New to ToK #3: Using ToK Skills to improve learning.
We start to identify the specific skills which will help students to learn IB Theory of Knowledge.
Skill Development
It took me a few years of teaching ToK to realise that developing ToK Skills is far more important than teaching the Framework, Knowledge Questions, or even the Concepts. OK, maybe I'm a slow learner, but I wonder how many other ToK teachers have realised that it's mainly about skills?
How many times does the word "skill" or "skills" appear in The ToK Study Guide?
The word "Skill" or "Skills" appears only once in the whole body of the ToK Subject Guide (First Exams 2022) - Well, OK it appears 12 times, but 10 of those are in the generic "this is the Diploma" stuff at the beginning, and the word appears once in the references. Only one occurrence of the word "Skills" in the body of the ToK Guide? Does this mean that Skills aren't important in ToK?
Are skills important in ToK?
Ok, there are some "Aims of ToK" outlined on page 7 of the Study Guide, I often hear these cited as the skills for ToK. They do, indeed, provide us with a good starting point for identifying the skills for success in ToK, but they are very wide and overarching. Maybe too broad and overarching for scaffolding ToK to make it accessible for all learners, maybe too broad for explaining to learners what they need to do to improve their attainment in ToK.
At ToK Today we aim to have a very close focus on skills needed for ToK, we aim to operationalise the skills so that we can say exactly what it is that students need to be able to do to realise the ToK goals and to achieve success in the ToK assessments. We're going to break down the Aims of ToK (Pg 7 of ToK Study Guide, 2020) down into a set of skills and their associated learning activities. The next part of this post is an example of such. However, this is not an exclusive, not definitive process. We need your input on this. I would love to hear what skills you think are required to be successful in ToK, and how to utilise this. The Thai ToK Teacher's Network group have already given me their insights on this. I thank them for their contributions thus far.
Operationalising an Aim of ToK into skills and learning objectives.
The above diagram is just an example of how we can translate one of the 6 Aims of ToK into a set of specific skills, and then develop a set of learning activities to form a lesson. O
ToK Skills 2.0
(as of Aug 2022).
If you would like a PDF version of this skills map click here
I would be very grateful if ToK Teachers would contribute to this skills map by suggesting skills that are not currently included on the map.
For more on ToK Skills (related to Grp Dynamics), and how to use them, click here.
Over the coming months ToKToday will model many more skill based learning enquiries in ToK. If you have requests, or comments, please contact me.
Daniel Trump
daniel@TokToday.com