[Webinar] Fiction Express, the International Baccalaureate and global learning

🌍 Stories that encourage inquiry into the world

The books are organised into four cross-curricular themes that connect reading with different areas of learning and real-world issues. Teachers can search for books using topic tags to find stories related to subjects such as multiculturalism or identity.

A story can therefore become a starting point for asking questions, exploring different perspectives and developing critical thinking and open-mindedness.

📝 Evidence of learning during and after reading

Cristina describes two ways to gather evidence of students’ progress:

• Formative assessment: reading chapter by chapter, quizzes, the forum and challenges help teachers observe comprehension and participation throughout the process.
• Summative assessment: projects, book reviews and downloadable PDF activities give students opportunities to demonstrate what they have learnt through interpreting and producing texts.

These activities help teachers gather evidence that they can assess against their school’s rubrics and criteria.

🎧 Reading, listening, speaking and writing

Alastair Lane reminds us that reading is the beginning of a communicative experience. Audiobooks, author videos, the interactive glossary, and listening, pronunciation and vocabulary challenges create more opportunities to practise English.

The books also give students characters and topics to discuss, present ideas about and write about. This can make it easier for teenagers to participate when they might struggle to answer a question without any context.

💬 Purpose shapes the way we write

Cristina explains why students need to choose their tone and format according to what they want to communicate. Persuading readers in a formal article, for example, calls for different choices from writing a personal email.

Books and projects provide opportunities to explore formats such as blogs, articles, reports and proposals, and to see how the same communicative purpose can be adapted to each one. During the session, Cristina announced a text type and communicative purpose matrix to help teachers find these learning opportunities.

📎 Webinar resources

• 🎥 Watch the IB webinar recording — in English
• 📊 IB presentation