Personal and social education (PSE) is concerned with the individual’s well-being and is intrinsically linked to all aspects of a student’s experience at school and beyond. It encompasses physical, emotional, cognitive, spiritual and social health and development, and contributes to an understanding of self, to developing and maintaining relationships with others, and to participation in an active, healthy lifestyle.
PSE is integral to teaching and learning at MIS and is embodied in the IB learner profile and attitudes, which permeate the programme and represent the qualities of internationally minded students and effective lifelong learners.
The three main strands of the PSE curriculum are identity (an understanding of our own beliefs, values, attitudes, experiences and feelings and how they shape us); active living (an understanding of the factors that contribute to developing and maintaining a balanced, healthy lifestyle); and interactions (an understanding of how an individual interacts with other people, other living things and the wider world).
The PSE curriculum addresses many aspects of the active living component but the development of a student’s well-being can be implicitly and explicitly addressed through all areas of the PYP curriculum. Therefore, every teacher is involved in supporting each student’s personal, social and physical development through all learning engagements both within and outside the programme of inquiry.
As reflected in the IB mission statement, our aim at MIS is to support students in becoming ‘active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.’