IB MYP Personal Project Tutor in Abu Dhabi

Three criteria, 8 marks each, 24 marks in total, converted by the school into a 1-7 grade. Within them sit seven strands, and the strands are what a moderator looks for. The table below sets them out, names the evidence each requires, and identifies where Abu Dhabi students most often lose the marks.

The most useful thing a parent can do with this table is check it against the report in draft. Each strand should be findable - not implied, not spread across three paragraphs, but addressed. Students who have never seen the strands written down tend to produce a report that answers four or five of the seven thoroughly and leaves the rest to inference, which costs bands rather than marks.

Note what is not assessed. The ambition of the project is not a criterion. Neither is the quality of the product in any absolute sense - criterion C evaluates the product against the student's own success criteria, which is why those criteria are the hinge of the whole thing. A modest product honestly evaluated against well-written criteria outscores an impressive product measured against nothing, every time, and students find this genuinely hard to believe until they see the descriptors.

Confirm the version of the guide your school is using before planning around any of this. Earlier guides used four criteria and required the project to be framed by a global context; the current structure centres the learning goal and the product. Your MYP coordinator can answer that in one line, and the answer changes what the report has to contain.

A learning goal does two jobs. It states what the student intends to learn, and it sets the boundary within which everything else is judged. Students write them in the first week, before they understand what the criteria will later ask, and they write them too broad because broad feels ambitious. Eight months later the breadth makes criterion C unanswerable.

The test is simple: could somebody else tell whether the goal was achieved? 'Learn about marine conservation' fails - there is no state of the world in which that is finished. 'Learn how to identify and document the common reef fish of the Abu Dhabi coast well enough to produce an identification guide for a school audience' passes, because achievement is checkable and the product is implied by the goal rather than bolted on.

Narrowing is the work of a single session and it is the cheapest intervention available in the subject. The method is to ask three questions in order. What will exist at the end that does not exist now? Who is it for? What would make it good, in terms someone else could verify? The answers to those three are the intended product, the audience, and the success criteria - which is most of criterion A produced in twenty minutes of interrogation.

The scope question is separate and equally important in an Abu Dhabi MYP 5 year. The project runs alongside the heaviest subject assessment load of the programme, and students regularly set goals that would need a free summer. A product that can be made in the evenings across two terms, with mandatory Arabic and Islamic Education and the full subject timetable continuing, is the realistic unit. Over-scoping does not lose marks for ambition; it loses them because the plan, the journal and the evaluation all end up thin.

This is the part of the personal project that students most reliably get wrong, and it is worth understanding mechanically. Criterion A asks the student to develop success criteria for their product. Criterion C asks them to evaluate the product against those criteria. The second is therefore only as good as the first. Criteria written vaguely in October make a strong evaluation in May arithmetically impossible, and nobody notices the connection at the time.

A usable success criterion has three properties. It describes the product rather than the student - 'the guide identifies twenty species' not 'I work hard'. It can be checked by somebody who was not involved. And it is specific enough to fail: a criterion that the product obviously meets tells a moderator nothing. Four or five criteria of that kind is a better set than ten aspirational ones.

The evaluation that follows is then a short, honest exercise rather than an essay. Take each criterion, state the evidence, and judge it - met, partly met, not met - with the reason. A product that misses two of five criteria, evaluated honestly with specific evidence, scores well on criterion C. A product that met everything, evaluated in general praise, does not. Students resist recording failure because it reads to them as a confession; in criterion-referenced marking it reads as evidence of judgement.

The practical sequence is therefore: narrow the goal, name the product, write criteria that could fail, then build. Students who do it in that order find the report largely writes itself, because every claim has a stated criterion and a piece of journal evidence behind it. Students who build first and write criteria afterwards produce a document that looks complete and reads as retrospective, which moderators recognise immediately.

Criterion B is the most misread of the three. It does not ask what the student made or how well. It asks them to explain how approaches to learning skills were applied - once in service of the learning goal, and separately in service of the product. Two explanations, two strands, 8 marks between them.

The approaches to learning skill clusters are research, communication, social, self-management and thinking. Every student uses several of them across a project year. Almost none of them name any. A student writes that they made a schedule and stuck to it; what criterion B wanted was that they applied an organisation skill within self-management, how specifically they applied it, and what evidence in the journal shows it working or failing. The underlying work is identical. The explanation is what is marked.

The separation of goal and product trips students up almost as often. Learning how to sequence documentary photographs is a research and thinking exercise; producing the twelve-image series on a deadline is a self-management and communication exercise. A student who answers the question once, generally, has addressed one strand and left the other to inference. Reading criterion B as two questions rather than one is worth a band on its own.

What a mid-project session does here is mechanical. The tutor reads the journal, asks the student which skill a given entry demonstrates, and makes them answer. The skills were applied - the student lived the project - so this is recall and labelling rather than invention. Done at the halfway point it also reveals which weeks have no record at all, while there is still time to keep one properly.

The process journal is where criterion B lives and where criterion C finds its material, and it is the single most commonly mishandled requirement in the personal project. Students treat it as a diary - what I did today, how I felt about it - and produce a document with no assessable content. Or they ignore it for seven months and write twenty entries in a weekend, which is visible to anyone who reads them.

What belongs in it is narrower and easier than a diary. A decision and the reason for it. A thing that was tried and did not work, with what was learned. A source, cited, with a note on what was taken from it. A skill applied, named, with what happened. A change to the plan and why it was necessary. Five categories, a couple of entries a week, three or four sentences each. That is perhaps ten minutes a week and it produces everything criterion B and C need.

Format is flexible and should suit the student. Written notes, voice memos, photographs with annotations, a running document, a notebook. The requirement is a record maintained throughout rather than a particular medium, so a student who thinks better aloud should record audio. What does not work is a format so elaborate that it does not get kept - an over-designed journal is an abandoned journal by December.

For an Abu Dhabi MYP 5 student the practical difficulty is the competing calendar. Subject assessment, mandatory Arabic and Islamic Education, and in many schools a graded music examination or a sports commitment all run through the same months. The journal survives that only if it is small and habitual. Two entries a week of four sentences, attached to an existing routine, is the version that still exists in March.

By report-writing time the project is finished and the remaining marks are entirely in how it is explained. This is the second moment where a session earns its fee, and the gain is usually larger than families expect, because most students default to chronology and chronology hides the strands.

The structural principle is one section per strand, in the order the criteria run. State the learning goal and the personal interest behind it. State the intended product and list the success criteria as they were written at the start. Present the plan and what changed in it. Explain the ATL skills applied to the goal, with journal evidence. Explain the ATL skills applied to the product, with journal evidence. Explain the impact of the project on the student or their learning. Evaluate the product against each success criterion in turn. A moderator reading that finds everything they are looking for, in the order they are looking for it.

Length is set by format in the guide - a written report, an oral presentation and a multimedia submission have different limits - and the figures are the kind of detail that is revised between guide versions, so take them from your school's own current brief rather than from any tutoring page. What is constant is that the limit is generous enough for the strands and tight enough to punish narrative padding. Students who tell the story run out of room before they evaluate anything, and the evaluation is a whole criterion.

The academic honesty requirement sits here too. Sources must be cited, the form is signed by both student and supervisor, and the work must be the student's own. A tutor reading a draft comments on whether a strand is addressed, whether a claim has evidence, and whether the evaluation refers to the stated criteria. A tutor never writes any part of it, and never supplies the evidence, because the consequence of misrepresented authorship falls on the student and it is severe.

The personal project fails on scheduling more often than on substance. It is the only major piece of MYP work with no weekly lesson attached to it, which means nothing in the timetable forces progress, and the internal deadlines in Abu Dhabi's larger schools arrive earlier than families assume. The table below counts backwards from submission, which is a more useful way to see the year than counting forwards from September.

Two features of the emirate's school year shape it. The first is that MYP 5 subject assessment and the project compete directly for evenings, and the subject work always wins in the short term because it has a teacher chasing it. The second is Ramadan, which shortens school days and moves family routines later - and in most years falls close enough to the project deadline to matter. Students who have banked progress before it are comfortable; students who planned to work through it are not.

Supervisor meetings are the other fixed point and they are limited. In a large cohort a supervisor may carry a dozen projects, so meetings are short and widely spaced. The way to get value from them is to arrive with something specific: a draft criterion set, three journal entries, a structural question. A student who arrives with nothing spends the meeting describing the project to a teacher who then has nothing to advise on.

Treat the table as a template against your school's own published dates. Ask for those dates in writing early, particularly in the newer schools where project calendars are still settling, and work backwards from the earliest one rather than from the final submission. The commonest avoidable failure is discovering in February that the internal draft deadline was January.

A supervisor and a tutor are different roles and it is worth being precise about both. The supervisor is a member of school staff who meets the student periodically, signs the academic honesty form, and confirms that the work is the student's own. They are accountable to the school and the IB, and they are the authority on the school's own deadlines and expectations. Nothing on this page substitutes for them.

A tutor adds time and criterion literacy - two things a supervisor carrying a dozen projects does not have in quantity. What that looks like in practice is narrow and specific. Interrogating a learning goal until it is evaluable. Rewriting success criteria with the student until each one could fail. Reading a journal and asking which skill an entry demonstrates. Reading a draft report and saying which strand is missing. Checking that the evaluation refers to the criteria as written rather than to how the student feels about the product.

What a tutor must not do is equally specific. Not choose the goal or the product. Not write any part of the report, the journal or the criteria. Not supply research, sources or content. Not make the product or any component of it. The project must be the student's own work, the academic honesty form attests to that, and the consequence of a breach falls on the student under IB rules. We say this plainly because the market this page sits in contains providers who sell completed assessed work, and that is an exposure for the student rather than a shortcut.

The first session is free - one trial lesson per student, no card details, nothing payable, no obligation to continue - and it is used to find out which of the two useful moments you are at. If the goal is still open, that is the session to have. If the product is done and the report is not written, that is the other one. If the project is in good order and the student needs nothing, the written note says so. Where no personal project specialist is free for the slot you need, we say that too rather than putting a generalist in front of a strand-based report.