Introduction: AoK The Arts
This lesson is designed to introduce AoK The Arts, it's skills based and participatory. The lesson is designed to be given early in the ToK course, in the first term of DP1. At this stage in the course I believe that we should be focussing on student's emotional orientation to ToK. We should be designing lessons so that they experience ToK as low stakes, low threat, easily accessible and fun. In my experience this means that we need to emphasis active participation, a gentle element of competition, and very little reading / writing. It also means that we should steer clear of watching videos, I find that students who are not excited by ToK become even less excited when we give them ToK-type videos to watch.
"Where's the rigour ?"
The participatory - fun approach of the lesson doesn't mean that it's not 'rigourous' (whatever that word means). It is based on sound and solid skills identification and skills development, but it tries to do this in a light-touch way which builds on student's pre-existing knowledge and skills.
The ToK Skills Map (developed in conjunction with Thailand ToK Teacher's Network). - we've tried to identify the specific skills that students need to enjoy success in ToK. This lesson has been developed from this map.
The skills specifically identified for development in this lesson may seem abstract when written in this form, but when operationalised as individual & group learning tasks they become far more accessible.
The Lesson.
The lesson is well described in the video linked below. I will just give brief details here.
Resources needed:
Paper, colouring pens / pencils, somewhere to display drawings (eg a whiteboard), some way to attach the drawings to the display (eg Blu-Tack).
Google link to the lesson presentation / instructions here.
PDF Version of the Lesson Is shown at the end of this post.
The content areas introduced in the lesson.
Anyway, I think that the lesson is fairly self explanatory. I hope that it shows that we can teach ToK without a heavy reliance on content, and that a focus on skills development can be fun.
If you have any questions or suggestions please don't hesitate to contact me at Daniel@TokToday.com
have a great weekend!
Daniel,
Lisbon November 22.