Writing Knowledge Statements: ToK Lesson

So how does knowledge manifest itself in the real world? And how do we develop different perspectives about how it manifests itself in the real world? These are key questions in understanding ToK, and knowledge construction as a whole.

I'm interested in creating ToK resources that make the subject accessible for students who find ToK more challenging or, to be honest, may not be particularly interested in ToK.

There's a video guide to the lesson below.

Writing Knowledge Statements.

Today's lesson is designed to help students build the skill of developing alternative perspectives for things they see in the real world. And start looking at how knowledge manifests itself in that real world. Both skills are central to ToK Exhibition & ToK Essay

Lesson Resources!

The lesson resource can be downloaded from this link.

We start by looking at a few real world scenarios and I ask the students to jot down as many possible reasons for the construction of that real world phenomenon. Give limited time,  the focus here is on a soft element of competition to get as many reasons written down as possible. I've put a few real-world scenarios in the lesson, obviously you can change these up for things which are more appropriate for your context or your students.

Then I do a bit of up front teaching to explain how we move from The Real World to the knowledge world showing them an example from each of the real world scenarios used earlier. This is developing the skill of writing Knowledge Statements.

Then I ask them to do the same themselves, changing the reasons that they gave earlier into "ToK World statements", or knowledge statements. And I start to introduce the Pillars of Knowledge - that is how knowledge is constructed, why knowledge is constructed, how it changes over time and the evaluation of that knowledge. I introduce this to try to extend thinking at the end of this lesson.

Purpose

The purpose of the lesson is to get your students used to identifying the knowledge characteristics of real world phenomena and the idea of using knowledge statements to explain those real world phenomena. Essential skills that we're just creating at a nascent stage at this point in the course.

This lesson also links with

This post on how to write Claims & Counterclaims.

This lesson on building skills for ToK Exhibition.

If this lesson is useful for your ToK teaching, or you just enjoyed this video, then a Like, Subscribe, Comment to Share or subscribe are greatly appreciated

Have a great day!
Daniel,
Lisbon, Nov 22