Teaching frameworks: inquiry-based, Montessori, and traditional instruction

Curriculum vs. pedagogy

Curriculum is what’s taught and how it’s graded, set by an external body like the IB or Cambridge. Pedagogy is how the classroom is actually run day to day — decided by the individual school, not the exam board — and it’s almost entirely invisible from a curriculum name alone. A school’s IB authorization or Cambridge registration tells you nothing about whether children spend their day in teacher-led lessons or self-directed project work.

This is the gap most marketing pages gloss over: “student-centered,” “holistic,” and “individualized” are used so loosely across school websites that they’ve stopped meaning anything specific.

Inquiry-based learning

Inquiry-based classrooms build lessons around student-generated questions rather than a fixed lecture sequence: the teacher poses an open problem or theme, and students investigate, research, and construct understanding with guidance rather than direct instruction.

This is the pedagogy the IB’s Primary Years Programme (PYP) formally mandates as part of its framework — one of the few cases in this guide where curriculum and pedagogy are bundled together by design, rather than left to the individual school. Any school authorized for the PYP runs its early years this way because the IB requires it, not as an optional approach the school chose independently.

A few PYP-authorized schools in Japan:

Montessori-style education

Montessori classrooms mix age groups (typically in three-year bands), give children long uninterrupted work periods to choose from a set of specialized materials, and minimize whole-class direct instruction, particularly at early-years and primary level.

It’s less common above elementary school in Japan’s international school market, and a school describing itself as “Montessori-inspired” without formally trained staff or Montessori-body accreditation (through AMI or AMS, for instance) may be borrowing the language more than the method — worth asking about directly.

A school running a Montessori track in Japan:

Traditional / direct instruction

Traditional instruction is teacher-led: a set lesson sequence, whole-class delivery, textbook-based coursework, and periodic testing. It’s common at the secondary level even inside otherwise inquiry-friendly schools, because A Level and AP-style external exams reward focused content coverage, and it remains the default model at many American-curriculum and Cambridge-pathway schools once students reach the exam years.

Why identical curricula can look different

Outside the IB PYP’s built-in mandate, curriculum and pedagogy are independent choices. Two schools can both be registered Cambridge IGCSE centers and run entirely different classrooms — one built around project-based inquiry units, the other around direct instruction toward the exam syllabus. Neither approach is more “authorized” than the other; Cambridge and the IB certify what’s taught and assessed, not the method used to get there.