weekend presentations

Dear TOK presenters,

You will get some further feedback on Friday concerning the presentations that you gave during the TOK weekend. This will include the scores awarded by the TOK teachers. You may notice some discrepancy between your self-evaluation and the judgements of the teachers. There may be a number of reasons for this.

First of all, this was your first “real” experience of giving a TOK presentation (the micro-presentations in November aside), and so it might well be a little difficult to know the standard expected for the highest levels of the criteria and grade descriptors. Thus the scores given by the teachers will be useful in providing a realistic benchmark in this regard.

Secondly, perhaps we don’t do enough student self-evaluation in the school, and therefore the task was not a particularly familiar one. The purpose is not to offer a high score in the hope of influencing the teacher!

Thirdly, we need to focus on the content of the presentations itself. We already gave you some important feedback at the end of the weekend, but I’ll summarize some of it here.

As an IB student, keep your eyes and ears open. You need to be observant and open to what is going on around you locally and in the wider world. If you do that, it becomes much easier to identify promising real-life situations for TOK presentations, not to mention examples for essays, articles for economics portfolios, research topics for extended essay and so on.

Use your real-life situation as the backdrop for your presentation. If you introduce it and then drop it like a stone, it suggests that it was just an excuse for your presentation and you haven’t thought it through, seen how it can support or illustrate the points you want to make at the “TOK level” in the diagram you were given.

Don’t replace your situation with an endless stream of unrelated examples. The result here is too much breadth and not enough depth – a “butterfly approach” that gives the impression that you hope that at least one of the examples will hit home. It is up to you to choose wisely your central real-life situation. You need to commit.

Remember that your presentation is supposed to analyze, not merely describe. Make sure you have thought through the implications of the points you raise. Consider alternatives, but make a stand for your own conclusion, even if you think it is partial or tentative or you might change your mind later. Show how we can make progress in our thinking even if we can't be totally sure about everything.

A real-life situation or a knowledge issue doesn’t need to be about something weird. TOK is not supposed to be about crazy things; it is a method of conducting enquiry into issues that matter in the world by trying to expose their roots. Often these roots are tough and knotted but we need to examine them if we are really to understand how knowledge works in the world. Review the “understanding knowledge issues” document for more on this.

Prepare well. Know the material. If you do, there will be no need to read to your audience. Reading from a script suggests that you haven’t done enough work to be confident about what you are presenting. Think about alternative ways of presenting your material.

Start your presentation slowly. Give your audience time to understand what is to come. Don’t rattle off your knowledge issue and real-life situation in about 7 seconds and leave everyone scratching their heads and trying to remember what you just said the whole point of the presentation was about.

I hope that these comments will help to explain some of the weaknesses that can be eliminated for next time. Your contributions to class, to follow-up discussion at the end of presentations – and particularly the very high quality of many contributions to this blog – indicate that you are capable of performing at the highest level in this course, so let’s continue on that journey up the mountain.