The International Baccalaureate (IB) offers curriculum frameworks within which schools and teachers experience a degree of creative freedom in the planning and delivery of the programs. This results in a potential consistency dilemma when an IB school is required to foster creative professionalism through collaborative practices, yet needs to ensure consistency of both content and pedagogical approaches. A collaborative environment requires a clearly defined balance between teacher autonomy and school direction in order to align pedagogical practices with curriculum intent. Teachers moving from a Japanese Article 1 school where limited autonomy is required may experience challenges when adjusting to requirements for a greater role in curriculum design in an IB Dual Language Diploma Program. Collaborative practices may not result in the necessary shifts in pedagogical practices if teachers are not adequately prepared for a school culture focused on creative professionalism.
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The Japanese Ministry of Culture, Science, Sport and Technology (Ministry of Culture, Science, Sport and Technology, 2014) has been attempting to shift aspects of its education system, including pedagogical approaches, to better prepare students for a rapidly changing world. Apart from the rapid process of globalization and technology-driven interconnectedness, within Japan, rapidly-shifting demographic patterns will inescapably mean a transformation of the social and economic fabric of Japanese society impacting all aspects of life, including family structures, social relationships, employment conditions, collapses in regional infrastructure, and a host of serious short- and long-term impacts (Atoh, 2008; Eberstadt, 2012; Igarashi et al., 2018). The Japanese education system will be required to operate in a very different set of circumstances than it has ever done before which brings with it a heightened sense of urgency to make the appropriate shifts in practices to help students prepare for these looming uncertainties.
Part of these efforts to shift educational practices in Japanese schools involves adopting International Baccalaureate (IB) programs as a way to promote a more international perspective in the education system and a more student-centered approach in the classroom. MEXT is using the introduction of IB programs to facilitate shifts in educational approaches which could both nurture higher-order reasoning abilities, analytical research and presentation skills, and promote stronger English second-language acquisition (Coulson et al., 2019). These capabilities that the IB programs foster are very similar to those which the Japanese education system seeks to develop (Moriguchi, 2018) and in this sense, the introduction of the IB programs is not a shift away from the embedded goals of Japanese education, but a strategic shift toward them.