Case Study
Ann Arbor Public Schools
Michigan, United States
Carrie James
It follows them, and it puts it all together and says, ‘This is what you’ve done. This is your portfolio.
Building a Stronger Foundation for the IB Career-related Programme
How a veteran Michigan IB coordinator used ManageBac+ to give the CP Core a durable, two-year home.
When Carrie James joined Ann Arbor Public Schools in 2017, she was stepping into a relatively new area of IB education.
Carrie had begun teaching history and economics in 1999 before becoming an MYP coordinator and later a combined DP and MYP coordinator in Bloomfield Hills Schools. She moved to Ann Arbor to help establish its IB Career-related Programme, initially serving exclusively as CP Coordinator and later overseeing both the CP and DP until her retirement in February 2025.
What attracted her to the CP was that it offered students something fundamentally different from either a traditional career and technical education pathway or a purely academic programme.
Yet Carrie frequently encountered a misconception that the CP was simply a less demanding version of the IB Diploma Programme.
People were like, 'We don't want to make this DP light.' That was a phrase that people said all the time... I don't feel like it's light at all. It's just totally different.
Carrie James, retired Ann Arbor IB CP and DP Coordinator
Carrie explains the CP through three interconnected areas of student development: technical skills, academic skills and employability skills.
Students develop technical expertise through their chosen career-related studies. At Ann Arbor, pathways included business, engineering, automotive services, culinary arts, cosmetology, health science and homebuilding.
They add academic challenge through at least two Diploma Programme courses.
You've taken a kid that already has a career interest, and now you've elevated their rigor.
The CP Core then helps students develop the skills required to apply their learning in professional and community settings. Its four components, Personal and Professional Skills, the Reflective Project, Community Engagement and Language Development, give students opportunities to explore communication, collaboration, ethics, self-awareness, service, language and the perspectives of others.
At Ann Arbor, ManageBac+ was used to support and follow student progress across all four of these CP Core components.
You're building their employability skills... It looks at the ethics, it looks at communication, it looks at collaboration, and it looks at, 'How do you get those jobs?
The programme’s power comes from the way the areas reinforce one another. Its operational challenge comes from the fact that the four components of the Core do not fit neatly into a conventional gradebook.
The Challenge: Managing Learning That Cannot Be Reduced to a Score
Across Personal and Professional Skills, the Reflective Project, Community Engagement and Language Development, students complete extended projects, document experiences, reflect on their development and build evidence of learning over time.
Those kinds of things are difficult to manage, because there is not a direct translation to 'What is your grade on your employability?'
For public school districts, that creates some practical questions: How should evidence of learning be displayed? And, where should this work live?
A district may already use a student information system for official grades, an LMS for individual classes, shared drives for documentation and additional tools for career-related courses. Each system may serve an important purpose, but ew are designed to maintain a connected record of a student’s progress through all four CP Core components across the full two years of the programme.
Carrie had seen the risks of relying on temporary or disconnected systems. During the programme's early years, students created portfolios using an external website-building platform. When that service removed the content, two years of student work disappeared.
Shared drives presented a different problem.
You can make it in a Google Drive, but... where does it live? Where's the longevity? It lives in your drive, it lives in my drive, it lives in a kid's drive. The kid graduates, it's gone.
Schools could build their own folders, spreadsheets and submission processes, but each locally constructed system added another layer for teachers to manage. It could also make it difficult for students to understand how individual reflections, projects and experiences connected to the larger programme.
The Approach: Give the CP Core Dedicated Time and a Shared Home
Carrie believes that one of the most important foundations for a successful programme is dedicated time for students and staff to bring the CP Core together.
The number one thing I think that you would need is... time and space to bring everything together through the Core.
In the programmes Carrie had seen work most successfully, the school offered a dedicated CP Core class. That space allowed students to work across all four components of the Core: Personal and Professional Skills, the Reflective Project, Community Engagement and Language Development, as connected elements rather than unrelated requirements.
But establishing a class is only one part of the structure. The teacher and coordinator also need a way to manage activities, evidence, feedback and progress across two academic years. That was the role ManageBac+ played in Ann Arbor.
We used ManageBac+ for the CP for those Core elements, the Personal and Professional Skills, the Reflective Project.
ManageBac+ is designed to support DP and CP coordination, including management of the Core, programme deadlines and portfolio or eCoursework submission. Its CP functionality includes built-in student worksheets for Core components and unit-planning tools for Personal and Professional Skills and language development.
Rather than requiring teachers to construct separate tracking systems for each requirement, ManageBac+ gave Ann Arbor a shared environment in which all four elements of the Core could be documented, monitored and connected.
A Record That Follows Students for Two Years
One of Carrie's biggest concerns with a conventional LMS was continuity.
A class may close at the end of a semester. A new course code may be created for the following term. Teachers may have to copy selected assignments or resources into a new course shell, while students lose the sense of a continuous journey.
If you're doing Canvas, Schoology, Google Classroom, or whatever the system is, it doesn't follow a kid for two years. In many cases, it doesn't follow them from semester to semester.
The CP is not a collection of isolated semester courses. Its Core develops progressively across two years as students build skills through Personal and Professional Skills, undertake the Reflective Project, engage with their communities and develop their language skills.
ManageBac+ gave that progression a consistent home.
Carrie explained that the platform could "make it easier for the teacher to manage all of this, and the kids to follow their own progress for those two years."
For students, that continuity helped transform separate tasks into a visible body of work.
It follows them, and it puts it all together and says, 'This is what you've done. This is your portfolio.'
ManageBac+ calendars can also bring tasks, deadlines, examinations and programme activities into shared views for staff and students, helping schools make responsibilities visible across classes and year groups.
Complementing the District's Existing Systems
Carrie's experience also offers an important lesson for public school districts: ManageBac+ does not have to replace every existing system to provide meaningful value.
At Ann Arbor, official course assignments and grades continued to be managed through the district's established systems. Carrie did not try to duplicate every DP or career-related course inside ManageBac+.
Everything I'm speaking to you is about those Core elements, and not the courses that the kids are taking.
Trying to move the same grade data between ManageBac+, the district SIS and its classroom LMS could create unnecessary work for teachers. The CP Core, however, required a different kind of environment.
It needed a place for reflection, dialogue, long-term projects, community experiences, language development and student evidence.
ManageBac+ therefore served as the programme layer connecting the Core, while the district's other systems continued to perform their established roles.
This approach allowed the school to introduce ManageBac+ where it solved a distinct problem rather than presenting it as another platform teachers had to use for every aspect of their work.
Protecting Reflection from Becoming a Checkbox
The long-term value of the CP Core depends on students seeing a purpose in the work.
Carrie cautions against turning reflective experiences into conventional assignments simply because a school's existing systems are built around points and grades.
When reflection is reduced to a recurring task worth ten points, students quickly learn to complete the minimum required action. The evidence may technically exist, but the programme's deeper purpose starts to evaporate.
When it becomes a checkbox and an assignment that you're giving ten points to, they're just going to do it to get those ten points.
ManageBac+ helped maintain a distinction between reflective programme work and a conventional score-based assignment.
There are no points to the Core. There is no score... It's all reflection.
For Carrie, that design supported the philosophy behind the CP.
It reinforces that process, right, over the product by using that software. I'm a fan.
Instead of forcing the Core into a gradebook-shaped container, the platform gave students space to document development, receive feedback and make connections among their experiences.
That distinction matters because students are unlikely to invest deeply in work they perceive as administrative busy work.
If they don't see the investment, then they aren't going to invest in it.
Making Student Work Useful Beyond the Programme
Carrie wanted students' CP work to become more than evidence of compliance with programme requirements.
The Reflective Project asks students to examine an ethical dilemma related to their chosen career field. Rather than presenting a simple pro-and-con argument, students consider the perspectives of multiple stakeholders.
For an engineering student examining driverless vehicles, for example, that might include consumers, investors, law enforcement agencies and communities responsible for infrastructure.
Carrie saw this as preparation for the complex thinking students would need in professional life.
The same principle applied to language development. An automotive student might focus on the practical Spanish vocabulary needed to explain a diagnosis, cost or repair timeline to a customer.
All of a sudden, you have become more employable.
By keeping reflections, projects and evidence connected, ManageBac+ helped students build a record they could return to when preparing for an interview, explaining their skills or demonstrating what they had learned.
Ultimately, we want something that's usable. We don't want it to be busy work and have no context, and not have it be something that is tied together.
Supporting Coordinators Without Losing the Programme's Purpose
A CP coordinator must connect career-related studies, Diploma Programme courses, Core requirements, teachers, advisers, deadlines and individual student pathways.
As Carrie put it: "The coordinator has a lot to coordinate."
That work becomes particularly complex when several Core elements have different expectations, rubrics and forms of evidence but do not belong in the district's conventional grading workflow.
When you're running three different things with all of these rubrics and all of these assessments that are with it, that don't have points... it's easier for me to work in ManageBac+ on those elements and interact in that platform.
ManageBac+ provided structure without turning the programme into a series of transactions. It helped Carrie and the CP Core teacher see what students had completed, communicate within the context of their work and keep documentation together across the programme.
Lessons for Schools and Districts Introducing the CP
Carrie's experience points to several foundations that schools should establish when launching or strengthening a Career-related Programme.
Start with the student, not programme recruitment
In a comprehensive public school, the CP may sit alongside AP, the DP, arts, music, journalism and many other pathways. The goal should not be to place every student into the CP or compete with other programmes.
Our goal was never to try to beat another program. It was to work with the kid and say, 'What is the best fit for you? What are your goals, and how can one of these things that we offer you help you meet those goals?'
Build shared understanding
Leaders, counselors and teachers need to understand that the CP is not a reduced Diploma Programme or simply career courses with an IB label. Its value comes from intentionally combining technical, academic and employability skills.
Protect time for the Core
A dedicated CP Core class gives students and teachers the space to make connections among the programme's different elements. Without protected time, responsibilities can become fragmented across staff and departments. If you don't have the opportunity to hold a dedicated CP Class, using a platform like ManageBac+ allows students and teachers to document, communicate about, and reflect on their progress throughout the program.
Create continuity across two years
The school's system should follow students throughout the programme rather than resetting every semester. Students need to see how their experiences, reflections and projects accumulate into a meaningful portfolio.
Let each platform do the job it does best
Districts do not necessarily need to move every course or grade into ManageBac+. The platform can provide the greatest value as a programme-specific environment for the elements that a conventional SIS or LMS was not designed to manage.
Keep reflection reflective
Core work should help students understand themselves, their communities and their future professions. Reducing it to points and completion checks risks weakening both student investment and the programme's purpose.
Creating the Conditions for a Stronger CP
The Career-related Programme can give students a rare combination of professional direction, academic rigor and personal development.
If you want your kid to build technical, academic and employable skills, it's the right program.
But the programme does not become coherent simply because each required element appears somewhere in a schedule or shared drive.
Schools need leadership support, informed advising, dedicated time for the Core and a system capable of holding the student experience together across two years.
For Carrie, ManageBac+ provided that system.
It gave CP Core work a durable home, helped students see their own progress and supported a reflective process that did not naturally fit within the district's conventional grading tools.
The result was not another digital container. It was a clearer structure around a programme designed to help students connect what they learn, what they can do and who they are becoming.
Bring Your CP Core Together
ManageBac+ gives the CP Core a home that lasts the full two years — reflection, projects and evidence in one connected record, without forcing it into a gradebook.