How to Teach ToK (New to ToK Pt 3)

When designing lessons ToK Teachers may want to focus on 3 factors:

• the development of Skills

• ways to speed up learning

• group dynamics in the ToK class

Click here for a full size version of the diagram.

When I started to write the "New to Teaching ToK" series I was always a bit worried about the third part - the 'what do you actually do ?' part. My concern was (is?) that no single ToK lesson is identical to any other lesson, and there's no simple formula for designing the lessons.

I used to place much more emphasis on making resources, and giving them away to other ToK teachers. However, I started to think that this isn't a particularly helpful approach for those teachers or for their students. The problem of 'pick up & give' lessons is that they haven't been designed for that particular group of students. Of course the teacher could modify the lesson so that it meets the particular needs of the students concerned, however that can be more work for the teacher than just writing it themselves from scratch, because the teacher hasn't written that lesson.

So, when I came to the "what do I actually do ?" bit I thought it best to go back to the principles by which I design lessons. I boiled this down to 3 main aims:

• Skills Development - the longer I teach ToK the more I realise that it's a skills course, developing skills is everything. Once students have the skills they'll fill in the content themselves.

• Speed - we have a maximum of 100 hrs to teach, and assess, the whole course. Accelerating the cognitive development & understanding of the students needs to be a focus of every lesson.

• Group Dynamics - using group dynamics fuses together the skills development and speeding up cognitive development.

I made a video on each of these areas:

• Group Dynamics

• Speed (Cognitive Development)

• Skills Development

and there are far more details on each at

Group Dynamics blog post linked here.

Speed (Cognitive Development) blog Post linked here.

Skills Development blog Post linked here.

I hope that ToK teachers find this content useful (if you did a Like on WordPress or YouTube would be much appreciated), if you have requests for particular content please let me know (Daniel@TokToday.com).

thanks for reading, and have a great day!
Daniel,
Lisbon, Portugal. August 2022.