How to plan your ToK Essay

There's no single formula to best plan your ToK Essay, but it's fairly safe to say that you will need to invest time and (cognitive) energy into planning if you want to be awarded a good score.

However, this is not an overly onerous task if you start early, and spend a short period of time each week on the essay. Over a couple of months this will add up to a substantial foundation of planning, and more importantly - a good understanding of your chosen prescribed title.

So what do I actually do in the planning stage ?

I'll put forward a 6 stage process for planning your essay, I have used IDEO's Design Thinking Stages as the basic framework, within which I have fitted the ToK Essay development activities. As mentioned earlier this is just one of many possible models, you can adapt it according to your needs.

^ stages of planning ToK Essay

You can get a full size version of the diagram above at this link

This process begins after you have chosen your preferred Prescribed Title, if you need help with that process please see the blog (& videos) linked here.

Discovery Phase

During this phase you will build the foundation for planning and writing your ToK Essay. If you get things right at this stage you will save yourself time, work and potential stress later on.

You can start by putting time into your weekly schedule to work on your ToK essay, if you give yourself 2-3 months to complete the essay you will probably only need to put 30mins-1hr / week into your schedule to successfully finish the essay. You should plan backwards from the Draft Deadline (remember the Draft Deadline should always be treated as the Final Deadline). Decide what on date you will stop planning and researching, and start writing. Plan your writing sessions. How many (quality) words can you write in an hour ? Probably about 200, if so then plan 8-10 hours of writing sessions.

You should also decide where you are going to store your planning documents, and record your collaborative sessions for the ToK Essay (eg Google suite, iCloud, OneNote, etc). Obviously ensure that everything is being copied to the cloud, hard drives do sometimes fail...,

Get together the necessary documents (eg IB ToK Subject Guide, Your school's ToK Handbook etc). Ensure that you have passwords for any online databases (eg JSTOR) that you may use.

Finally, make a commitment to yourself. This is private to you, and it's a nice way to make this process valuable and personal to you. My commitment to myself at the beginning of a big project always involves the gratitude that I have to be offered the opportunity to do this, the spirit within which I will do the project, and a respect for the learning that will come from the process. That's my commitment to myself, you can make a commitment which is meaningful to you.

Interpretation Phase.

During this phase you are going to build your personal interpretation of the question. Do this before you start to take on other people's interpretations. It is important that you have created your own understanding of the question before you listen to others so that when it comes to developing and writing the essay you have a starting point which comes from your core inner understanding. When students run into problems with the essay I always ask them what they thought the question was asking (& what their answer to it was) before they started writing the answer. Often the student will not be able to answer this question because they hadn't established their personal (foundational) understanding before taking on the views of others.

You can use the ToK Essay Activators during the Interpretation Phase to help you to develop your own understanding of the Prescribed Title.

The ToK Essay Activators (above) are prompts to help you to develop your own understanding of the essay. You can use these (on your own) to guide your thinking at this early stage.

It is very useful to find a way to record your thinking at this stage. You may enjoying using the scattergram method, or visual thinking through drawing or doodling, or even making a flowchart. However you choose to do it I would strongly recommend having an easily accessible record of your thinking, which is meaningful to you, at this early stage.

Ideation Phase.

Once you've established your own understanding of the essay now is a good time to start to collaborate with your fellow ToK students, groupwork with students who are writing the same PT as you. Collaboration is a give and take relationship, you can offer your understanding of the PT, and in turn they will help you to deepen your understanding by offering their interpretation.

The aim here is to gather lots of ideas, and to develop new interpretations / perspectives. The aim is not to replace your own understanding with someone else's ideas (doing this will make it much harder for you to write a high scoring essay). Your work with other students is to help you to develop your ideas in breadth, depth and scope.

At this stage you can also start honing (refining) your arguments, research sources, and examples that you will draw upon in the essay. As noted in other blogs I recommend using examples that are drawn from your other DP subjects. Using these examples will save you time (as it's content that you've already learned), you can ask your subject teachers for help (eg if you're using an example from Chemistry then you can ask your Chemistry teacher to give you more information about the development of the theory/concept etc). Finally, using examples drawn from your other DP subjects will help you to deepen your understanding in that subject. ToK helps learning in the Hexagon, and the Hexagon helps your learning in ToK.

Your teacher will probably design collaborative group learning experiences with students who are writing the same PT. Remember to find a way of recording these collaborative sessions (eg a journal, doodles, or taking a photo of a board covered in Post-its). These records will help to stimulate ideas and thinking later when you are writing the essay.

Experimentation Phase.

Now it's time to write your essay plan.

The ToK Essay is 1600 words, so you can think of it as being 8-10 paragraphs long. It's not many words (or paragraphs) given the task handed to you by nature of the PTs. You will need to be concise and precise. There is very little room for contextualisation, scene setting and other 'flowery stuff'. You've got to get straight to the point and start executing the Assessment Instrument very early in the essay.

A Note on Structure.

There is no single 'best' ToK Essay structure. You will need to develop a structure which best serves your needs for the way that you want to answer the prescribed title. I have seen high scoring essays which have used lots of different structures (unfortunately I have also seen less successful essays which have also used the range of structures). If you want more detailed help on structure I would recommend getting my ebook "How to write the ToK Essay in 6 easy steps" which is available from the Student Support Section of this website.

During this phase you will need to finalise the arguments, real world examples, evaluation points and implication points that you will use in the essay. You will undertake the bulk of your secondary research (see note about using content from your Hexagon Subjects above).

Show your teacher your Essay Plan, and get feedback on ways to improve the plan. Feedback on the plan is crucial to helping you to write the essay with fewer obstacles later.

Once you and your teacher are happy with your Essay Plan write your Introduction and show it to your teacher. This will help you to know whether you're setting off in the right direction. It will also help to know whether you are using appropriate tone, pitch and style.

A note on The Introduction

There is no need to write 'flowery' introductions about the nature of the universe, the function of existence, the vastness of the universe etc etc. Further, don't start with a quote if it's not relevant to the PT (generally, just don't start with a quote). There are insufficient words available to write in such a descriptive and stylistic manner. You have to get straight to the point. For most students this will be defining the key terms in the essay. If you want more help on what to put into The Introduction see the ebook (How to write the Tok Essay in 6 Easy Steps) from the Student Support section of this website.

Evolution Phase.

Once you have feedback on your Introduction from your teacher it is finally time to write the rest of your essay. As you write your essay you may find that ideas & arguments develop and even change. This is a positive sign that your understanding is developing as you spend more time thinking about the Prescribed Title. If this happens you may need to go back and redraft the Introduction - this is all good, it's the process of Evolution - an adaptation of knowledge to changing circumstances. Congratulations if you experience, this you are growing !

Continue to communicate with your teacher, and show them your writing when it's appropriate to do so. Write to schedule, and submit a fully finished Draft Essay before the Draft Deadline. Fully finished means that the language has been refined (and proof-read if necessary), the bibliography & references are completed, and there is a word count on the essay.

If you have planned your schedule properly you should comfortably finish writing your Draft well before the submission deadline, and you won't have to 'pull an all nighter', or other such stressful experiences !

Once you have submitted the Draft let out a big sigh of relief, and have a small celebration - the difficult bit of the essay is now over.

Well done !

Growth

If you've followed the plan so far you will have submitted a good Draft Essay. The written feedback from your teacher will help you to turn a good Draft into an excellent final essay. When you receive the written feedback act on it as soon as possible as the ideas will still be fresh in both you and your teacher's minds. Don't leave the written feedback until the last day before the final submission deadline as this will not leave time for any further clarification that you need from your teacher. I usually give my students a month between receiving written feedback and submitting the final essay, I urged them to work on the written feedback at the beginning of that month rather than towards the end.

After dealing with the written feedback you can submit your essay, and you're done for this component of your IB Diploma. However, you're not actually "done".

The ToK Essay is probably most academic, esoteric and conceptually challenging piece of writing that most students have undertaken at this stage of their education, and as such it can profoundly change you. The skills that you have learned during the essay will serve you well for the upcoming DP exams, and well into your time in Higher Education, and subsequently into your career. Many students have told me that their first year of university entailed a lot more "ToK-like" thinking than they had anticipated (regardless of the subject they study at uni). One student who was studying Film at uni wrote to me after the second term to tell me that he was loving his course because "it's just like doing ToK with a camera.".

If you need help with any aspect of your ToK Essay or Exhibtion please feel free to contact me at Daniel@TokToday.com.

Stay ToK-tastic!
Daniel,
Lisbon, Portugal,
September 2022.