My IB Why This Matters
"I could teach my own unit fine. I have no idea if anyone else could."
That's the real test of a unit plan, and it's harder to pass than it sounds. Over the last four articles you've made every major decision backward-design asks for — concepts and context, a statement of inquiry, inquiry questions, a summative task tied to criteria. This article is where those pieces stop being separate decisions scattered across four documents and become one coherent plan — the kind a colleague could pick up cold on a Monday morning and teach competently, because every choice in it is traceable back to the same thesis.
This is also where a gap most MYP units quietly have gets fixed: Approaches to Learning, the transferable skills the MYP asks you to build deliberately, too often show up as a checkbox rather than something actually planned and taught. Not in this unit — ATL gets planned here, properly, with its own section.
Understand the Idea
A unit plan is a design record, not a lesson-by-lesson script. Its job is to show, in one document, how every element connects to the statement of inquiry — the unit's thesis, built in Article 12. Different schools use different planner platforms (some IB-provided, some built in-house, some in a shared drive template), and the exact field names you'll see vary — "learning experiences," "teaching strategies," "formative assessment tasks" might be labelled slightly differently depending on your school's version. What doesn't vary is the underlying structure MyIBHub recommends checking your plan against: an inquiry section (concepts, context, statement of inquiry, inquiry questions), an action section (the summative task, criteria, learning experiences, ATL, differentiation, resources), and a reflection section (what actually happened, and what you'd change).
Learning experiences and teaching strategies are the actual sequence of lessons and activities — but under backward design, they're planned last, and each one exists because it builds a skill or an idea the summative task will require. This is the payoff of the whole sequence you've followed since Article 11: by the time you get here, you're not guessing what to teach, you're filling gaps between where students are now and what the task will demand of them.
Formative sequencing means planning the smaller, practice-oriented, low-or-no-stakes checkpoints across the unit that let you (and students) see progress toward the summative before it counts. A formative task on reading one primary source for perspective, done in week two, is there because the summative in week five needs students to do that skill under their own steam with three sources.
ATL (Approaches to Learning) covers skill categories like research, communication, self-management, social skills, and thinking skills, which the MYP treats as things to be explicitly taught, not assumed. The common failure mode — and this is worth naming directly — is treating ATL as a box you tick after the unit is designed, listing a skill because the unit happens to touch it, rather than choosing a skill deliberately and planning a moment to actually teach it. A unit that lists "critical thinking" as an ATL focus but never sets aside time to teach how to think critically about a source hasn't planned ATL — it's mentioned it.
Differentiation in a unit plan means naming, concretely, how students with different starting points, languages, or needs will access the same statement of inquiry — not just "differentiate as needed" as a placeholder, but actual named strategies tied to actual points in the unit.
Resources is the least glamorous field and the one most often left generic ("various sources," "textbook") — a resource list that a substitute or covering colleague could actually use names specific texts, links, or materials, not categories.
See It in Practice
Here is the Grade 8 I&S industrialisation unit, assembled field by field, with margin-note-style commentary explaining each decision and where it came from.
Key concept: Change. (Article 11 — sets the broad lens for the whole unit.)
Related concepts: Causality, perspective. (Article 11 — chosen because the SOI needed to connect "why things changed" to "who gets believed about it.")
Global context: Territory of fairness and development (confirm your school's current exact wording). (Article 11 — the lens connecting classroom content to the wider world.)
Statement of inquiry: "Rapid change in a society's systems of production can force different groups to compete over whose account of progress is believed." (Article 12 — arrived at after two weaker drafts; chosen because it's a genuine relationship, transferable, contestable, and student-paraphrasable.)
Inquiry questions:
- Factual: "What specific changes took place in how goods were produced in Britain between roughly 1760 and 1850, and who was affected by each change?"
- Conceptual: "Why might people who experience the same period of change end up with different accounts of whether it counted as progress?"
- Debatable: "Whose account of industrialisation deserves the most weight in deciding whether it was progress?"
(Article 13 — the debatable question deliberately echoes the SOI, so the unit's daily questioning and its thesis stay connected.)
Objectives/criteria (illustrative — confirm exact criteria names and numbering with your current subject guide): Criteria selected for this unit are ones involving analysing sources/perspectives and constructing a supported argument — chosen because the SOI and summative task genuinely require them, not because they were "due." Other criteria for this student group are planned for coverage in different units across the year.
Summative task: The museum-briefing-paper task from Article 14, using three sources with conflicting perspectives, mapped to selected strands.
ATL in the Planner — this unit's dedicated ATL focus:
MyIBHub recommends treating ATL as its own planning decision, not an afterthought bolted onto the learning experiences after the fact. For this unit, the teacher selects critical-thinking skills (specifically, evaluating the credibility and perspective of a source) and communication skills (specifically, structuring a written argument that acknowledges a counter-perspective) as the two explicit ATL foci — chosen because the summative task cannot be completed well without both.
Planning ATL explicitly means naming when it's taught, not just that it matters. In this unit: lesson 3 includes a direct mini-lesson on a source-evaluation framework (who wrote this, when, for whom, what's left out) before students ever apply it to the mill owner's letter; lesson 7 includes explicit modelling of a paragraph that states a position and then addresses one counter-perspective, using a deliberately weak sample paragraph the class revises together. Both are timed to land just before the formative task that practises the same skill — that placement isn't accidental, it's the point.
Formative sequence: A source-evaluation formative in week two (practising the ATL skill on one source, low stakes); a draft-paragraph formative in week four (practising the argument-with-counter-perspective structure on a smaller version of the summative prompt, with peer feedback against the task-specific clarification).
Differentiation: Sentence starters and a source-annotation template for students needing additional language support; an extension prompt asking stronger students to bring in a fourth, self-found source and justify its inclusion; audio versions of the parliamentary testimony extract for students who benefit from hearing text read aloud.
Resources: Named texts — the 1834 mill owner letter (adapted extract, provided in the unit pack), an extract from the 1833 factory inquiry testimony (adapted extract, provided), and a short passage from a named modern historian's revisionist account (provided, with full citation) — not "various primary sources."
A short "weak version" for contrast: The weak version of this same unit lists the topic as "Industrial Revolution," an SOI reading "Industrialisation changed society" (the Article 12 weak draft, never revised), inquiry questions that are all factual, a summative that's a closed-book test, an ATL section that says "critical thinking, communication" with no lesson attached to either, and a resources field that says "textbook, internet." Every field is technically filled in. None of them connect to any other field. A colleague could fill in that planner in twenty minutes and could not teach a coherent unit from it.
The Mathematics parallel, briefly: The same discipline applies outside I&S. A Grade 8 Mathematics unit on linear relationships, key concept relationships, might carry an SOI like "Representing a changing quantity in different forms can reveal patterns that a single representation hides," inquiry questions moving from factual ("what is a gradient?") to debatable ("which representation — table, graph, or equation — is most useful for predicting real-world outcomes, and does that answer change depending on the situation?"), a summative task modelling real, messy data (say, a local business's monthly sales), and an ATL focus on communication (justifying a choice of representation) planned explicitly, not assumed. Same seven-decision sequence, same coherence test, different subject.
Apply It
Teacher Activity: The coherence check.
For every learning experience in your unit plan — every lesson, activity, or formative task — physically draw a line (on paper, in a document, wherever you've written the plan) connecting it back to the statement of inquiry. For each one, be able to finish the sentence: "This is here because it builds [a fact, skill, or reasoning move] that the summative task and SOI require."
Anything you can't connect gets one of two outcomes: cut it, or write a one-line justification for why it stays despite not obviously serving the SOI (sometimes there's a legitimate reason — a school event, a skill needed for a later unit — but it should be a conscious decision, not an oversight).
Artefact to produce now: Your unit plan with every learning experience annotated by a short phrase naming what it builds toward, plus an explicit ATL section naming which skill, taught when, tied to which formative or summative moment. If any learning experience has no annotation, that's your punch list for this week.
Avoid This
ATL as a word list. Naming "critical thinking" and "communication" without a lesson that teaches either is the single most common ATL failure. Fix: for every ATL skill named, write down the specific lesson number where it's directly taught, not just used.
A resources field full of categories. "Various sources," "textbook," "online articles" tell a covering colleague nothing. Fix: name actual texts, even in draft form.
Learning experiences that don't trace to the SOI. Fun activities that survived from an earlier, forward-designed draft of the unit are the most common coherence failure. Fix: run the coherence check above honestly, including on activities you personally love teaching.
A plan only you could teach. If key decisions live only in your head — why this source, why this sequence — the plan has failed its real test. Fix: add the margin-note commentary, the way the worked example above does, so reasoning is visible on the page.
Check Yourself
Pick any single learning experience from your plan at random. Without looking at your annotations, can you say in one sentence what it builds toward in the summative task? If yes, your plan has passed the coherence check for that item.
Continue Learning
The unit exists. It has a thesis, a genuine set of questions, a task that generates real evidence, explicit ATL instruction, and a plan a colleague could actually teach from. That's the achievement of this chapter, and it's not nothing — most units never get this coherent.
But a good plan is not yet good teaching. A statement of inquiry that reads beautifully on paper can die in the first five minutes of a lesson if the room isn't managed, the questioning is flat, or twenty-eight thirteen-year-olds simply don't buy in. The unit exists. Chapter 04 is about what happens when 28 students walk in.