It was ToK PD and Planning time this week at my school, so our ToK teaching team of 6 gathered to ruminate, cogitate and prognosticate. I find ToK PD is always the most fun and rewarding PD, especially when it’s in-house PD. Our main aims for our ToK PD were to reflect on ToK Teaching 2018-19, and to make changes to improve things for 2019-20. This is the 13th year that I’ve taught ToK, and I’ve never taught it the same way twice.
When reflecting on the year my big realisation was that the students find it difficult to write KQs because they find it difficult to identify the Knowledge Issues / Knowledge Problems. Now, I know that Knowledge Issues / Knowledge Problems are vestigial structures from previous iterations, and that they don’t exist in the current iteration. However, I’m not sure how you teach students to interrogate knowledge and knowledge construction without teaching them what the potential problems of knowledge and knowledge construction might be.
So, I asked the ToK FaceBook Grp (“Do you still teach Knowledge Issues ? If not, how do you teach Students to construct Knowledge Questions ?“). I got 2 responses. One person said that she still teaches Knowledge Issues (just like me). Another person said that they teach Knowledge Claims rather than Knowledge Issues (as specified in the current Subject Guide). However I’m not sure how to teach Knowledge Claims without teaching Knowledge Issues/Problems. So, without any better guidance our ToK team decided to place greater focus in the coming year on the teaching of Knowledge Issues.
At the end of this post you can find a PDF of the Presentation used in one of the sessions of the PD, if you want access to the actual moving / animated Presentation please use this link here.
I hear that in the next version of ToK (aka “ToK The Next Generation”) the IB will give us a list of Knowledge Questions so we will no longer have to teach how to write a KQ. However, I think we’ll still have to teach Knowledge Issues, because how are the students supposed to be able to explore, and evaluate, KQs within AoKs if they don’t know what they’re looking for ? (the Knowledge Issues are the “destination of that exploration”).
Anyway, back to our ToK plans for next year. We’re going to start G11s giving Presentations in the last few weeks of this summer term, and finish those presentations in the first few weeks of the Autumn term. The ToK Teaching Team had a long discussion as to whether we should move the Presentation to Jan/Feb of G12, there are many advantages to such a model, but ultimately we decided against it due to Fixture Congestion in Jan/Feb (Mock Exams, IAs, EAs etc).
The two discussions (should we teach KI’s? and when shall we do Presentations?) are actually the same discussion, which is what are the skills required for ToK ? Once identified, how do we best teach those skills. Of course there are the 5 AtL Skill clusters as identified by IB. I think that 4 of those skills play a supporting role to Thinking Skills (at least in the ToK classroom). Success in ToK Teaching requires making those Thinking Skills ToK specific. The ability to do that in the classroom is complex, demanding and requires a highly skilled teacher.
I see a lot of resources concerning what to teach in a ToK course, but far less on how to teach a ToK course. I think that a focus on teaching Knowledge Issues (our first discussion above) helps to sharpen the focus on developing thinking skills in the ToK course as it draws us away, somewhat, from the temptation to dwell on the RLS. However, I’m acutely aware that Knowledge Issues are not in the current Guide as such, and that they have been replaced with the Claim-Counterclaim structure (of which I am not adverse, albeit a little adversarial), but this structure still requires the claim-counterclaim structure.
So, my next steps in planning next year’s course is start looking at pedagogy which explicitly teaches thinking skills (rather than ToK structures), if anyone has any good suggestions please pass them my way.
The big take-away from all of our plans is much more direct, explicit, focussed and upfront teaching of the skills required for teaching Knowledge Issues from the start of G11. Here’s a link to our evolving ToK Handbook which contains our Scheme of Work, if you’re interested.
I become ever more interested in the craft of teaching ToK rather than the content of a ToK course. It’s both the most intriguing and beguiling subject to teach as it’s open ended skills based format leaves it wide open to student and teacher content interest. The thinking skills required by the course are often entirely novel to students, and therefore effective ToK pedagogy demands highly accomplished constructivist pedagogy.
enjoy your ToK Teaching & Learning !
Daniel,
Bangkok May 2019
ToK PD (PDF)
Link to Google Slides of ToK PD (with lots of moving animation bits)
ToK Trump 
Hi, I was wondering whether you would publish your thoughts on this years November essay titles, as your analysis is always extremely insightful.
Hi John, I am concentrating more on developing constructivist teaching materials than writing essay explanations at the moment. However, if there’s a particular question that you’re interested in I’ll see if I can build some learning activities to help students to access that question. Many thanks for your very kind comments, they are much appreciated.