The answer to PISA is project work. At LIS, it’s just part of the timetable.

After the latest PISA results, Germany is rethinking how its schools teach. At Leipzig International School, that way of teaching has been the everyday reality since 1992.

This week, education ministers across central Germany set out what follows the latest PISA results. New curricula are already being written: away from teaching from the front and from worksheets, towards project work. Content, the ministers said, should be worked out independently or in teams. The goal is a school that encourages young people to think critically.

It is the right direction, and good news for children across Saxony.

It is also a fairly precise description of what has happened at Leipzig International School every day since 1992. The difference is one of timing. One system is beginning to write the reform. We have spent three decades teaching this way.

Learning that moves

In Primary, everything begins with a question rather than a worksheet. Why does a ship float? Who decides what gets built in our city? What happens to the things we throw away?
Children research, build models, test them, abandon them and build again. They interview experts, curate exhibitions, argue about findings. Reading, writing and mathematics don’t run alongside the question — they run through it, because you need them to get anywhere. Reading even has a lesson of its own: Library is a timetabled subject in Primary, and the result is visible every day in a school full of children who read because they want to.
And because a number on a report card doesn’t tower over these years, curiosity stays what it should be: a motor, not a risk. Children who aren’t afraid of the wrong answer ask better questions.

Intentionally designed

In Secondary, something is added — not substituted. Academic depth, examinations, real demands: all of that is here. Alongside it, and treated as equally important, is the work that cannot be done alone. Students learn to take responsibility in a team, to accept criticism, to sit with a perspective that isn’t theirs and to give reasons for the one that is.

Emotional intelligence, collaboration and the capacity to make an impact are not soft extras beside the academic programme. They are the condition for knowledge doing anything at all later on. The IB Learner Profile runs through it: inquiring, reflective, communicative, principled. Qualities you cannot examine. Only practise.

Critical thinking, then, is taught, practised and assessed — most visibly in Theory of Knowledge, which is compulsory and graded, and which spends two years on a single question: how do I know that what I think I know is true?
That question has become considerably more urgent. Andreas Schleicher, who leads PISA at the OECD, recently put it this way:

„Where students are intentionally taught how to interpret evidence from AI he use of AI seems to be more positively related to learning outcomes. So preparing young people with the right levels of AI literacy may become an antidote against the kind of more negative effects.“

— Andreas Schleicher, OECD [the_oecd Instagram: Video published 8.09.2026]

Note the word intentionally. AI literacy of that kind does not arrive with a laptop trolley. It comes from years of being taught how to test a claim, weigh a source and notice the difference between an answer that sounds right and one that is — in the science lab, in a history essay, in a language lesson, wherever a machine can now produce a plausible first draft in seconds. Theory of Knowledge gives that work a name and a grade. It is not where it lives. It runs through every subject we teach, and it did so long before a chatbot could write an essay.

Proven by results

In July, our Class of 2026 received their IB Diploma results. The 65 students averaged 32.7 points, against a global average of 30.88. Seven scored above 40, five of them 42 or higher — equivalent to a 1.0 Abitur, the highest grade attainable in the German system. Thirty-five earned the bilingual diploma, awarded for completing and excelling in two languages. The diploma is recognised by universities worldwide and as a Hochschulzugangsberechtigung in Germany.
Strong numbers, and still only part of the picture.

What no points total captures is what two years of the IB does to a person. The Extended Essay that shows you what intellectual rigour actually feels like, and what it costs. The moments of doubt, and the decision to keep going anyway. Our graduates leave more resilient, more independent and better at judgement than they arrived.

None of this is easy. It needs small classes, well-trained teachers and a great deal of time for feedback, and it cannot be introduced by decree. But it works, and it has worked in the middle of Leipzig for more than thirty years. If Saxony and Thuringia are setting out on this road, we are glad of it.
You can read about project work. It is better to watch it happen.

Virtual Open Day: 29 September 2026
Open Day on campus: 7 November 2026