Why This Matters

"My students didn't know why we were doing this." You've probably said some version of that sentence, and probably blamed motivation — maybe they're just a hard group this year. Often it isn't motivation at all. It's a specific, nameable planning fault, usually somewhere between your global context and your statement of inquiry (SOI — the conceptual thesis your unit is built to prove). Unnamed problems repeat every year because you can't fix what you can't identify. Named problems have a fix attached. This article names ten.

Understand the Idea

Every mistake below follows the same shape: symptom (what you notice in the classroom or the planner) → cause (the planning decision, or missing decision, behind it) → fix (the specific correction). Reasoning symptom-to-cause is the whole skill — once you can do it, a bad lesson stops being a mystery and becomes a diagnosis.

These ten aren't random. They cluster around three planning stages you've already worked through in earlier chapters: framework understanding, concept/context design, and assessment design. Knowing which stage a mistake lives in helps you know where to intervene.

  1. No mental model of the framework — you treat MYP as a set of fields to fill rather than a chain of decisions where each field depends on the last (Article 11's territory).
  2. Planner filled in after lessons are planned — the planner becomes paperwork describing what you already decided to teach, instead of the thing that generated the lessons.
  3. Key concept chosen by vibe — picked because it "sounds right" for the topic, not because it's the concept the unit is actually built to teach.
  4. SOI is a made-up sentence, not a thesis — it describes the topic instead of making a claim someone could disagree with.
  5. Inquiry questions are comprehension questions in disguise — "What happened in 1945?" wearing an inquiry costume.
  6. ATL as a tick-box — approaches to learning (ATL — transferable skills like research, communication, self-management) get a skill named in the planner but never actually taught or assessed.
  7. Mental percentage grading — converting criterion-based achievement levels back into a private percentage in your head, undermining the whole point of criteria.
  8. Summative doesn't match criteria — the task asks for something the rubric doesn't measure, or vice versa.
  9. Inquiry mistaken for abdication of teaching — "student-centred" gets read as "I don't need to explicitly teach anything," leaving students to discover content that actually needs direct instruction.
  10. No quality standard or self-review — the unit ships the moment every field is technically filled in, with no check against what "good" means (Article 26).

See It in Practice

Here's a short, deliberately flawed invented unit — a Grade 9 Design unit on sustainable packaging — containing five embedded faults from the list above.

"Key concept: Change (chosen because packaging is 'always changing'). SOI: 'Packaging design has changed over time to use different materials.' Inquiry questions: 'What materials have been used for packaging?' and 'When did plastic packaging become common?' ATL listed in planner: 'Communication skills.' Summative: students design a packaging prototype and present it; rubric only assesses Criterion A (Inquiring and Analysing) even though the task is mostly about the physical design and iteration process, which belongs under Criterion C and D."

Spot them: key concept chosen because it "sounds right" (fault 3) → SOI restates the topic instead of claiming something (fault 4) → both inquiry questions are recall, not inquiry (fault 5) → ATL named but nothing in the task requires or assesses communication specifically (fault 6) → summative doesn't match the criteria actually being used (fault 8).

Now the fixed version: "Key concept: Systems (packaging is a system balancing protection, cost, and material impact — chosen because the unit's real content is about trade-offs, not history). SOI: 'Sustainable packaging solutions often trade one form of environmental harm for another, so "sustainable" needs a specific, defensible definition, not an assumed one.' Inquiry questions: 'What trade-offs exist between packaging materials?' (conceptual) and 'Should cost or environmental impact matter more in a design decision?' (debatable). ATL: Critical thinking — explicitly taught via a trade-off comparison protocol students use twice before the summative, then assessed as part of the design justification. Summative: students design and justify a packaging prototype, assessed against Criterion A (research into trade-offs), C (developing ideas), and D (evaluating), matching what the task actually requires."

Same topic, same amount of teacher effort — the fixes are about the shape of decisions, not extra work.

🛑 Do this now: Before reading the Apply It section, go back and try to name the fifth embedded fault in the flawed version on your own — one hasn't been called out yet in this paragraph. (It's fault 3: the key concept "Change" was picked because packaging changes over time, not because Change is the concept that best explains what students are actually learning.)

Apply It

Teacher Activity: Fault-find before you check the answers.

  1. Re-read the flawed unit above as if you were reviewing a colleague's plan for the first time — genuinely try to find all five faults from the numbered list before you re-read the fixed version.
  2. Write your fault list, using the format: symptom you noticed → which of the ten mistakes it matches → what you'd say to the teacher.
  3. Compare your list against the fixed version's implied corrections above. Note what you missed — that's useful information about your own blind spot, not a failure.
  4. Now check your own current unit (from Chapter 03 or Chapter 15) against all ten mistakes, one at a time. For each, write "present" or "not present," and for anything present, write the one-line fix.

Artefact: a completed ten-mistake audit of your own unit, with fixes noted for anything flagged.

Avoid This

"I only check for these mistakes when a lesson goes badly." Symptom: you diagnose after the damage, not before. Fix: run the ten-mistake check at planning stage, using Article 26's quality review as the trigger point.

"I think ATL is basically decorative." Symptom: the same ATL skill appears in every unit regardless of what the unit actually does. Fix: name the ATL only if there's a specific moment in the unit where it's taught and a specific moment where it's visible in the summative.

"I'm scared that inquiry means I can't directly teach anything." Symptom: students flounder on content you never actually explained. Fix: inquiry structures when and how you teach, not whether you teach — direct instruction is often exactly the right move inside an inquiry unit.

Check Yourself

Pick any one mistake from the ten. Without looking back, state its symptom, its cause, and its fix in three short sentences. If you can't do the "cause" step, that's the one to revisit.

Continue Learning

Next step: Article 29 is where you build a full unit from scratch, applying everything from Chapters 02–05 and dodging all ten of these mistakes as you go.

📎 Download: Mistake → Symptom → Fix diagnostic table (all ten, one page).
📌 Official source: For the official description of ATL skill categories and criterion-based assessment principles referenced above, consult MYP: From Principles into Practice on the IB Programme Resource Centre.