If you have just been handed it
You have been given IA supervision and nobody trained you for it.
Almost no school trains this. You are expected to supervise a piece of assessed work, keep it authentic, give useful feedback, and hold a line you were never shown. Here is what the job actually is.
Ask me anything about supervising it The free aim checker Printable class self-check AI for IB Teachers course
What is actually true
Most marks are lost before any content is written
On the question, the scope and the structure. A student with a workable question and a clear plan is most of the way there. That means your most valuable intervention is the earliest one, not the draft read.
The draft is where your authenticity line lives
You can tell a student what is wrong. You cannot tell them what to write instead. In practice that means feedback phrased as questions and as criteria, not as corrections to copy out.
Your job is the assessment, their teacher's job is the content
If you are supervising outside your specialism, that is not a disadvantage. The criteria reward structure, reasoning and reflection, and those are visible to any experienced teacher.
A first meeting is worth more than three draft reads
Twenty minutes on the question, what they will actually do, and what evidence they will have, prevents most of the problems that show up four months later.
You are allowed to say the topic will not work
Early and plainly. Students almost always prefer being told in September to discovering it in February, and it is a kindness rather than a failure.
Three things to do this week
- Get every student to write their question in one sentence and read all of them in one sitting. The problems stand out immediately.
- For any question you cannot picture the finished work from, book twenty minutes.
- Write down what you were never told, because that list is your handover to whoever gets this next year.
You might be the wrong one of these
People arrive here as a student and turn out to be a parent, or the other way round. Both of the others are worth two minutes.