Implementations of curriculum mapping in the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program: Teacher's and program coordinator's perspectives

International Baccalaureate (IB) programs created by the International Baccalaureate Organization are carried out with four main programs: Primary Years Programme (PYP), Middle Years Programme (MYP), Diploma Programme (DP), and Career Oriented Programme (CP). The Middle Years Programme was created for students between 11 and 16. The common goal of IB programs is to raise international-minded individuals, as stated in the mission statement (International Baccalaureate Organization [IBO], 2017a). In IB, a curriculum is primarily built around four IB units, starting with a one-year curriculum mapping, which is then reduced to unit plans, which are usually reduced to six-month unit plans (Thomson, 2011). Huffman (2002) defined curriculum mapping as providing information about how each teacher teaches which subject and evaluates student performance and resources. Curriculum mapping is associated with the representation of the different components of the curriculum, allowing the whole curriculum to be examined, while at the same time making the relationships and connections between the parts of a curriculum map easily visible (Harden, 2001). This study aims to investigate the opinions and experiences of teachers and program coordinators regarding curriculum mapping practices in implementing the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme by integrating it into the national curriculum in Türkiye and to determine the opportunities and difficulties they experienced in the curriculum mapping process. In addition, one of the sub-goals of this study is to reveal the role and effectiveness of curriculum mapping implementations in the MYP design, which is carried out towards the goal of raising individuals with international mindedness, is the target of both international education and national education curricula (IBO, 2017a; Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı [MEB], 2023). Within the framework of the stated objectives, this research was carried out using a case study design, one of the qualitative research methods. The study group consists of 14 MYP teachers and five program coordinators who work in İstanbul in some private schools implementing the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme in Türkiye and carry out curriculum mapping implementations in these schools. The researcher developed a semi-structured interview form for interviews with the determined study group. The content analysis approach was used to analyse the data of this study. Codes were created according to the teachers' answers to the open-ended questions in the semi-structured interview form. These codes are clustered under categories, shown in the respective tables. Themes were created in line with the data obtained from the interviews and the codes developed by the researcher. The findings section presents the opinions of the study group with direct quotations. The discussion section reveals the similarities and differences between the results obtained from the study and the studies in the literature. The conclusion section summarizes the research results. The recommendations section provides suggestions for practitioners and researchers.