ToK Exhibition Skills Builder Part 2

Today's post is the second half of a series of lessons designed to build the skills for the ToK Exhibition (thus it's a "ToK Exhibition Skills Builder")

The first lesson is linked here, if you’re yet to read that you can pop back, download the free resources etc.

FREE Lesson Resources !

The Presentation (showing the students what to do) is available at this link

All slides (student forms) as lessons resources are available for free from this link.

Lesson Aims - Building skills.

This lesson is specifically designed to help students to get higher marks on their Exhibition, it does that by developing the skills of:

• Revisiting the Identification of the Personal Link to the Object

• Constructing Perspectives on the prompt, and then

• Linking objects to the prompt.

There is a slightly controversial alteration that we identified last year to IB’s recommendations. Rather than identify objects and then develop perspectives the ToK team that I worked with found it easier for students to develop perspectives on the prompt, and then to identify objects which exemplify those perspectives.

I have also built into the process the use of ToK Concepts (as recommended in the May 2022 Subject Report.

The Lesson Process

I have written my own prompt, the same prompt as used in the last lesson - Why does pre-existing knowledge change ? You, of course, can write your own prompt, or use one of the IB Prompts (obviously in the real Exhibition the students must use one of the prompts given by IB).

In the last lesson students linked objects to the prompt, and explained those links. In this lesson I want them to develop a Perspective (or argument) relating to the prompt - think of it as one of the ways to answer the prompt, our first aim is to get them to write 3 perspectives on the prompt.

So, here I have come up with two perspectives as examples for modelling. The first being

the pre-existing knowledge may change because the predictions made according to that knowledge have become less certain. The ToK concept here being Certainty.

The second being that

pre-existing knowledge may change because it was created at an earlier date, and is no longer justifiable in modern culture. The ToK Concepts here being Culture & Justification.

I then gave students time to write their 3 perspectives on the prompt, in groups, each perspective to include at least one ToK Concept.

Identifying Objects

We then moved on to identifying an object that demonstrated the perspective. Note again we are writing the perspective, and then identifying the object. This reversal of the orthodox order came about after my first experience of the teaching the Exhibition. In that process we identified objects, and then tried to explain the link between the object and the prompt. Doing it in that order we found that there was a lot of similarity in the links described for the 3 objects. This made it far harder for students to score in the higher mark bands for the criteria of justifying the contribution that each individual object makes to the Exhibition.The students had to go back, write unique perspectives, and then select new objects. We soon realised that we needed to reverse that process - hence the Perspectives to object order.

Linking Objects to Perspectives

Then we ask the students to explain the link between the object and the perspective. Note - at this stage we are not linking the Object to the Prompt. We're linking the object to the perspective in order to ensure that the student explains the unique contribution of that object to the Exhibition.

Personalisation of the object.

Now I re-introduce the personalisation of the object. Again, this may at first seem to be the wrong way round, common sense tells us that it would be easier to start with the personal, and work to the general. However, my experience is that it is harder to move good knowledge arguments if we start with the personal. Students find it easier to move between themselves as knowers and the knowledge world if they’ve initially spent time considering objects in the abstract, it just reduces the incidence of anecdotal description - of course, your mileage may vary.

Explanation of the object's link to the perspective back to the prompt !

The final step is to link the explanation of the object’s link to the perspective back to the prompt. Lots of links, I know, but these steps are the operationalisation of the criteria that reads “justification of the particular contribution of that individual object to the Exhibition”. It is this criteria that students need to fulfil to be scoring 7-10 marks in the Exhibition.

The whole process took about 1 hr. If we repeat this process a few times, changing the prompt each time, students will be well prepared for the ToK Exhibition.

I hope that you found this useful.

Have a great day, and stay TokTastic!
Daniel,
Lisbon, November 2022