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Since its founding in 1035 AD, Suzhou High School of Jiangsu Province has developed a reputation as one of the elite public high schools in China. The school has always been a pioneer in educational practices and reforms. Not content to rest on its laurels or glory in its storied past and prestige, Suzhou High School is constantly adapting, providing students in the modern era with a unique, once-in-a-lifetime learning experience.
Curricula Supported
Grade Levels: 10–12Implementation History
2022
The Fusion Curriculum
Suzhou High School was authorised as an IB World School in 2022, becoming the first and only public school international division in the city of Suzhou to be authorised by the IB. The school strives towards creating a curriculum which brings together the best of Eastern and Western educational principles and approaches. The fusion curriculum is a progressive framework that spans three grades and consists of the one-year Bridge Programme (Grade 10) and the two-year IB Diploma Programme (Grades 11-12). The curriculum integrates the IB DP, the Chinese national curriculum and the Chinese Wu culture, leading students to develop as lifelong learners with international mindedness, independent thinking skills, intellectual curiosity, community awareness, and, above all, honesty and integrity.
The school boasts an extraordinarily knowledgeable, experienced, responsible, supportive, and passionate faculty team. They are educational experts from Suzhou High School, veteran IBDP educators, external moderators, workshop leaders, authorization/evaluation readers, and younger teachers who are mostly Suzhou High School graduates with academic degrees from top-notch world universities and prior teaching experience. Nearly half the teaching staff are international teachers coming from five continents.
Adopting and Implementing ManageBac for the Whole Community
The school first became aware of the ManageBac system through market research and hearing positive feedback from experienced IB teachers. It subsequently adopted it as its main teaching and learning software.
“We invested a significant amount of time in system implementation and training. After an initial period of adapting and getting used to the system, we now deeply appreciate its high compatibility with the IB curriculum, the powerful features it offers, as well as the great convenience it brings. Whether from a teaching and learning perspective, or from the viewpoint of student personal growth and the overall development of the school’s teaching and research process, it is clear that ManageBac provides us with a flexible and customisable framework for managing the vast amount of teaching and learning materials we handle. At this point, it is difficult to imagine how our teaching, learning, and programme documentation could be carried out without an integrated platform like ManageBac.”
Achieving Academic Excellence with ManageBac Passport
The school adopted ManageBac Passport in 2022, and is deploying it in as many areas as possible. Teachers and coordinators use it mainly for curriculum planning and for documenting and managing teaching and learning resources. Additionally, they utilise ManageBac Passport for assessment. Furthermore, the system supports multi-curricula reporting, allowing them to simultaneously generate both International Baccalaureate (IB) and Chinese National Curriculum (CNC) reports.
The pre-built curriculum in ManageBac Passport is an essential resource for unit and lesson planning. Passport also offers study and revision resources, including IB and in-house exams from the Question Bank, flashcards, videos, and revision guides. Some teachers assign them as homework, while others recommend them as optional work for students to complete, based on their individual learning needs. As Zhenqi notes, “One of the best things about these resources is that they’re categorised and organised by subject topics, which facilitates differentiated learning and helps develop self-learning abilities in students.” This thoughtful organisation and ease of access to resources underscore ManageBac’s commitment to catering for diverse learning styles.
Transforming Curriculum Planning and Reporting
“ManageBac has transformed curriculum planning at Suzhou High School. The system’s workflow, from the creation of unit and course plans to the upload of teaching resources, supplies the framework for my lesson planning.” This sentiment echoes throughout the school, where ManageBac has really changed the way they plan and carry out their teaching.
ManageBac helps with top-level monitoring of the quality of curriculum delivery. For instance, the DP coordinator can customise fields in the unit plans and require subject teachers to check or refine unit objectives, fill in ATL dimensions and more, all within the system. From the perspective of a DP coordinator, this process entails a three-step workflow: deconstructing specific requirements → setting standards → implementing them uniformly via the system.
“Our school runs a complex curriculum that includes both IB and CNC. However, thanks to the high flexibility of ManageBac, we can easily and efficiently generate multi-curricula reports that present student performance across different dimensions and in the desired format.” The adaptability of ManageBac in terms of integrating several curricula has been a game-changer for Suzhou High School, simplifying what was once a challenging task.
