Christmas ToK Lesson
Teaching DP in the last week of term before Christmas can present us with somewhat of a challenge. Usually there is a festive feel in the air, and the students may be having ‘parties’ in some classes, some may even want to have a party in your lesson. I’m a bit of a grumpy Scrooge who prefers to keep learning going - we have limited teaching time, and a party is more work for less gain than running your lesson as usual. However I am not totally immune to the Yuletide festivities - so I usually try to bring a festive theme into the lesson, without losing the learning objectives - that’;s what I have for you today - a ToK lesson which introduces AoK Natural Sciences, but applied in a festive grotto of presents, reindeer and softly falling snow.
A video explaining the lesson is linked below.
Christmas ToK Lesson
The ToK of Santa Claus: Learning Objectives
I’ve called the lesson The ToK of Santa Claus. The lesson has two main learning objectives:
1) students consider the differences between necessary and sufficient evidence, and many points in between.
2) students learn key points about the scientific method.
Mentimeter - a great learning tool
So, we start the lesson with a Mentimeter poll - if you haven’t used Mentimeter it’s a great (free) tool to get engagement and to check understanding. Sometimes I don’t get any further than the mentimeter starter activity in a lesson.
This Mentimeter quiz asks students to consider the terms necessary and sufficient in relation to evidence. At the risk of trivialising these ideas we’re just starting to scaffold students in their exploration of these terms.
Popper's Theory of Falsification
After the quiz we go into a Christmas version of Popper’s Falsification Theory, it’s a loose application of that theory - but should be ‘sufficient’ for the purposes of a ToK course. This is followed by a bit of upfront teaching of the theory of falsification.
At this point, maybe about 50 mins into the lesson we can move to group work, and introduce the scientific method. We ask groups to use the Scientific Method to research the existence of Santa.
Activity 2 then gives students a more conceptually challenging task which helps them to understand perspectives in AoK Natural Sciences. We ask each group to take on a different perspective / role as a knower when considering the existence of Santa.
And then finally, if you have a really long lesson, or incredibly enthusiastic ToK students we have 6 open ended questions which link the role of evidence in The Natural Sciences to other ToK concepts - the operative concepts in each question are obviously in purple bold.
And, there we have it - a suitably festive lesson which will still enable ToK learning to take place.
I wish you and your family all the best for the season, and I hope to see you back here in the New Year.
Seasons greetings to you all,
Daniel,
Lisbon, Portugal