Create a 5-minute buzz in TOK class over sense perception. Which version of the words do your students hear? It seems that groups of people are truly split over how they interpret the sound file! The first video here (from The Guardian) simply gives the options – as you’ll want just to get your class […]
Read more Today, it’s time to lighten up – with a TOK cartoon, and a smile. In recent months, we’ve been heavy on a cluster of inter-connected topics: confirmation bias, fake news (variously defined), fact-checking, “pushback” to opposing views, and class activities for self-awareness of cognitive resistance to changing our minds. But today – as May exams […]
Read more Here’s a challenge for your students. Are they open to changing their opinions if faced with contrary facts? Today we offer a class exercise – ready for you to download, to use directly or to customize – whose goal is student self-awareness. It demands reflection, research, and discussion, and should raise discussion on facts, feelings, […]
Read more Good news: counter-argument with factual support may not be doomed after all. The “backfire effect”, as widely discussed in the past few years, was a truly disheartening phenomenon for anyone who cares about critical thinking or reliable knowledge. However, recent studies illustrate how the human sciences work as they offer revised conclusions – and at […]
Read more History, it often seems to me, isn’t essentially about the past. In so many ways, it’s about the present and the future – the afterlife in records, interpretation, and impact on thought. In current news, I’m struck by what lives on from bygone days in three seemingly unlike examples: a controversial law (Poland), yet another […]
Read more
In a previous blog post I outlined a very basic memory technique which works by creating a story out of to-be-remembered information. This makes the information more memorable than recalling a list of unrelated words and the technique itself requires no real groundwork, after all, you are just making up a story. Whilst impressive results […]
Read more “That’s what I think. And I’m entitled to my opinion.” This kind of declaration can be the end of the road for any exploration or exchange of ideas. Up goes the wall. Behind it, the speaker entrenches a view and refuses to examine it. In a course such as Theory of Knowledge where we encourage […]
Read more
Continuing my work tutoring A level students, I have been writing some one page, A4 summaries of Mechanics 1 for the Edexcel M1 component. I have got the full course down to five pages. These are not meant to be a complete, perfect summary of the course, simply an idea to prompt the memory and […]
Read more