A Study on Public Teachers’ Recognition in Impact of International Baccalaureate (Through Focus-Group-Interview of a School Implementing Japanese DP)

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to clarify the perspective of IB teachers at IB accredited public high schools. Therefore, we set the objectives as follows. (1) how IB teachers in Japanese public high school recognize the learning of students who take the IB. (2) how IB teachers in Japanese public high school recognize the IB programme comparing to Japanese curriculum (MEXT). To approach the objectives, focus-group-interview was applied as the research method. By utilizing Modified Grounded Theory Approach (M-GTA) as an analysis method, the description of re-segmentation was generated from the coding of teachers’ narratives. From the results of the analysis, IB teachers replied classes with a small group of students, enhancement of students’ ability, higher-order inquiry activity and highly specialized contents as the merits of IB. Additionally, in terms of applicability of IB into other public high school, teachers tended to think that the highly specialized contents are helpful to expand students’ deep understanding of the subjects, but in the MEXT curriculum, it became clear that class-size issues and textbook-based restrictions were recognized as barriers to applicability of IB.