Photos to Concepts - Lesson Starter Activities
I like lesson starter activities to be fairly low cost for both students and teachers alike, low cost in planning time, stress and brainpower. If I try to start a lesson with an article from an esteemed publication (like Nat Geo or The Atlantic) I find student energy can dip down pretty quickly.
My students sometimes need to be 'eased' into the ToK Mindset at the beginning of the lesson.
So, the two lesson starter activities that I present today meet the criteria of super-low cost in terms of planning, stress and brain power. Simple they may be, but they can also be very powerful in helping students to learn ToK. Their power comes in the ensuing discussion rather than in the complexity of the planning. - Take a rest ToK Teacher !
Picture - Concept Lesson Starter Activity.
This starter activity is super straightforward. You simply show the students a random photo of anything (you can use a random picture generator such as this), and ask them the question
"Which ToK Concepts are represented by this photo?"
Of course any ToK Concepts can be linked to any photo if you are able to construct a good argument, and that is the essential value of this activity. This very simple, no planning, activity has led to some of my best ToK lessons over the years.
"Which ToK Concepts are represented by this photo?"
Obviously the learning comes from how you develop the discussion about why the students chose certain concepts rather than others..
Develop discussion.
Learning:
Students become familiar with ToK Concepts.
Students learn how to link concepts to objects (exhibition)
Students learn how to use ToK Concepts in arguments
The close up Macro lesson starter.
Like the starter above, this starter activity is pretty self explanatory. You start the lesson by showing students a close up macro photograph, you ask them to guess what the object is. As you slowly reveal more and more of the photo the students write their guesses down, as the object is slowly revealed. It’s useful for them to look back, once the object has been revealed, to see how many different things they thought that object could be.
Example of super macro image on the right, and 'revealed' object on the left.
There are some great examples of the type of objects that can be used on this website.
This simple activity can be used to teach perspective, of course every student knows that if you look at things from different angles your experience of them changes, (your knowledge of them changes). This activity could be used to ask why, if we know about perspective, do so many of us cling to absolutes in many circumstances ? Perspective is a much more complex concept than it first appears. Perspective changes knowledge. This activity is just rooting the word perspective in ToK, it’s making it domain specific (a big thing in the Self Regulated Learner literature).
Perspectives are the basis for arguments - which are one of the key ways to access the higher marks on ToK Essay & Exhibition.
So, here are 2 apparently simple activities, but they have the potential to take students a long way in ToK knowledge & ToK thinking. In my experience these starters can often extend across the whole lesson. They are simple activities which have the potential to be very complex.
There's another ToK lesson starter activity for you here.
If you try either of these starter activities I'd love to know how they worked out, and how they could be improved for the future. If you have any requests for other learning resources please let me know (Daniel@TokToday.com).
Daniel,
Lisbon, August 2022.