George Walker’s weblog

The early relationship between the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) and the United World Colleges (UWC) is accurately described by that sometimes ill-used term ‘symbiotic’.   In the early days, each needed the other and Lord Mountbatten, an influential supporter of both, wrote to the IBO’s first director general, Alec Peterson, in 1976:

…as you know, anything you can do to enlarge the acceptance of the IB will be very helpful to UWC.

Peterson, in his classic account of those early days (September 1987, Peterson ADC, Schools Across Frontiers: The Story of the International Baccalaureate and the United World Colleges, Open Court Publishing Company) later reflected:

…without the input of students and teachers from the United World Colleges, the IBO would have foundered, as I am sure that without the IB, the United World College fleet could never have set sail.
and the remarkable decision taken in 1971 by the headmaster of Atlantic College, David Sutcliffe, to abandon all national examinations in favour of the IB Diploma (less than a year after the award of the first diplomas to just 29 candidates!) was arguably the turning point in the successful development of the IBO.

At the time, Atlantic College, located in a medieval castle in Wales, stood on its own.  Today there are ten UWCs dotted around the world, all of them, apart from the college in Venezuela, depending upon the IBO and it is no coincidence that some of our most interesting diploma syllabuses have originated from the work done by UWC teachers.

In recent years, though, the relationship has weakened and I doubt if any of the colleges is now in the top ten of the largest IB schools.  At a joint conference in Prague in 2000, I suggested (September 2004, Walker G, To Educate the Nations: Reflections on an International Education: v. 2, Peridot Press):

The IBO and the UWC have developed during the past generation into organizations whose influence has far exceeded their size.  I am suggesting today that our potential influence over the next generation is even greater but it will only be achieved through partnerships and collaborations.  We can neither do it alone this time, nor can we do it together because the world around us has changed.  We need partners and that will test our political skills to the limit but my colleagues and I in the IBO will be doing our best to practise the art of the possible and we shall look forward to the closest possible collaboration with the UWCs.

I therefore have contradictory reactions to the recent news that two more colleges, one in Costa Rica and another in Kenya, are being planned.  On the one hand, this will bring fresh vigour to an organization that has not made much headway since the tenth college opened in India nearly 10 years ago.  But I cannot conceal a feeling that it merely perpetuates the existing system with all its apparent weaknesses – unstable long-term funding, geographical isolation and an educational paradigm that (for me) does not sit entirely comfortably in the 21st century.

A few weeks ago I was in Banja Luka and Sarajevo participating in the joint UWC/IBO project in Bosnia and Herzegovina (The IB in the Balkans).  Our international conference in Sarajevo attracted representatives from IB schools in Croatia, Slovenia and Greece as well as a large group of UWC graduates, some local some international, from colleges around the world.  I doubt if there has ever been such an impressive example of the potential influence of the combined networks of UWC and IBO and it offered a tantalising glimpse of how we can move beyond the syllabuses and examinations of the IB Diploma Programme to offer a new model of post war educational reconstruction.

To those who ask me, how can I best see international education in action? my reply has always been, visit a United World College.  Now, I believe this latest UWC/IBO partnership should encourage both organizations to seek a renewed relationship that reaches beyond the often isolated experience of one particular institution.

George Walker

We have been having discussions recently about putting the IB Diploma Programme online, trying to make it less school-bound, less dependent on where you happen to live. One of the barriers preventing access to an IB programme is the way it is currently confined to authorized IB World Schools and despite double-digit expansion these are still very thinly spread around the world – as my daughter (in parent mode) keeps reminding me.

The IBO has been dipping a number of toes into the waters of distance learning in recent years, accumulating experience through its online curriculum centre (OCC), distance teaching between partner schools in Finland and a Diploma Programme subject (standard level economics) offered online in a trial involving four schools in the USA and Latin America.

Recently, a typically powerful IB mixture of staff and external advisers (all giving us their time voluntarily) met to discuss the concept of an IB Open International College. There was broad support for the idea but unanimous concern for maintaining the same distinctive core values online as we strive to encourage through the conventional teaching of our programmes.

These values are clearly expressed in our mission statement and they have been recently expanded and developed into the new IB learner profile which promises to become one of our most important guiding documents (its origins, incidentally were in the Primary Years Programme: an interesting example of bottom-up influence). “They live a life of integrity and honesty, with a strong sense of fairness, justice and respect for the dignity of the individual, groups and communities…. They show empathy, compassion and respect towards the needs and feelings of others…They are accustomed to seeking and evaluating a range of points of view, and are willing to grow from the experience…They understand the importance of physical and mental balance and personal well-being for themselves and others…”

Until quite recently, such aspirations would have seemed an inappropriately fuzzy distraction in the context of a challenging academic curriculum, a soft target for the political right. Today, educating good citizens is widely perceived as every bit as important as providing them with the knowledge and skills to earn a living. Of course, there is nothing new in this; it just seems that we have put it to one side for a generation or two and it has taken the work of people like Howard Gardner and Daniel Goleman to bring the concept of emotional intelligence to the attention of both the academic and the business world. See, for example, Goleman’s article Leadership That Gets Results in the Harvard Business Review of March-April 2000 and Patrick Sherlock’s article Emotional intelligence in the international curriculum in the Journal of Research in International Education of December 2002.

The new challenge to the IBO is to ask how these values might be inculcated ‘at a distance’, ‘remotely’, ‘online’, ‘by e-learning’. And being forced to think about it is no bad thing because in the environment of conventional schooling we tend to assume that much of it happens through an unmediated experience of the institution’s hidden curriculum, which has no obvious online equivalent.

I am no expert in the area of values education but it seems to me that we shall need to create identifiable communities, coming together for a purpose, with which the student can regularly interact. These might include locally based face-to-face peer support groups, face-to-screen video conferencing and visionless chat room exchanges. Clearly, the IBO has a special capacity to inject a strong international dimension into all this and one can imagine the potential richness of worldwide online lessons on the Theory of knowledge.

And there my musings end. Not because I have exhausted the potential of this wonderful opportunity for the IBO, but rather to give you, the readers of this blog, the chance to tell me what you think. I welcome any comments, positive or likewise, on the theme. They can be posted by selecting the Add Comment link found at the bottom of this page. I’m not able to respond individually to what is said, but you have my assurances that all feedback will be taken into account as the vision of the IB Open International College evolves.

Thank you,

George Walker

I have a very important meeting coming up, and very important meetings produce a lot of worry and need a lot of careful preparation.  During two days in late September a group of the IBO’s most senior staff (18 of us from around the world) will try to agree on a draft operating budget (totalling about US$ 60 million) for 2006.

We are in for some tough negotiations but I hope it will turn out to be a positive learning experience for everyone.  I shall try to remember the advice of Fisher and Ury in their excellent book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (Penguin 1983):

• Separate the issues from the people and be tough on the issues
• Try to get behind the positions people adopt to understand their interests – why they have adopted that position?
• Involve everyone in generating different options for resolving the problem
• Use objective criteria (‘You say this will lead to an improved service for schools – exactly how?’) to judge different options.

I shall also try to remember that the professional virility of senior staff is often measured by how they perform in the annual budget negotiations.  They are inevitably seen as the champions of their departments, but we can reduce the sense of personal exposure by trying to focus on the priorities of the organization as a whole.  This, after all, is what the process of strategic planning has been all about.

George Walker