IB Theory of Knowledge - A Student's Guide

Our brand new textbook for TOK's new syllabus is organized around key knowledge concepts. Each lesson covers one concept. If you use 100 lessons from this book, you will have covered 100 concepts. These are all knowledge concepts that form the foundation of critical thinking in TOK: bias, justification, understanding, evidence, doubt and many others. These knowledge concepts naturally become building blocks of higher-order thinking skills.

Download the full list of units and lessons HERE.

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Areas of knowledge are all addressed throughout the course and in comparison rather than separately. Instead of teaching 10 hours of Natural Sciences followed by 10 hours of History (and so on), we teach, for example, the concept of bias and look at how bias takes different forms in different areas of knowledge. Such organization of the course is much more holistic and more in line with the IB recommendations.

The IB-recommended themes are integrated with areas of knowledge. Instead of teaching the themes ÒKnowledge and languageÓ and ÒKnowledge and technologyÓ separately from the rest of the course, you will be teaching areas of knowledge through these themes.

Such organization makes the course holistic and allows you to overcome the artificial division of knowledge into themes, areas of knowledge and so on. With this in mind, we still cover all the aspects of the knowledge framework in every lesson.

Chapters:

Introduction + Knowledge of Knowledge
Knowledge and Technology
Bias in Personal Knowledge
Bias in Shared Knoweldge
Knowledge and Understanding
Knowledge and Language
Assessment Guidance
Our course makes things easier for teachers. This is what we provide:

A student book which is designed to be used either at home or in lesson time. The book is broken down into individual lessons. Every lesson is designed for a duration of a 1-hour period. Every lesson is broken down into basic material and extension material, which will allow you to meet the needs of all types of learners. Every lesson has suggested further reading or watching.
Teacher Support Packs (TSPs), which include:
Lesson plans for each lesson with a variety of activities
A journal for students to work with during lesson time
Teacher's version of the same journal with suggested answers
Powerpoint presentations, handouts and other materials
Unit plans and possible course outlines
We will also have a blog and a Facebook page to offer continuous support to both teachers and students
You can be flexible with our course. It is designed in a way which makes every unit and every lesson relatively independent. You can teach several Themantic lessons, or you can teach one Themantic unit, or you can teach the whole Themantic course. Within the course itself, you can be flexible with the number of lessons and their sequence. We have suggested sequences in the course outlines - you can choose one of the default ones or design your own.

Our course is written with assessment in mind. Our approach is to maximize efficiency: everything works toward building student confidence.

The key concepts that form the foundation of the course are also the ones that frequently appear in prescribed TOK essay titles
Teaching areas of knowledge together with themes and concepts means that students start preparing for the essay much sooner
Every unit has an exhibition which builds the skill of finding real-world applications of TOK concepts
Every lesson models thinking that is required in both assessment tasks.
There is a unit with assessment guidance which includes checklists for making a perfect exhibition and writing a perfect essay.