The IB Primary Years Programme at Le Monde

The International Baccalaureate is not a curriculum brand — it is a 50+ year body of applied educational research, refined continuously through IB's own research arm and independent study, and implemented in more than 5,700 schools across over 150 countries. Becoming a Candidate School is not a marketing designation. It requires a multi-year process of self-study, staff training, curriculum mapping, and site verification by the IB organization to confirm a school has the structures, culture, and instructional practice to deliver the programme with integrity.

Very few Oklahoma schools have taken this on. Le Monde's candidacy means our teachers are trained in, and our curriculum is being built around, a framework that has been tested and refined against decades of research on how children actually learn — not just what a single school believes works.

The PYP was not invented in a vacuum. It draws directly on some of the most influential findings in learning science:

Constructivism — students build understanding, they don't just receive it.

The PYP's inquiry-based design is rooted in the constructivist theory of learning associated with Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, and extended by Jerome Bruner's work on discovery learning and the “spiral curriculum” — the idea that revisiting big ideas at increasing levels of complexity builds deeper, more durable understanding than covering a topic once and moving on. This is why PYP units of inquiry return to the same transdisciplinary themes year after year, at growing depth, from Pre-K through Grade 5.

Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development.

The PYP's emphasis on scaffolded, teacher-guided inquiry — rather than either direct instruction alone or unstructured “free discovery” — reflects Vygotsky's finding that students learn best when supported just beyond what they can do independently, with structures (sentence frames, guided questions, peer collaboration) that are gradually removed as competence grows.

Formative assessment and feedback.

The PYP's assessment model leans heavily on ongoing, low-stakes formative assessment — a practice with one of the strongest evidence bases in all of education research. Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam's landmark research (Inside the Black Box, 1998, and subsequent studies) found that consistent, specific feedback tied to clear learning goals produces some of the largest measurable gains in student achievement of any classroom practice. John Hattie's large-scale synthesis of education research (Visible Learning) similarly ranks feedback and formative evaluation among the highest-impact interventions available to teachers — well above many more commonly discussed reforms like class-size reduction. The PYP's rubrics, reflections, and continuous benchmarking are built to put that research into daily practice.

Language and cognitive development.

For our immersion learners specifically, the PYP's approach aligns with Jim Cummins' research on bilingual cognitive development — particularly the “common underlying proficiency” model, which found that skills developed in a first or immersion language transfer to a second language rather than competing with it. This is the research basis for why strong target-language instruction in K–2 supports, rather than undermines, later English literacy.

A note on sources: the studies and researchers above represent well-established, widely cited work in education research. As with any research summary, we encourage families and board members who want to review primary sources to verify citations directly — happy to provide a formal bibliography on request.

The ten Learner Profile attributes — inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk-takers, balanced, and reflective — are not a slogan. They reflect a body of research (often grouped under “21st-century skills” or “durable skills” literature) showing that dispositions like self-regulation, collaboration, and reflective thinking are strong predictors of long-term academic and life outcomes, independent of raw content knowledge. The PYP builds these explicitly into daily classroom language and routines, rather than treating them as a separate character-education add-on.

Rather than teaching subjects in isolation, the PYP organizes learning around six themes that every IB PYP school in the world uses, ensuring Le Monde students are engaging with the same globally benchmarked framework as students in Geneva, Singapore, or Toronto:

Each grade level engages with all six themes over the course of a year, building a spiraled curriculum that revisits big ideas with increasing sophistication as students mature — the Bruner principle in direct practice.

One of the PYP's most research-backed and often under-recognized components is its explicit teaching of Approaches to Learning — five skill categories that research consistently identifies as strong predictors of academic success across every subject area:

• Thinking skills — critical thinking, creative thinking, and transfer of understanding across contexts.
• Research skills — formulating questions, gathering and evaluating information, and drawing conclusions.
• Communication skills — exchanging thoughts, messages, and information effectively, in more than one language.
• Social skills — collaborating, resolving conflict, and adopting varied group roles.
• Self-management skills — organization, time management, emotional regulation, and reflection on one's own learning process (a skill set closely aligned with what researchers call metacognition — consistently one of the highest-leverage skills for long-term academic achievement).

Rather than assuming students absorb these skills incidentally, the PYP names them, teaches them directly, and has students set goals and reflect against them — turning “soft skills” into an explicit, trackable part of the curriculum.

PYP assessment blends the same rigor as our benchmark and standards-based systems with practices research shows drive growth:

• Formative, ongoing assessment — frequent, low-stakes checks that inform next-day instruction, not just end-of-unit grades.
• Rubrics and co-constructed success criteria — research shows that when students understand what quality work looks like before they attempt it, performance improves measurably.
• Student reflection and goal-setting — building the self-management and metacognitive skills referenced above.
• Portfolios and culminating showcases — authentic evidence of growth over time, alongside traditional benchmark data (NWEA MAP, OSTP, and Avant STAMP for language proficiency).

In Grade 5, students undertake the PYP Exhibition — a collaborative, self-directed inquiry into a real-world issue they choose themselves. It is the single most research-referenced outcome measure within the PYP framework, because it requires students to demonstrate, in an authentic and public way, every Learner Profile attribute, every ATL skill category, and years of accumulated content knowledge — synthesized into independent, self-managed work. It is designed as a bridge to the independence and academic rigor expected in the IB Middle Years Programme and beyond.

Candidate School status means Le Monde has been formally accepted into the IB's Candidacy phase and is actively implementing the PYP's standards and practices under IB guidance, working toward a formal authorization visit. It is a multi-year commitment that touches every layer of the school — curriculum design, teacher training, assessment practice, and governance — and being only the second school in Oklahoma to reach this stage reflects a level of institutional investment in research-based practice that very few schools in our state have made.

When you choose Le Monde, you are choosing a program grounded not in trends, but in decades of converging research on how children build understanding, develop language, and grow into capable, self-directed learners — delivered through a globally benchmarked framework, verified by an outside body, and now recognized as one of only two such programs in the state of Oklahoma.