Knock, Knock, it's TOK! When it comes to opening your door to Theory of Knowledge, would you rather leave it closed?
As an English B teacher I always used to feel stressed about making connections to Theory of Knowledge - I had enough on my plate preparing my students for external assessment! If you can relate to this, I want to let you know you don’t have to do a lot of extra planning in order to let TOK into your classroom.
Read on for 3 easy ways to make TOK connections that require less than 5 minutes of planning.
#1 Reflect after reading comprehension
While the Paper 2 texts are always based on a variety of topics and themes, while doing comprehension practice or past papers I always liked to get students to reflect at the end on what ‘Area of Knowledge’ could be linked to the text/s.
If you need a reminder, the areas of knowledge are history; the human sciences; the natural sciences; mathematics; and the arts.
This is a concrete way for students to become more familiar with the areas of knowledge and use higher-level, interdisciplinary thinking. The best thing is, no planning is required! Simply ask the students as a closure activity.
For complete Paper 2 practice reading comprehension resources that include this TOK reflection question, click here and here.
#2 - Ask questions during Individual Oral practice
When analysing extracts for the Individual Oral, students identify and discuss themes and ideas. While practicing for the individual oral, I often had guiding questions for sections 1, 2 and 3, and simply added a TOK-related question to part 3 for students to reflect on. Here’s an example - what knowledge question could you create, based on this text/extract? You could ask the same question after reading the entire novel.
I’ve taught TOK myself, and one of the biggest challenges my students had was formulating knowledge questions, so any help they can receive from other subjects is a huge benefit! Formulating questions also helps students build their conceptual-thinking muscles, which is very important when they reflect on English B themes during the Individual Oral. For a concrete example, here’s a groupwork assessment activity that already includes a knowledge question for students to reflect on. My students did this piece of assessment in Year 1 of English B, and by Year 2 I had them creating their own knowledge questions.
#3 - Consider different perspectives
One of TOK’s assessment objectives is to “demonstrate awareness and evaluation of different points of view.”*, which is a necessary skill for our English B students so they can understand a range of ideas in different cultural contexts, not to mention step into the shoes of the characters they are reading about in literature.
For simple, concrete ways to reflect on different perspectives, Project Zero has a whole range of resources on perspective-taking. One of my favourites is ‘True for Who?’ which I adapted by taking a problem, event or dilemma from the novel we were reading, and got students to analyse it from the viewpoint of different characters. Great thinking skills for TOK and excellent preparation for in-depth analysis of literature for the Individual Oral!
I hope you find these ideas helpful. What other ways do you open your doors to TOK?
*Source: International Baccalaureate Organization. (2020). Theory of knowledge guide: First assessment 2022 [Online]. 5, 14
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