Why This Matters

"So do I just throw out everything I've been doing for the last six years?" That's the question underneath most of the resistance you'll feel, and maybe the resistance you'll hear from colleagues, when a school moves toward MYP. Nobody says it out loud in the staff meeting, but it's there: a quiet fear that fifteen years of built-up lesson plans, question banks, and classroom routines are about to be declared worthless.

They're not. Most of what makes you good at your job — clear explanations, strong questioning, subject knowledge, classroom management — transfers directly. But something real does change, and pretending nothing changes is just as dishonest as pretending everything does. This article names the actual differences, specifically, so you can stop guessing.

Understand the Idea

The clearest way to see what changes is a single distinction: coverage vs understanding. Coverage-focused teaching asks "did we get through the content?" Understanding-focused teaching asks "can students do something meaningful with the content?" A class can cover an entire textbook chapter and still produce students who can't apply a single idea from it to a new situation. MYP planning is built around catching that gap before it happens, by starting with the understanding you want and working backward to the content and activities that build it.

That leads to the second shift: content-first vs concept-first sequence. Content-first planning starts with "what topic is next in the textbook?" Concept-first planning starts with "what big idea should students walk away understanding, and which content will best build that?" The content usually barely changes — you still teach photosynthesis, still teach the French Revolution, still teach quadratic equations. What changes is which question you ask first when you sit down to plan, because that question decides everything that follows: your sequence, your activities, your questions in class.

The third shift is about assessment logic: summative-as-endpoint vs summative-as-design-anchor. In many traditional planning habits, the test comes at the end, largely separate from planning — you teach the unit, then write a test that samples what you taught. In MYP planning, the summative task (the major assessed piece of work at the end of a unit) is designed early, often right after the statement of inquiry, and the rest of the unit is built to prepare students for it. This is sometimes called backward design: start with the evidence you'll accept that students understood, then plan the route there.

None of these three shifts require you to abandon strategies that work — direct instruction, practice problems, lecture, drills. They ask you to sequence and justify those strategies differently.

See It in Practice

Consider one teacher's Grade 7 Science term, covering the same content — cells, then ecosystems, then simple machines — shown two ways.

Traditional sequence: Week 1–3, cells: structure, function, definitions test. Week 4–6, ecosystems: food chains, food webs, vocabulary quiz. Week 7–9, simple machines: types of levers, mechanical advantage, calculation test. Each topic is self-contained. The final assessment for each block is a test built after teaching finishes, checking whether students remembered what was covered. A student could pass all three tests and never be asked to connect cells to ecosystems to machines — because nothing in the sequence asked them to.

MYP sequence, same content: The teacher notices that cells, ecosystems, and simple machines can all be examined through the same key concept — "systems" — because each involves interacting parts with inputs and outputs. The term becomes one longer unit (or a connected set of units) with a statement of inquiry along the lines of: "Living and mechanical systems both depend on the balanced interaction of their parts." The summative task, designed before teaching begins, might ask students to analyze a real system of their choice — a plant, a local ecosystem, a simple machine they build — and explain what happens when one part fails. Cells, ecosystems, and machines are all still taught, in similar depth, with many of the same activities the teacher already used. But the sequence is chosen because each topic builds toward the same transferable idea, and the test was designed first, not last.

Weak MYP attempt: the teacher keeps the traditional three separate tests, bolts on a "systems" label to the unit plan cover page, and changes nothing about sequence or the final task. This is MYP in name only — recognizable because deleting the label changes nothing about what students do.

Strong MYP attempt: the sequence, the summative task, and the statement of inquiry are all visibly connected — a colleague reading the unit plan could predict what the final task will ask, just from reading the statement of inquiry.

🧠 Teacher insight: The fastest self-check for "have I actually changed anything, or just relabeled it?" is to ask whether your summative task was designed before or after you finished teaching. If it was designed after, as a way to test what you happened to cover, you're still in the old logic — even if the unit plan says all the right MYP words.

Apply It

Do the "Keep / Adapt / Retire" sort with ten of your current teaching practices. Here's a worked mini-example with five, to show the kind of judgment call involved:

  1. Keep — Clear worked examples on the board before independent practice. This transfers directly; MYP doesn't discourage explicit instruction.
  2. Keep — Your classroom management routines (entry procedure, homework checks). Unrelated to curriculum philosophy.
  3. Adapt — Your end-of-unit test. Keep the rigor and some of the questions, but redesign it so it's planned before the unit starts and requires application, not just recall.
  4. Adapt — Your topic sequence. Keep most of the content, but reorder or connect topics around a shared big idea where one genuinely exists.
  5. Retire — A worksheet-only revision lesson with no task requiring transfer. If its only purpose is content repetition with no application, it's a candidate to cut or substantially rebuild.
🧭 Planning decision: Now do this for ten of your own practices, sorted into three columns, on the Keep-Adapt-Retire worksheet. Be honest about the "Retire" column — it should have at least one or two genuine entries. A sort with nothing in "Retire" usually means you haven't looked hard enough yet.

Avoid This

Symptom: you rewrite every lesson from scratch. This is the overcorrection — assuming MYP means nothing you already do is valid. Fix: use the Keep/Adapt/Retire sort above; most experienced teachers find well over half their practices land in "Keep."

Symptom: your "MYP unit" is your old unit with new vocabulary pasted on top. Fix: check whether the summative task was designed before or after teaching — that single question exposes cosmetic change fastest.

Symptom: you resequence content around a concept that doesn't actually fit, just to force a connection. Fix: not every topic needs to be merged with its neighbors. A forced connection is worse than three honest, separate units.

Check Yourself

  • Can you name, specifically, which of the three shifts (coverage vs understanding, content-first vs concept-first, summative-as-endpoint vs summative-as-anchor) is hardest for you personally, and why?
  • In your last unit, was the major assessment designed before or after you finished teaching?
  • Do you have at least one genuine item in your own "Retire" column?

Continue Learning

Next step → Article 4: The Role of the MYP Teacher, where these planning shifts translate into your actual day-to-day responsibilities. Download the Keep-Adapt-Retire worksheet to complete the activity above in full.

📌 Official source: Check MYP: From Principles into Practice for the IB's own description of concept-based teaching and backward-design assessment planning.