Have you ever been an IB Diploma Coordinator? If so I can guarantee you one thing, 90% of your day is made up with discussing one thing?

Inquiry based learning? NO!

How to support teachers improve assessments? NO

Formative feedback? NO

It is of course the simple and easy word - DEADLINE! The bane of any coordinators life. The first thing that I thought about when I go into a new coordination role - is the culture, ethos and structure of dealing with deadlines equitable and fair within the school. However more important is the consideration of the effect from policies and protocols on each and every student; in terms of pressure, anxiety and their wellbeing. Just look at the meme image list on Google related to IB deadlines - I am sure some made by my students!

I am sure my current school will not mind me saying, but I walked into the nightmare where the culture and ethos around deadlines was lacking. Maybe it was Covid times, but something needed to be done. Why you say, well here are a few reasons that again any IB coordinator will have come across in one form or another:

Problems! Problems! Problems! At this point I was lucky enough to read the wonderful blog post from Damien Bacchoo on 'Deadlines and Taxes.' It's a great rumination on how difficult it really is with his final sentence being - 'I started this article with the promise to sleep on the issue of school deadlines.  But it seems to me that it’s going to take a bit more than that to solve this one...' He raises some excellent discussion points that we have all thought about:

• Are we really teaching about real life - another words are deadlines in the real world fixed, and the answer is often NO surprisingly
• Are all students the same, so should they have the same deadlines - its the same discussion as when teachers judge how long homework will take e.g. 30 minutes , when we all know it can take from 5 to 3 hours dependent on the student
• Are sanctions such as no feedback the right way forward - when we are trying to teach life lessons
• Perfectionism is a problem - so is it not kind to set a deadline, so students do not waste time and gain no ROI
• Is it really a deadline  - especially when there are draft, final, official and so on deadlines???
• Are we biased how we treat different students - for example those that can advocate and shot the loudest

Bearing all this in mind, and knowing I had done it many different ways before I looked at ensuring the following :

• Equity - it had to be fair, so that all students unless there was a wellbeing issue handed in
• Keeping it simple - no google calendars, or spreadsheets
• Teachers had to follow the deadlines - only changing if there was a real issue and after consultation with the IB Coordinator
• Each and every year the deadlines are renegotiated - ensuring that teachers took notice, that they were balanced and most importantly teachers helped to spread out with more deadlines in Year 1. Thanks to Business, Geography, Physics and Business who all moved to Yr1.
• Ensure the University deadlines are within the main deadlines - so students could see fully Yr2, Term 1 as being a difficult time (oh and not forgetting SATs and other standardised tests)
• Deadlines were published for two years for each cohort - so students could plan ahead
• All work was uploaded to ManageBAC (nominally to check for plagiarism) - but also it was centralised and could be followed up easily and immediately
• Publicise to students any wellbeing issue will be taken seriously - and supported
• Explain fully to students that the deadlines are spread for a reason - to enable them to plan, and give enough time to each
• Model to teachers and students planning and scaffolding - using the Extended Essay with milestones, intermediate hand in's, expected structures etc.
• Discuss and talk to students about ROI ( Return on Investment) - to ensure students are not wasting their time
• Finally ensure teachers are moderating a few weeks after deadline, and assessing - with only then a limited amnesty for low hanging fruit for students

Fig 1 - A simple and one page deadline timeline

Fig 2 - A simple and understandable set of protocols

Fig 3 - Celebration of a deadline hand in!

Did I solve all the problems, NO but the most important thing is the ethos and culture of student cohorts is now to hand in work to deadlines. Teachers keep to the deadlines reasonably well, and take them seriously. And we are all communicating together!

We recently had a further discussion as we always do in the local Thai IB Coordinators network, and I still came away with the questions from Damien are we really teaching students about real life and have we solved the problem of perfectionism?  Probably not, but I think maybe there needs to be a system change here - shout out to the IB's workload initiative which seems to have gone quiet in recent years?

However we can say we have increased equity, reduced bias, reduced stress and anxiety (to some extent although again a systems problem I believe,) taught and modelled too students best practice, what ROI really means and how to self regulate.

However I am a perfectionist, so each and every year I will tweak the system, tweak the deadlines to try and get it better - Oh DEAR!