NOTE: Final essay due 10:00 PM on Wednesday,June 10th.
Here is the assignment schedule, if possible:
1. Review materials in Weeks One & Two and submit your essay prompt by May 15th – just the prompt you’ve decided to use
2. Submit your first draft no later than May 29th
3. Submit your final essay no later than June 10th
FIRST WEEK
Goals for this week:
* Students gain a basic understanding of the Essay
* Students analyze previous essays
1. Review TOK Essay Writing Guide It’s slightly outdated, but most of it is still very useful. Identify three pieces of information in it that you think will be useful to you, along with at least one question. If we do this in class, we’ll go through it two pages at a time.
2. Here’s an extra chapter to our textbook on writing a TOK essay. Identify three pieces of information in it that you think will be useful to you, along with at least one question. If we do this in class, we’ll use it as a “jigsaw”
3. Six Steps To Writing A Good TOK Essay. Identify three pieces of information in it that you think will be useful to you, along with at least one question.
4. Here is an outline students should use for their essay (NOTE: You also have the option of using this outline instead)
IMPORTANT! Here is an essay written by a student in 2017. The other essays in this post are good, but students had several months to write them in their senior year. This one, on the other hand, was written in four weeks, is very well-done, and I would suggest you regularly re-visit it as your model. It carefully follows the outline.
5. Model of Completed Outline from 2015
Here is what the completed essay using that model looked like in 2015 (you don’t need to look at it for right now)
6. Second model of completed outline
7. Here is what the completed essay using that model looked like in 2015 (you don’t need to look at it for right now)
8. Read the following essays from former students and note:
* How many Ways of Knowing are discussed and what were they?
* How many Areas of Knowledge are discussed and what were they?
* How many explicit textbook connections did you find and what were they?
* How many non-personal examples came from the textbook and how many were original ones? What were they? Were they used in the style of a story – beginning, middle, end.
* How many personal examples were used and what were they?
* Were there any hypothetical examples used (“Suppose this was the case and that happened”)?
* Were the examples explicitly connected to the thesis statement? Did every example or paragraph end with making that connection to the thesis statement?
* How many counter-claims were used? What were they? Did they have a source, or did they just use “Some people might say….”
9. If you want (but you don’t have to), you can also review these other essays by former students, along with the essays connected to the outline examples listed earlier in this post:
10. Here is the TOK Essay Rubric from IB
11. Here are two essays from 2021:
SECOND WEEK
Goals for this week:
*Students choose their essay prompt and begin work on their outline
1. Review the potential essay “titles” that can be found here and pick one. They cannot be prompts that have been covered on any of the ten sample essays on this post, so you want to take a quick look at all the essays to see what prompts they use.
* Review TOK Essay Tips
* Begin work on your outline. The first draft will be due by Friday
*Here is specific advice based on recent feedback from IB Examiners to our students:
Four key points that IB Examiners made in essays from last year were:
* Don’t use hypothetical examples. In other words, when you support your thesis with stories related to different Ways of Knowing and Areas of Knowledge, make sure they are real. Don’t say something like, “Suppose this was the case and that happened.”
* Make sure that ALL of your examples and points are explicitly connected to answering the prompt. End every example or point making that explicit connection.
* Make sure that you include counter-claims in your essay. In other words, what would people say who disagreed with your thesis and what would be your response to them? These should have a source. In other words, don’t just write “Some people might say…”
* You can use TOK concepts from the book, but don’t use specific examples cited there to illustrate them. Instead, come up with your own examples. It’s okay to use some personal examples, but a majority should be more “academic” ones.
THIRD WEEK
* Work on outline and complete a revised draft by Friday OR a first draft of your essay by that time.
FOURTH WEEK
*Work on essay.
FIFTH WEEK
Final essay due 10:00 PM on Wednesday,June 10th.