In an IB education, you guide your students to reflect deeply. Thinking about their thinking, being metacognitive, and asking big questions are the order of the day. How can you as a TOK educator design a course that creates opportunities for students to do this?
This handbook below gives you three options to choose from as you begin designing your TOK course. Select the approach that best suits your classroom and let’s get designing!
The TOK course comprises 100 teaching hours, delivered over the course of 15 months approximately, or what is deemed, “concurrency of learning,” going over both years of the Diploma Programme. When approaching course design, consider the interplay between different building blocks as outlined below and in the illustration.
This interplay allows us to explore knowledge from an anatomical perspective via the knowledge framework – scope, perspectives, methods and tools, and ethics – as well as the knowledge questions, which serve as a map to explore the concepts, themes, and AOKs, resulting in an understanding of what we know and how we know what we know.
Designing the course
So how can you design a TOK course while ensuring that you give importance to all the elements? Here are three suggested ways to go about planning a TOK course:
Regardless of which approach you choose, ensure that the pointers below are addressed.
- Maintain a sustained focus on the core theme
- Address the knowledge framework elements in unit planning
- Consistently integrate TOK assessment skills into all units
- Integrate appropriate ATL skills necessary for assessment success into all units
- Cover the two optional themes in Year 1
- Complete the TOK exhibition end of Year 1
- Complete the TOK essay halfway through Year 2
Learning experiences are an integral part of course design for TOK. Regardless of the approach you use, here is a suggestive roadmap to help you develop a meaningful learning experience:
Delivering the course
Schools approach assigning TOK teachers differently. Some prefer to have one teacher; others opt for a group of teachers. Each approach is determined by different factors such as the size of the cohort and available expertise amongst teachers.