Why This Matters

You started two weeks before term began, or maybe two days before. Someone said "here's your MYP subject guide" and walked off to deal with the twelve other things new-teacher season throws at them. You don't know what a statement of inquiry is, you don't know who to ask, and you have a class walking in on Monday.

This is normal. Most MYP teachers arrive mid-crisis, not through a calm onboarding process. The danger isn't arriving confused — it's staying confused in ways that harden into habits. A misconception you form in week one, if nobody corrects it, can take a full year to unlearn. This article is triage, not theory: what to do, read, and ask, in order, so you get through month one without digging a hole you'll spend the rest of the year climbing out of.

Understand the Idea

Your first month has four kinds of work, and they go roughly in this order: documentation access, people, systems, and first planning.

Documentation access means physically getting your hands on the documents that govern what you teach — most importantly your subject guide (the IB document outlining your subject's aims, objectives, and assessment criteria) and any school-specific curriculum maps or unit plans for your grade levels. You cannot plan sensibly without these, and in the chaos of a new term, nobody may think to hand them to you unprompted.

People means identifying who to ask when you're stuck, before you're stuck. In most MYP schools this is some combination of an MYP coordinator (the person overseeing the programme school-wide), a subject group lead or head of department (the person overseeing your specific subject), and simply an experienced colleague teaching the same subject or grade. These are different people with different knowledge — the coordinator knows programme-wide structure and policy, the subject lead knows your subject's specific criteria and past unit decisions, the colleague knows the practical, unwritten stuff.

Systems means learning the mechanics your school actually uses: the planner platform — the specific software or document system your school uses to write and store unit plans, which varies enormously between schools, from the IB's own tools to shared drives to commercial platforms — plus your school's gradebook, reporting system, and any subject-specific shared resources.

First planning means your actual first attempt at engaging with one real unit, ideally alongside someone else, not alone and not from scratch. This is deliberately last: attempting to plan before you've done the first three steps usually means planning from guesswork.

See It in Practice

Here's a week-by-week plan. This is one plausible sequencing — your school's calendar and your own starting point may shift the order, but the logic (access before people, people before systems, systems before planning) holds up well across different schools.

Week 1 — Orientation. Find out, concretely: who is your MYP coordinator, who is your subject group lead, and what grade levels and units are you actually responsible for this term. Get login access to whatever planner platform your school uses, even if you don't understand it yet. Don't try to plan anything substantial this week — the goal is orientation, not output.

Week 2 — Documentation. Obtain your subject guide and read the assessment criteria section closely — this is the part that will affect your marking most directly and soonest. Ask your subject lead for last year's unit plans for the grade levels you're teaching, even in rough or unfinished form; a real example, even an imperfect one, teaches faster than a blank template.

Week 3 — First unit reading. Take the very first unit you'll actually teach this term and read it closely: its statement of inquiry, its key concept and global context, its planned summative task, its ATL focus. Don't rewrite it yet. Just understand what's there and flag anything confusing, in writing, to ask about in week 4.

Week 4 — First planning conversation. Sit down with your subject lead or an experienced colleague and go through your list of week-3 questions plus your first real planning decisions for the unit after the current one. This is the conversation where your understanding actually gets calibrated against someone who's done this before — don't skip it in favor of muddling through alone.

Weak version of month one: a teacher skips straight to week 4-style solo planning in week 1, guesses at what the fields mean, never asks anyone directly, and quietly accumulates three or four misconceptions that surface as confused feedback from the coordinator in October — much harder to unlearn once a term's worth of units are already built on them.

Strong version: the teacher spends week 1 purely on access and orientation, resists the urge to look competent by producing polished plans early, and treats the week 4 conversation as the actual milestone — not a formality, but the moment their draft understanding gets checked against someone experienced.

🛑 Do this now: Before this week ends, confirm you know the name and contact details of your MYP coordinator and your subject group lead. If you don't know, that's today's task — ask the front office, HR, or your line manager directly.

Apply It

Book three conversations this week: your MYP coordinator, your subject group lead, and one experienced MYP colleague in your subject (these might overlap in a small school — that's fine). Bring a short question list to each so the conversation produces answers, not just introductions. Here are five to start with, adjustable to your context:

  1. Where do I find the current subject guide and assessment criteria for my subject?
  2. Which planner platform does the school use, and where are last year's completed units stored?
  3. What's the collaborative planning schedule — when and with whom do I plan units?
  4. Is there a school-wide policy on things like inquiry cycles, reporting language, or ATL tracking I should know before I plan anything?
  5. What's one mistake new MYP teachers at this school commonly make in their first term, that I could avoid?
🧭 Planning decision: After all three conversations, write a one-page "month one plan" for yourself — literally the four weeks above, filled in with your specific unit, your specific colleagues' names, and your specific first unit's title. That page is your concrete artefact from this article: not notes, an actual dated plan you can follow.

Avoid This

Symptom: you try to build a fully MYP-styled unit plan from scratch in week one, alone. Fix: use an existing unit from your subject as a model first; original design work comes after you understand the pattern, not before.

Symptom: you nod through jargon in meetings without asking what terms mean. Fix: keep a running list of unexplained terms and bring it to your week 4 conversation — every experienced MYP teacher has been exactly where you are.

Symptom: you find the coordinator only when something has already gone wrong. Fix: the week 1 introduction is preventative, not reactive — meet them before you need them.

Symptom: you copy last year's unit plan and teach it unchanged without understanding why any part is there. Fix: it's fine to start from an existing plan, but annotate it for yourself first — write in the margin what each field is doing, using Article 2's framework, before you teach from it.

Check Yourself

  • Do you know, by name, your MYP coordinator and subject group lead?
  • Have you located your subject guide and read its assessment criteria section?
  • Do you have access to your school's planner platform and at least one example unit plan?
  • Have you booked (not just planned to book) your three first-month conversations?

If any answer is no, that's this week's task.

Continue Learning

Next step → Chapter 02: start thinking like an MYP teacher, once you've stabilized month one. Download the First 30 Days Checklist and the accompanying "Questions to ask your coordinator" list to carry into your week 1 conversations.

📌 Official source: Check your subject guide and your school's MYP coordinator for the authoritative, school-specific version of documentation access, planning cycles, and reporting requirements — these details vary by school even within a shared IB framework.