IBDP Extended Essay Timeline - Sessions & Deadlines for Students
One of the most time consuming and important parts of my role as IBDP Extended Essay Coordinator is planning the timeline for each cohort of students. What deadlines make sense for each group? When do holidays & IA due dates fall? What kinds of sessions do I need to run to support the
students? In this blog post I will share the general guidelines I use to make these decisions, the student sessions I choose to run and a Word Document version of the timeline for this cohort (class of 2025).
At my school we choose to break the EE process down into several mini-deadlines, which are:
Year 1:
EE Advisor request - November 13th
First draft EE Research Question (RQ) - December 11th (just before winter break)
EE Outline & Bibliography due - January 25th
Reflection #1 in RRPF form - January 31st
2500 words of draft #1 due - March 18th
Reflection #2 in RRPF form - April 24th
4000 words of draft #2 due - May 16th
Year 2:
Final draft due - first week back in school (August)
Viva voce - mid-September
Final reflection late September
Among all of these due dates are a variety of informational sessions designed to help teach students what the extended essay is all about & provide guidance through each step of the process. While we tend to start the process early at my school we try to let students get through most of their first semester before they select their EE Subject area, topic & write the first draft of their research question. This allows them to build some knowledge in their chosen subject area and really take some time to think about their ideas. Here are the sessions I offer to support students during short 40-minute sessions.
Year 1 Sessions:
What is the EE? IBDP Induction - September 6th
EE Fair (Intro EE Subjects) with teachers, students & posters - October 4th
EE Basics (Who, What, When & RRS set-up) - November 1st
Developing your Research Question - November 22nd
Research Tools (with librarian) - January 17th
The Reflection Process - January 31st
EE Formatting & Reflection #2 - April 24th
Year 2 Sessions:
What is the Viva voce & finalizing your EE for upload - early September
EE Completion celebration!
The final part of our EE process are the Writer's Workshops, these are events held in the library on campus where students and teachers have time to focus completely on the EE. Usually one is held on a Saturday from about 10 am to 1 pm and one on a Wednesday afternoon from 1:30 pm to 4 pm. We have them just before each major draft deadline. These help our students find time to meet with their advisors, focus and motivate each other to be productive. There are so many deadlines and things to do in the IB Diploma Program that it can be hard to focus on the EE, so this is something we do to help. This year we will do our two Writer's Workshops on:
Here is the process all in an editable Word document that you can use to modify for your own school's needs.
I hope that this post was helpful, if you need any other resources or ideas for the IBDP Extended Essay you can find several resources in my TPT shop and a few other blog posts about the EE. The first post is all about the IBDP EE, an introduction post and I have also written one about the different roles in the EE, including the role of the student, supervisor, librarian etc.
As always, thanks for reading teachers, travelers & curious souls of all kinds.
The Roaming Scientist
