Co‑Piloting with AI: How WAB’s High School Keeps Students at the Center 

As students get older, the questions around AI get bigger, but the core aim stays the same: helping students become thoughtful, ethical, and independent thinkers in a world where AI is now fully present. High School learning at WAB weaves AI in through the existing strengths in the IB Diploma Programme (DP) and upper Middle Years Programme (MYP): disciplinary depth, research, and real‑world projects.  

The MYP Personal Project at the end of Grade 10 is a key example of how making thinking processes visible helps protect the integrity of learning, as well as deepens it. Students choose a topic they care about, design a long‑term project, document their process, and present outcomes that matter to them. Because each project is unique and process‑driven, teachers can see how AI is being used and coach students toward appropriate and transparent use. In this way, the Personal Project shows what it means to work with AI as a thoughtful tool while keeping student voice, thinking, and originality at the center. 

Across DP subjects, teachers are also making AI use explicit and intentional. Teachers work with students on how to use AI‑powered research tools safely and critically: distinguishing between legitimate databases and AI “slop”, using AI to reorganize notes rather than to “write the essay”, and checking claims against trusted sources. In some classes, teachers pilot carefully designed AI tutors to support specific parts of learning, one example is personalized support in a Chinese language class, where students can interact with a specifically programmed AI to check their sentence structures and coach them to improve their skills, the teacher can then track the AI conversations and student progress. In classes, students use AI to visualize large data sets or test variations in code as part of design and computer science work. 

This is grounded in the deep, personalized learning that already defines the DP at WAB. The Extended Essay asks students to design and carry out a university level research project in a discipline of their choice; CAS and Global Citizenship in Action projects push them into their communities; DP Art asks them to curate a body of work that is represents their ideas and feelings. In all of these, the process is visible: students meet with supervisors, document how their ideas change, and reflect on feedback. That makes it much harder to hand learning over to a chatbot. Instead, AI becomes one more tool they can question, test, and challenge. 

Theory of Knowledge (TOK) is another clear example, as it asks students to examine how knowledge is constructed and what counts as evidence in an age of deepfakes, synthetic media, and AI‑generated text. Questions like “How do we know this image is real?” or “When should we trust an expert or an algorithm?” push our students to think critically about knowledge, evidence, and trust. Director of Innovation in Learning and Teaching, Stephen Taylor, describes TOK as almost “vaccinating” students against uncritical use of AI by building their reasoning, analysis, and skepticism. These discussions connect directly to what students see in their social feeds and in the news. 

Beyond the classroom, you can see the outcome of this approach in the way HS students show up. Throughout our Future Ready panel series this year, Grades 10-12 students sat alongside external experts, asking sharp questions, pushing back on assumptions, and drawing on their own experiences. Stephen notes that the innovation is not that students are blindly using AI; it’s that they are using it more effectively than peers elsewhere. AI can be a co‑pilot for inquiry, feedback, and exploration, while the DP and MYP structures keep intellectual integrity and human judgment at the center. WAB’s flexibility and focus on student agency creates the conditions for highly innovative uses of AI through project development, coding and creativity such as STEMX’s AI in Medicine Day and projects where students are building their own apps and devices. In an era when it’s easy to imagine AI “doing school” for students, WAB’s High School program is deliberately designing learning where students’ own voices, ideas, and learning can’t be automated. 

This year, through our Innovation Series, in collaboration with Stephen Taylor, our Director of Innovation, we’ll be sharing stories and examples of what innovation looks like across WAB. We’ll share stories from classrooms, examples from alumni, and insights from global partners. Our hope is that together, we can build a clearer picture of how innovation at WAB helps our students become better learners and prepared for life beyond WAB.