ToK Q&A December 2022

ToK Q&A: I’ve been receiving questions from ToK students around the world. I love to answer your questions, so I thought that I’d take some of the most frequently asked questions, and bundle them into a video. 

Question #1 : "What makes a good object for an Exhibition?"

This is a very straightforward question to answer, the May 2022 Subject Report makes it very clear. The best objects are ones that have some personal relevance to you, that bit’s easy. However - the personal relevance should also have a link to the prompt, it should have a knowledge link. So, if you’re answering the prompt “why do we seek knowledge?”, and your object is your childhood soft toy. The link is not because it was your favourite soft toy, the link could be because you first became interested in the motivation to seek knowledge when you read the “Made in Great Britain” label attached to the toy’s toe.

Going back to the original question - what makes a good object, I would say that the object is far less important than the way in which the object is used - the way in which you use the object to explore the knowledge link.

This is a similar answer as to what makes a good RLS in the Essay - but we’ll save that for a later post.

Q2: "Is it OK to include diagrams in Essay 5 May 2023 ? - the essay about Visual Representations"

The short answer to this question is yes it is, the slightly longer answer is why would you want to include diagrams ? Let me explain a little - if you include a diagram / chart it is your written explanation of that diagram / chart that the examiner will assess, not the diagram / chart, but it’s use in the exploration of the prescribed title. In my opinion if you are getting into the detail of explaining a specific chart / diagram you are probably spending too many words describing the RLS rather than exploring the PT.

Remember the PT is about knowledge rather than the specifics of any particular RLS - focus on trying to establish principles about knowledge production rather than analysing the RLS. I think that this particular PT is about the word ‘helpful’ rather than ways in which visual representations may or may not be accurate. If you want more information on Essay 5 you can watch my video for more details.

Q3: "I need to get a high score in ToK, but I am worried because it’s such an open ended subject - What if the Examiner has a different viewpoint to me ?"

OK, first thing is don’t worry, I don’t want you to waste energy on anxiety - if you work closely with your teacher, follow their advice you should get a good score in ToK.

Let’s briefly look at the two ToK assessments, and you should see that a good score is very achievable.

The Exhibition is marked by your teacher, and moderated by IB. Very rarely do IB moderate the teachers grade by more than 1 mark. Therefore, in most cases - what your teacher gives you for the Exhibition is the score that stands. So, you need to work closely with your teacher if you want a good score in the Exhibition, ask for, & listen to, their advice, pay close attention to the Draft feedback.

Let’s look at The Essay - The Essay is marked by an external IB Examiner, but The Examiner’s don’t mark the Essay according to their personal opinions. They have an assessment rubric that identifies specific things that they are looking for. Your teacher can you give you a copy of this - it’s called “The ToK Essay Assessment Instrument” - if you include the things that they are looking for in the rubric you should get a good score. Don’t worry - that’s wasted energy - just communicate with your teacher - they will show you how to get that high score.

Q4: "How can I write counterclaims ?"

So, first of all - there’s no requirement to write claims & counterclaims. There is a requirement to ‘explore’ the prompt, and to include knowledge arguments, evaluation of these arguments and implications of those arguments. The use of claims and counterclaims is just a useful way of structuring those requirements that some people find helpful.

Personally, I think that using the claim & counterclaim structure does help most students for most essays to meet the requirements - so I generally recommend it (you can see more on essay structures in the card I put above). 

That said, the difficulty that some people find in writing the counterclaim comes from, I think, a belief that the counterclaim has to be the direct  opposite of the claim - this is not the case. The counterclaim should be an alternative perspective of the claim, not necessarily the opposite, and this leaves you the opportunity to explore a number of possible counterclaims.

Let’s look at a simplified example: if your claim was that all swans are white. Your counterclaim does not necessarily have to be that not all swans are white. Your counterclaim could be some swans are sometimes white, or some swans are white when it fits their purpose, and so on. The counterclaim can be a variation of the claim as long as it introduces alternative knowledge arguments.

Q5: "Can students see the subject reports ?"

For those of you who don’t know - the subject report is a report written by the Chief Examiner after the exam session - it’s super useful as it explains what the examiners are looking for, and some of the common mistakes that they saw in the previous exam session.

The answer to the question of whether the subject report ids available to students  is yes, as far as i understand it students are allowed to see the ToK Subject - I’m not aware of any guidance from IB to the contrary, ToK teachers - if you know any contrary guidance please let me know. I have always shared the subject reports with my students, and used them to help them to prepare their ToK assessments - if I shouldn't have been doing this I’ll now be in trouble !

Check out the May 22 Subject Report (in diagram form) at this link (Essay), and this link (Exhibition).

OK, that’s enough for the December Q&A, we'll have another one in January. If you have questions that you would like me to address in future Q&As please don’t hesitate to send them to Daniel@TokToday.com.

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

ToK Exhibition Skills Builder (part 1)

Building skills is the key to success in the ToK Exhibition.

If you're only going to read one document about the ToK Exhibition then the Subject Report May 22 is the document to read. It's the most definitive explanation of what the ToK examiners are looking for. I look at the contents of the subject report in this post, I mention it here because it informs this post.

This post is about building skills for the ToK exhibition. There is some mystique, chatter and a little confusion about the ToK exhibition. My starting point with any ToK assessment is that it's about skills so we need to identify and teach the skills required for the exhibition.

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I'll just take this opportunity to plug the ToK skills map (linked here). Please have a look at that and feel free to suggest any skills that are yet to be added or developed on the map. I will also take this opportunity to beg for a like, subscribe, comment or share if you find these materials useful.

ToK Exhibition Skills.

So what are the TOK exhibition skills? I have developed the following map of the specific exhibition skills which we can use to guide us in our teaching.

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At the top are the two meta-skills, these are the overriding skills needed to do about an exhibition I think these are developing an argument for the objects and justifying their argument. However these are fairly abstract skills you need to break them down into tangible things that students can do, practise and develop to do well in the exhibition.I have called these the foundational skills

Foundational ToK Exhibition Skills

The foundational skills are: identifying an appropriate subject, constructing a knowledge link of the object to self, constructing a knowledge link of the object to the prompt, identifying the unique contribution of the objects to the exhibition, and identifying evidence for the objects contribution to the exhibition.

Now that we've identified the discrete foundational skills required for the exhibition we can start to design learning tasks for each of these skills, and we can build these learning tasks into ToK teaching from early in the course. 

Teaching the foundational skills.

I created a lesson to help students to develop these skills, the Student Skills Builder proforma can be downloaded here:

ToK-Exhibition-Skills-Builder_-Pt-1-1

The lesson is designed to be given in the first few weeks of the ToK course in DP1, so we can shortcut some of the gaps in knowledge that students will have at this stage of the course. This is done by devising my own prompt, and giving it to the students. In this case the prompt was why do we change pre-existing knowledge ? The main reason for giving them a prompt was that I could then guide the choice of objects in order to build the first skill: identifying an appropriate object. it also gets around any problems of academic honesty of reusing prompts later on etc.

I asked the students to bring an object which had either wowed them, or had changed the way they think about the world. by directing them I was helping them to develop the skill identifying an appropriate object. 

We spent considerable time discussing the objects they chose, and why they chose those objects. I then went on to show them how to  develop their personal link to the object into a knowledge link to the object. This is the gap of understanding for students at this stage in the ToK Course, That is moving from The Experienced world to the ToK world, their ability to do this will develop through modelling and familiarity with the contents of the course.

Moving from the 'real world' to the ToK World is the key understanding for ToK.

Modelling

Before we got onto to the contribution of the object to the exhibition (what I call the argument )I shared with the students the Exemplar that I have written which is also linked in the web post on this lesson.

The Exemplar Lesson:

ToK-Exhibition-Skills-Builder_-Pt-1_Daniel

At the end of the Exemplar there are a set of questions and annotation tasks which are designed to help the students to identify where in the Exemplar I have linked my own experiences to the knowledge world and the knowledge prompt. So I'm just trying to model that skill for them before asking them to do it themselves. 

Now, at this stage we are taking things very slowly  - I am modelling how to make the links, and then asking them to do it with their own objects. I am giving them a lot of verbal & written feedback on what they’re doing. This is really the process of creating the ToK Mindset - if you don’t know what that is I made an earlier video on it (linked here) - this is the heart of ToK, and once students have developed The ToK Mindset they have ‘cracked’ ToK.

The last skill that I build in this lesson is the identification & use of Evidence for the claim arising from the object. The Subject Report really clarifies what IB Examiners want as ‘evidence’ for the claim, and this is required to get into the top 3 marking bands.

I hope that you found this post & these resources helpful. If you have any requests for content or resources please don't hesitate to contact me (Daniel@TokToday.com).

Have a great week,
Daniel,
Lisbon, Nov. 22

What are the examiners thinking ? (ToK Exhibition)

Experienced teachers of ToK well know that the Subject Report is one of the most important documents for guiding students to do well in ToK.

The Subject Report is written by the Chief Examiner after each Exam Session, it is an aggregation of the main points arising from the individual reports that each examiner has to write after they have marked the ToK Essays & Exhibitions. Therefore it gives you great information on:

• Common Mistakes made.

• Strong or effective approaches to questions,

• And most crucially - the examiners operationalise the assessment criteria, in other words - they tell us what they’re looking for, or what they mean, by some of the more vague descriptors in the assessment criteria.

The May 22 ToK Subject Report is available from the Programme Resource Centre. I have summarised the May 22 ToK Subject Report - The section on The ToK Exhibition is linked here, and the section on the ToK Essay is linked here.

My summaries are useful as an aide memoir, or a teaching resource to be used with students. However, I encourage you to read the full report. There are a lot more details in the full report than I can fit into a one page summary.

Why focus on the May 22 Subject Report?

The May 22 ToK Subject Report is particularly interesting because it is the first time we have feedback from the Examiners on the ToK Exhibition, and it really clarifies some of the things that we were not sure about going into the May 22 exam session. If you are currently preparing students for the ToK Exhibition the May 22 Subject Report is required reading.

This post focusses on what the Subject report tells us about  the ToK Exhibition, there is a section in the report on The Essay, but that will have to wait for another video:

Key points in M22 Subject on The ToK Exhibition.

1. Object Specificity.

Specific objects are far better than generic objects. Many of the subsequent marks awarded for the Exhibition partly rely on the specificity of the object - so this point is important. Further, it is easier for students if the object has some personal link to their own lived experience - this is more in fitting with the Exhibition which is supposed to be a reflection on how ToK Manifests itself in the real world. The subject report goes into some detail about what is meant by a specific object -it really is worth reading, personally I think that the examiners have made it very clear for us.

2. Knowledge Links.

The explanation of the link between object & the prompt needs to be about knowledge - not about the the object, or any wider real world issues - it has to be about knowledge. This may seem obvious, however I recently saw an Exhibition commentary which the teacher thought had been undermarked by the Examiners. On reading the commentary it was immediately clear that the student had written very little about knowledge, they had written a lot about the real world context of the object, but very little about knowledge. A simple if crude test of this is to simply count the number of times the student has used the word “knowledge” - if they’re not using the word they’re probably not writing about knowledge.

3. Specific Contributions.

The contribution of the object to unpacking the prompt needs to be specific & distinct to that individual object. This means that the objects probably need to be varied / different types of object. Further, This is why I ask my students to construct 3 arguments relating to the prompt BEFORE picking 3 objects. This makes it much easier to score highly on this criteria.

4. Evidence.

The report clarifies what is meant by evidence, it could include a study, documentary evidence, a news item, a thoughtful or expert opinion.

Final Thoughts

Finally there is an interesting paragraph in the subject report that explains that the Exhibition is meant to be a reflection on how ToK manifests itself in the real world, it says that

“candidates are not expected to answer the prompt but to show how their objects are interesting to help reflection about the prompt and explore it. It needs to be a TOK discussion so candidates should be encouraged to use TOK concepts…,”

May 22 ToK Subject Report, IB

In this we paragraph have a couple of insights which were not previously clear to me , and I think will be of great help in the future:

1. We should try to bring the ToK Concepts out in the Exhibition - I’m going to ask my students to focus on 2 or 3 concepts in their Exhibition.

2. More importantly - it’s a reflection which can be left unanswered, this invites a wider ToK discussion, which can link back the student’s role as a knower with the prompt - oh happy days !

You can find more thoughts on the ToK Exhibition here, including a useful structure planner.

If you are a student who wants help with your ToK Exhibition please check out our student support pages here.

If you have any thoughts or requests I'd love to hear from you: Daniel@TokToday.com,

Have a Tok-tastic day!
Daniel,
Lisbon Nov 2022

ToK Subject Report "at glance".

My aim was to distill the May 22 ToK subject report down to only one page. I wanted to create the "Subject Report at a glance". I then realised that it made more sense to have one page for The Essay, and one page for The Exhibition.

In the May 22 ToK Subject Report the section on the Essay is rather succinct. Earlier Subject Reports contain most of what needs to be said about the ToK Essay. The analysis of the Prescribed Titles gives us an interesting insight into how the examiners interpret the questions, but it is fairly question specific.

The section on The Exhibition is the really interesting part of the May 22 ToK Subject Report. Obviously, this is the first report with details about The Exhibition. It helps us to start to firm up many of the questions that we had earlier.

We get much clearer guidance on issues such as the appropriateness of objects, what constitutes justification, and what is evidence. The point that I made earlier about students having 3 different arguments (1 per object) seems to have been agreed in the report.

To be honest, it's very difficult to distill into one page.

I would strongly recommend that every ToK Teacher read the section on The Exhibition in the original form.

However, I completed my 'at a glance' versions as aide memoir. They could be useful to share with your students.

Get your ToK Subject Report infogram (PDF Version) at this link (it's free).

If you have any questions, or thoughts, about the May 22 ToK Subject Report please leave them in the comments below, or email me at Daniel@TokToday.com.

Check out the pre-subject report video that I made on The ToK Exhibition here, a post-subject report video will be coming out soon.

Have a great day!
Daniel,
Lisbon, October 22

What do we know (so far) about the ToK Exhibition?

The first set of ToK Exhibition results are in, and the clouds of mystery that have previously shrouded the expectations of this new assessment are starting to clear somewhat. We are yet to receive the Subject Report (which will hopefully further clarify expectations), but we can glean some things from this first set of moderated commentaries. At my school we entered 45 candidates, none of the sample were subject to moderation (the ToK Examiner agreed with our grading), and our range was from ‘fairly low’ up to 10/10.

What I present here are the thoughts and decisions of our ToK team as we worked through what we thought was expected from the ToK Exhibition. It would appear that these decisions were upheld, but before we fall into a pile of complacent conceit a few disclaimers are warranted:

1, My observations come from only 1 set of results, and this is the first cycle of this particular assessment. One set of 45 results is not sufficient to make reliable cause and effect statements. Further, rumour & folklore amongst DP teachers would have it that IB are more lenient the first time a new form of assessment is run.

2. It is highly possible that we “just got lucky” with our moderator,or that we were on the verge of moderation with some pieces, and just snuck over the no-moderation line. Many times in the past I have seen little rationale to moderation decisions in subjects across the Diploma. It’s rather irrational (and self serving) to call out moderation decisions as nonsensical when they go against your students, but to take them as an indication of your ‘greatness’ when they go in favour of your students.

3. The illusion of causality could be at play here. It may be that our student’s work was not moderated despite the decisions that we made regarding what we assumed was required for The Exhibition.

With the disclaimer out of the way let’s look at context:

We were a very experienced 4 teacher ToK Team including 1 ToK Examiner & workshop leader, and 2 of the other teachers being examiners in other DP subjects. I mention this because being an examiner in any DP subject gives you an insight into how the published assessment rubrics are actually applied to student’s work. I think that most DP examiners would agree that there are a number of implied ‘givens’ which may not be explicit in the published assessment rubric.

Secondly we have all attended numerous ToK workshops over the years that we have been teaching the course, and 3/4  of us attended ToK Cat 2 in November 2021 in the hope of upskilling ourselves for The Exhibition. Further, we had run our own collaborative ToK Exhibition upskilling workshops in school. The thinking presented here comes from those in-school ToK collaborative workshops.

Decisions regarding the Exhibition May 2022 Session.

1. Treat the Exemplars with caution.
   During the Cat 2 Training (Nov 21) that we attended the workshop participants undertook a blind marking procedure of the exemplar commentaries which are published in the Teacher Support Materials section of the Programme Resource Centre. Most of the workshop participants gave significantly lower marks than those awarded by the Chief Examiner, participants who had been ToK Essay & Presentation Examiners were particularly surprised by the high marks given by the CE to the exemplars in comparison to those given during the blind marking exercise.
   
   Back at school, after the workshop, our team reflected on what had happened during the workshop, and we all noted that we had seen a similar pattern in both new ToK assessments, and new assessments in our hexagon subjects. That pattern is that the exemplars for new assessments tend to be very generous, and the actual results that students receive from the first exam session are usually much lower than the corresponding exemplar marks (for coursework of the same quality). Further, we noted that some of the examiner’s comments for the marked exemplars on the PRC were extremely brief (eg see Exemplar C), far briefer than the teachers' comments that we had been writing for ToK Presentations in previous sessions. Therefore, we decided that we needed to unpack the assessment instrument to devise a structure for the commentary rather than be led by the exemplars.
   

2. Unpacking the Assessment Instrument - differences to the exemplars.
   Definitions:
   We noted that none of the exemplars had explicit definitions of concepts or key terms, the sort of definitions that we would expect in the ToK Essay. However, we felt that it is difficult for students to make a clear link between the object and the IA prompt, and to write a clear explanation of that link, without such explicit definitions.
   
   Further, we felt that it would be difficult for students to justify the contribution of the link to the overall Exhibition without those definitions. This links to point 3 - the role of arguments in the Exhibition. Finally, it would be easier for students to explain the real world context of the object, and to use evidence to support points if they had clear definitions of the concepts and key terms in the prompt at the beginning of the commentary.
   
   Therefore, we put ‘Definitions’ as the first stage of our Commentary Structure, and asked all of our students to define the concepts and key terms as the first sentence(s) of their commentary.
   
   We were concerned about this decision, as none of the exemplars contained a ‘definitions section’, it’s not in the assessment rubric, and there’s no instruction from IB to do this. However, all of our students who scored 7-10 on the May 22 Exhibition had a definitions section at the beginning of their commentary that they returned to, as appropriate, during the piece.
   
   I reiterate the point that those students may have scored highly despite the definitions section rather than because of it.
   

3. Real world context ratio
   We noted that exemplars B-J contain far more ‘real world context’ content than ‘ToK content’ than we are used to in The Essay, and previously in the presentation. My rule of thumb guide is 80% ToK: 20% real world context for the essay, the higher scoring Exhibition Exemplars range from 35-60% real world context content . We thought that it would be very difficult for students to both make the links between the object and the prompt, and to justify the contribution of the object in terms of knowledge in 950 words. The process of abstraction from the real world to the knowledge world is at the heart of ToK, and we were wary of the notion that this would be abandoned in this assessment.
   
   Therefore we decided to build a structure which focuses more on the knowledge characteristics (issues?) arising from the object’s link to the object rather than on the real world context of the object. We are somewhat taking a chance that if students talk about the knowledge issues of the object they will cover the requirements for identifying the real world context of the object.
   
   The first Drafts of the Commentary had far more real world context content than we were comfortable with. This was expected (and is the norm in the essay, and previously with the ToK presentation). The feedback on the Draft Commentaries focussed on reducing the real world context, and increasing the ToK content.
   
   The commentaries that scored 7-10 marks contained far more ToK content than real world content (close to the 80:20 ratio). Again, we should not necessarily read causality into this.
   
   A note on the binary categorisation of ‘ToK Content’ vs ‘Real World Context’ with reference to The Exhibition (and maybe the essay). I have heard from WSL, and maybe from the Curriculum Managers, that this division is a false one, or at least should be more nuanced. The view being (I think) that The Exhibition should be a tool for students to develop the skills required for abstraction in the Essay. Further, that as the Exhibition is based around the Core and Optional Themes which are more ‘real world’ based than Areas of Knowledge. Therefore the Exhibition should contain more real world context, and crucially - make the link between the real world and the ToK world. My concern is that the knowledge requirements to move into the two higher marking bands are such that with a limited word count students must focus on the ToK content to attain a higher score.
   

4. Perspectives (aka Arguments, aka Knowledge arguments).
   
   We noted that the exemplars on the PRC do not contain explicit knowledge arguments like we might see in the essay, or previously in the Presentation. The instruction to the students is that they show how ToK manifests itself in the world around us, and we felt that this might be more easily achieved by students if they were taking a more perspective (or argument) based approach. The vast majority of the IA Prompts can be answered using a diverse range of perspectives, and therefore lend themselves well to a perspective (or argument) based approach.
   
   Further, and crucially, we noted the requirement in the top marking band is to identify, and justify, the particular contribution of each individual object. We felt that this is probably more easily achieved by students if we ask them to identify 3 perspectives (or arguments) arising from the IA prompt at the beginning of the Commentary, and then to choose 1 object to demonstrate each argument.
   
   Again, I worried about this decision as there is no explicit instruction in the assessment rubric to do this. However, I know that it is easier for students to write a justification if they are making an argument than it is to write a justification without a wider framework. Further, it would be easier to differentiate the contribution of each object using a specific argument linked to that object than it would be without the explicit argument. 
   
   All of the commentaries moderated at 5-10 marks used this 3 argument structure. Again, we need to heed the previous warnings regarding causality here.
   
   The rough structure that our team arrived at is below. We used this with our students to guide them in the writing of their commentaries.

Link to a (FREE) PDF of the above diagram.

A short note on the nature of the commentary.

As far as I understand it the ToK Exhibition Commentary should be a write up of the commentary that the students give (gave), or use to guide them, at their ToK Exhibition. This possibly implies that the Commentary should be a more narrative piece. It could be levelled that the analysis and structure presented here today are not in the spirit of typing up a commentary from an Exhibition. However, as ToK remains a pass-fail component of the Diploma I adopt a ‘take no chances’ approach. 

Daniel Trump,
Lisbon, Portugal.
July 2022.