New to teaching ToK? (Part 1)
What to do in the first couple of lessons.
Overview video in under 60 seconds.
If you're new to teaching Tok you may be wondering what to do in your first few lessons, you may have been to the IB Cat 1 and Cat 2 training, and yet you’re still wondering what to do in the first few lessons, ToK presents us with a syllabus which has no content, but it does have a framework. It is quite natural to ask what do I do with this ? where do I start ? and what should I be starting with?
This is the first in a 3 part series of blogs written to help teachers who are new to teaching ToK. I will draw on my (17) years of experience of teaching ToK to tell you what I do, what has been successful and why I do it. I will also give you some free resources that you can use in your first few ToK lessons if you choose to do it the same way that I do it.
The 3 blogs will provide you with a way to start teaching your ToK course.
Blog 1: What to do the first few lessons (this blog).
Blog 2: Ways to structure your ToK course.
Blog 3: How to actually teach ToK.
The detailed video of this blog.
The formal title of these first couple of lessons is “Emotional Orientation”, but we could subtitle it “teaching students not a subject”. This may seem obvious, and you’re probably a very emotionally intelligent and affectively sensitive teacher of your main subject, well we just need to ensure that we bring those skills and that approach over to ToK.
#1 Students not Subject.
I’m going to approach this with three main parts to it:
Emotional Orientation.
Group Dynamics
How to teach ToK
These three parts are obviously inter-linked, and they form a very particular approach to teaching ToK, an approach that I have developed over a significant period of being a ToK teacher.
Emotional Orientation of students not subjects
My first piece of advice to teachers who are new to teaching ToK is to remember that you are teaching students not a subject. If you successfully teach a hexagon subject you will be very aware of the importance of thinking about the students in front of you rather than the subject itself. Well, the same applies to Tok, however sometimes new teachers can become distracted by the ToK framework.
“The brain does much more than recollect. It compares, synthesizes, analyzes, generates abstractions. We must figure out much more than our genes can know. That is why the brain library is some ten thousand times larger than the gene library. Our passion for learning, evident in the behaviour of every toddler, is the tool for our survival. Emotions and ritualized behaviour patterns are built deeply into us. They are part of our humanity. But they are not characteristically human. Many other animals have feelings. What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behaviour patterns of lizards and baboons. We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos
So in these first few lessons I spend the time getting to know the students in my class, I want to know them as individuals, what motivates them what are they interested in, what type of learning tasks they enjoy doing, what preconceptions they bring to the classroom and most importantly what knowledge and skills do they have that will help us to supercharge our TOK course. One of the common challenges that most ToK teachers face is that we don't have enough time to deliver this course, if your school gives you the IB's recommended time allocation it is only 100 hours, and some schools struggle to even give the full recommended time. In order to mitigate for time constraints we have to develop a course which draws upon the qualities, values, skills and engagements of the students. This needs to be a student led course, more than a teacher led course, by promoting student led delivery you accelerate learning, and reduce the pressure on time.
So where to start? : every human experience is partly an emotional experience.
The students are bringing their emotional orientation towards school, IB, ToK, you, etc . What you are interested in is what emotions do these students bring into my classroom ? and what are their core emotional frameworks ? and how can I shape their emotions so that they are positive about ToK?
Games!
So in those first couple of lessons I like the students to experience ToK as low-stakes, and enjoyable. I try to play a few games and get them moving around the classroom. The games are designed to allow me to get to know more about them. One of the key games that I play I call "Fact, Opinion, Belief and Truth". I have linked this resource below, you can adapt the resource for your own requirements.
In this game students have to classify statements as Facts, Opinion, Beliefs or Truths. This game seems to be overly simple, but of course students should quickly start debating how we define a fact, or a truth. Having both ‘Opinion” and ‘Belief’ in there as categories often leads to much debate. I have often found that students will appeal to me, as the teacher, to tell them the definition of one of the categories, and this gives me a great opportunity to tell them for the first time that it’s up to them to arrive at their own definition. This is a key moment for modelling ToK thinking, particularly if the students have come from a pre-DP curriculum based around pre-determined knowledge (such as iGCSE). You can bookend this game with students completing their own knowledge statements (such as “I know____ a fact”, and “I believe_______”.). By completing this both before and after the game we’re doing Reflection, without mentioning the word Reflection, more on that in later videos.
Other games that I use in these first couple of lessons will involve the ToK Concepts - especially Power, Truth and Responsibility. I link resources to these in the video description.
The objective of these games is two-fold - one to give students positive experiences of being in ToK (proactively address their emotional orientation to the subject), and secondly to give me an understanding of who I have in my class so that I can tailor lessons to their interests and skills in order to increase engagement, and overcome time pressures in the course. Which leads us into our second aspect: Group Dynamics.
#2 Group Dynamics
Each ToK class is different, and each student is different in every class to which they belong. The group dynamics of your ToK class are unique. You can influence these dynamics, you can shape them, these dynamics are your value added variable for success. Think of them as being a form of momentum which will carry you and the students along when things are tough. However, to take advantage of the unique group dynamics of your class you need to develop a good understanding of them in a range of different circumstances. During these first few lessons of the ToK Course you can design activities which will give you an insight into the group dynamics of your class, and the potential dynamics during a range of different learning activities.
Murphey et al (2012) use the term "collaborative agency" to describe the synergistic power of positively integrated groups working together to a common goal. The authors construct an argument that rather than taking the individual as the key unit for understanding learning we should take the group as the unit for understanding outcomes. Therefore we should start with the group if we want to positively effect such outcomes.
I will try out a few different group activities in these first few lessons to see how the students react. Such activities include competitive group games, creative group games, group challenges incl. Problem solving, group presentations and drama.
I want to make a special mention for the role of drama, Drama is, in my experience, incredibly powerful in the ToK classroom. By giving the students very time limited ad lib scenarios you are making them develop an understanding of perspective, purpose, context and role of knowledge producers, knowledge communities and the knower. You are also building positive group dynamics, and you have the added bonus that generally the students don’t feel like they’ve been to a heavy academic class, but have spent the lesson having fun doing some drama. ToK Today will bring you some videos specifically on how to use drama in ToK in the coming months.
In summary these first couple of lessons are your first opportunity to intentionally start building the group dynamics which will be so important to building the skills and ability for the students to realise success in the limited time available.
That’s a convenient segue into the final element of today’s video: Norms of Co-construction.
#3 Norms of Co-Construction.
We know that the best approaches to teaching and learning promote student agency and enquiry. This is only even more evident in ToK, where there’s no defined content, but the course requires students to develop a particular lens and then to apply that lens to the things that they are interested in in the world. As such, my aim for every ToK class is that we develop a norm of co-construction - that is that the students develop and deliver the learning for each other. The first few lessons are essential for establishing that norm. - how do we do this?
The games that I talked about earlier can be delivered so that students variously take the roles of participants, organisers, and assessors / judges. I will hand the board markers over to one or two students and tell them they’re in charge of running this section of the lesson. I will also put a few students in charge of judging the outcomes of the games. The games are pretty low stakes so there’s never any peer stress caused by this, and the students quickly expect to have an active role in the ToK classroom. Again, as we look at how to teach ToK in future videos I will come back to the Norms of Co-construction.
Summary
So, there we have the first 2-3 hours of ToK teaching as I do it. In summary - intentionally address the emotional orientation of the students to ToK, start building positive group dynamics, and start establishing a norm of co-construction.
If you’re an experienced ToK teacher you probably do these things anyway. However, I felt it valuable to make this video for colleagues who are new to teaching ToK because I don’t think it’s Self Evident in the Course Guide, and the IB Workshops that I have attended have focussed on What to teach, but not How to teach it.
Daniel Trump,
Founder of ToK Today.
Resources.
If you've made it this far you very much deserve some free resources! These are some of the resources (for playing ToK Games) that I mentioned in the long video (you may have to adapt them for your local circumstances):
Thunks (this is just a starter, you can find many more at this link)
References.
Sagan, C., Druyan, A., Malone, A., Sagan, C., Soter, S., Andofer, G., & McCain, R. (2013). Cosmos. Random House Inc.
Murphey, T., Falout, J., Fukada, Y., Fukuda, T. (2012). Group Dynamics: Collaborative Agency in Present Communities of Imagination. In: Mercer, S., Ryan, S., Williams, M. (eds) Psychology for Language Learning. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137032829_15