CAS Guide

A CAS experience belongs to one or more of the 3 CAS strands: creativity, activity and service. A CAS experience can be a single event, a repeating event or a series of different events. The experience can be individual, school- or community-based. 

The CAS project is a special CAS experience which has to be completed once. It has to follow a few additional criteria: It should last at least one month and should challenge students to show initiative, demonstrate perseverance, and develop skills such as collaboration, problem-solving, and decision-making. Thus, it has to involve some social interaction with others (for example a fellow IB student), the student also has to be involved in the planning of the project. It can include one or more of the 3 strands (creativity, activity and service). On Managebac (see ManageBac for more information) the projects are marked with a cube symbol.

In order to show that students are successfully completing CAS, they have to provide some evidence. This can be anything ranging from photos, and little videos, to hand-drawn sketches or plans, and written evidence. Generally, it is useful to provide more than one piece of evidence per experience. 

During the duration of each experience or the project, the student should reflect on their progress, their goals and whether they are successfully attaining the CAS learning outcomes (see below: The 7 Learning Outcomes). The reflections are also the primary evidence for the CAS advisor and coordinators to determine whether the students are doing CAS successfully or if they have to do more. In the reflections, the student can think about what could be improved, changed or what they have learnt during this experience, or also simply how they have experienced doing their experience/project and how they felt.
In order to write meaningful reflections, the following questions provided by the IB can guide students but are not a necessity:

• What do you perceive and notice?
• How you feel being involved?
• What do you think and feel about the activity itself?
• What does the activity mean to you?
• What value does the activity have?
• What did you learn from this activity, and how might you extrapolate/profit from this to apply any lesson to your life more generally?

For CAS experience, students should involve in one or more of the following Learning Outcomes.
1. Strength & Growth: Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth. 
What are you good at and where can you still improve?

2. Challenge & Skills: Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.
Have you tried anything new? What did you struggle with and what new skills have you gained?
3. Initiative & Planning: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience.
How did you start your experience and how did you plan it?

4. Commitment & Perseverance: Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences.
Doing your experience regularly and maybe over a longer period of time. 

5. Collaborative Skills: Demonstrate the skills and recognise the benefits of working collaboratively.
Why is it better to work on this experience in a team? What did you gain from the teamwork that you maybe would not have acheived when doing the experience alone?

6. Global Engagement: Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance.
The IB likes to say: Think globally, act locally. A experience that discusses global issues.
7. Ethics of Choices & Actions: Recognise and consider ethics of choices and actions.
Do your/can your actions and choices have serious consquences for other people/your environment etc.?

ManageBac is the online platform that the Gymnasium am Münsterplatz and many other IB schools use, There the students can document their CAS experiences and the supervisors can directly see their updates and how well they are doing. Each student gets their individual login which can only be accessed by their CAS advisor and the CAS coordinators of the school. The website of the GM can be found under: https://gmbasel.managebac.com/login . The website includes other IB organizing tools (e.g. also for the Extended Essay) but the GM only uses it for CAS.

Each student gets a personal CAS advisor, they are teachers from the school but that does not necessarily mean that it will be a teacher they have in their regular classes as well. The CAS advisor guides and supports the student in creating and completing a meaningful CAS program. They also tell the student whether they are on track with their CAS and doing enough or if they need to do more. The CAS advisor has access to the students ManageBac portfolio and can thus directly see the students updates, experiences, and reflections.