Taking Responsible Action

I've been thinking about responsible action a lot lately as the department tries to improve the curriculum. The IB mission statement is to create a better, more peaceful world and their official guide states, "The actions that students choose to take with regard to their fellow students, and to their local or wider community, may be considered the most significant summative assessment of the efficacy of the IB continuum of international education."

If you take the above and also keep in mind the IB program models for the PYP, MYP, and DP that each include the learner profile, action, approaches to learning skills, some type of extended culminating project, and international mindedness as the through strands for all three programs, you can't help but realize responsible action for both ourselves and others is really the heart of the IB.

So what does responsible action look like?

I've been thinking about responsible action within two major umbrella categories: self and other. These two categories also leap out of the program aims when you read through the guides and continue to see aims such as developing "student well-being" and "empowering service with the community".

Maximizing personal well-being is also one of the best ways to empower optimal service with the community, so even these two categories are undeniably interlinked and inseparable. The IB mentions physical, intellectual, social, and emotional well-being. As these are augmented in students, they should gain ever more capacity to serve the community and act responsibly.

So as I dwell on these topics, here are the current actions that I think are most responsible and therefore worth modeling for students as teachers and a learning community:

• eat vegetarian to help prevent climate change, feed more people, and decrease animal suffering
• exercise regularly to ward off preventable diseases of the heart, lungs, muscles, bones, and brain
• read as often as you can aiming to complete one book per week to learn new skills, facts, expertise, and generally raise work capacity and use to the world through cross-pollination of subjects and fields of interest
• consume ethically by buying in ways that minimize your impact on the earth, especially when it comes to air travel
• donate and fundraise regularly to the most effective charities and causes as determined by third party organizations like GiveWell and the Copenhagen Consensus
• advocate and vote in elections, especially on global issues
• work in a field that can have maximum effective social impact by utilizing websites like 80,000 Hours to determine where your strengths can have the highest benefit

All of the above actions have the potential to make the world a better, more peaceful place. 

To go one step further, I think a simple, short goal that an entire school could rally around would take these actions even further.

I suggest the mission, "Saving 1,000 human lives through responsible action".