.

"I think my weakest indicator is different every time." Usually untrue. Symptom: you keep hitting the same coordinator feedback across different units. Fix: track your scores across three units; look for the pattern.

Check Yourself

Without looking back at this article, name the five quality indicators and, for each, write one question you could ask of your own unit to test it. Then check your list against the article — did you capture the spirit of each, even if the wording differs?

Continue Learning

Next step: Article 27 shows you how to convert prescribed subject content — MOET or otherwise — into a unit that can actually pass this five-indicator check.

📎 Download: Unit Quality-Control Checklist (five-indicator scoring sheet with prompts).
📌 Official source: For the official, required planner fields themselves (as opposed to MyIBHub's quality lens), check the current MYP: From Principles into Practice on the IB Programme Resource Centre.