Unpacking The TOK Outline

Ugh, the dreaded TOK Presentation. 

To be honest, the TOK Presentation is definitely one of the things I dreaded most in the IB, since it really is a combination of your understanding of TOK and your presenting skills. Well, fear not, I've broken down the TOK Outline (the structure for your TOK Presentation), so you can better approach the structure of your TOK Presentation and nail the criteria needed for top marks. Let's get started!

What exactly is the TOK Outline?

The Presentation Form, known also as the TOK Outline, is a form you need to fill alongside your presentation. Some consider this form to be equally as important as the presentation itself, since this is actually the document used by the IB to moderate your grades. If you've got a bad TOK outline but you held an awesome presentation, your grades will be dragged down pretty considerably.

The TOK Outline is essentially stripping down all the main points of your presentation (arguments, examples, conclusion) into a 500 word summary. By "stripping down", I pretty much mean getting rid of all the fluffy parts of your text and making it as precise as possible. You can even substitute words for arrows to show how you're progressing from one point to another!

The TOK Outline is provided by your teacher and officially filled in on your Managebac account (each school has a different portal to access Managebac through, and if you haven't already you'll be given your own account to your school's portal as well).

Here's what the TOK Outline looks like:

Presentation Planning

Presentation Title:

Describe your real-life situation:

State your central knowledge question (this must be expressed as a question):

Explain the connection between your real life situation and your knowledge question:

Outline how you intend to develop your TOK presentation in the context of your real-life situation. Include analysis of your main knowledge question and related knowledge questions as well as arguments and perspectives. Responses can be presented in continuous prose or as a list of points:

Show the significance of your conclusions with particular reference to your real-life situation and indicate how those conclusions might be relevant to other real-life situations:


Since we've got weird vocabulary all over the place, it might be easiest to take a look at what each section requires of us:


Presentation Title:

This needs only around 3-6 words which pretty much cover what main things will be talked about. For example, if you're doing something about Memory and the role it has our perception of the world, you could have a Presentation Title such as "The Relationship Between Memory and Thought". It's a simple way to clarify the overarching theme of your presentation.

This can be edited at any point of you creating the presentation, so this is something that really doesn't matter too much in terms of points.



Describe your real-life situation:

Before unpacking what this section needs from you, let's first look at what a real-life situation is.

Real life situation

This is commonly referred to as an RLS. An RLS is a circumstance that has occurred in real-life (surprise!). The reason I want to specify this is because RLSs can be easily confused with hypothetical situations which seem like they have occurred in real-life, but they actually are just ideas/concepts that haven't happened yet.

An example of this is the famous situation that asks "if a tree fell in a forest and no one saw or heard it, did it ever actually fall?" While a tree falling in a forest without anyone ever knowing has undoubtedly happened throughout the course of the Earth existing and therefore has occurred in real-life, this can't be considered an RLS. The reason we can't use these types of situations as RLSs is because it's simply not specific enough. Unless we can actually point out a very specific tree in a specific timeframe fell down and was later discovered by people, for instance, we can't use this as our RLS. We gotta find something else.

To get an idea of what can be used as an RLS, let's delve a little deeper into what separates a regular real-life situation from a TOK real-life situation. Generally, an identified RLS is related to what we go through in TOK classes. This can include a real situation that has occurred in the Area of Knowledge (AOK) of History or involves a Way of Knowing (WOK) like Memory.

Alright, so now that we've gone through what classifies as an RLS that you can use in your Presentation, it's time to go through what's needed from you in this section.
Your presentation needs to be based on 1 identified RLS. This RLS should ideally be controversial and has many different perspectives you can see the situation through. This RLS is meant to inspire your group to ask questions and pose arguments about it that can extend into other real-life situations.

Main tips for finding a good RLS:

• To make your life as easy as possible, try to pick a controversial situation with many valid perspectives
• Find a very specific RLS. Finding a topic like euthanasia is a good start, but you should really find a specific example where the discussion of euthanasia is apparent. Try limit your RLS to an interview, news article, court case, etc. with a specific date and people involved. Here, for instance, you can take a look at this case taken up in the High Courts in the UK about euthanasia (https://www.bbc.com/news/health-19249680), where a specific guy and time are clarified. From here, you can further unpack the situation and try to find whatever TOK implications you can. 

State your central knowledge question (this must be expressed as a question):

Knowing what exactly a "central knowledge question" is meant to be and how this should be worded is usually the biggest concern of students doing the TOK presentation. Fear not, however, there are some key things you should know to form a great Central Knowledge Question (Central KQ).

1. This is the main question you will be attempting to answer throughout your presentation. 
2. This question should be a direct product of your RLS, and as such should be very clearly linked to it instead of being only tangentially related.
3. You can always revisit and edit your central KQ, so don't get too stuck on this at the beginning as it can really suck up a lot of your time if you think too much about it.

Here's a structure you can get some inspo from when actually forming the KQ:

To what extent does ________ shape/influence/govern ________ ?

While this is definitely not the only way to do it, this can give you an idea of what generic KQs look like. Fill in one of the gaps with an AOK or WOK and the other gap with a certain concept relevant to your RLS. The identified concept can be something to do with perception of the world, authority, etc.

Explain the connection between your real life situation and your knowledge question: 

This might be pretty obvious, but you need to explicitly link with your RLS is relevant to your KQ. You need to pinpoint specific elements in your RLS (such as concepts or quotes directly from your RLS) that connect to your AOK/WOK mentioned in the KQ.



Outline how you intend to develop your TOK presentation in the context of your real-life situation. Include analysis of your main knowledge question and related knowledge questions as well as arguments and perspectives. Responses can be presented in continuous prose or as a list of points:


This is the most crucial part of your whole outline. Here, you're gonna present your key arguments that you'll use to try answer your central KQ.

You need to have 3 main arguments (claims), and for each argument you need 1 counter-argument (counterclaim). That means in total you will have 6 key arguments you will be presenting. 

IMPORTANT: You can't substitute these arguments for 6 claims, you need 3 claims and 3 counterclaims.

There are many ways you can organise how you present your key arguments. I personally used this format and found it to be the easiest way of structuring my arguments and showing what key concepts I introduced to back up each argument.

Section 1 
Claim 1:
Evidence*:
Counterclaim 1:
Evidence:  

Section 2
Claim 2:
Evidence:
Counterclaim 2:
Evidence: 

Section 3 
Claim 3:
Evidence:
Counterclaim 3:
Evidence:

*Evidence refers to the examples you use to back up the argument you stated. These can be other, less specific RLSs to your main one, specific words, natural phenomena, etc. These are usually listed like a regular list (ie. court case A, natural phenomenon B, historical event C) and should show the marker what kind of things you used in your presentation to illustrate your arguments.





Here's another popular structure.

Section 1: 
Claim 1:
Development*:
Counterclaim 1:
Development:
Extension**:  

Section 2:
Claim 2:
Development:
Counterclaim 2:
Development:
Extension: 

Section 3: 
Claim 3:
Development:
Counterclaim 3:
Development:
Extension:


*Development means what steps you took to back up and "develop" your argument, which is similar to your evidence but should show your thought process from one point to another point. This can be structured so that:

First point presented --> Question about point just presented --> Thought that comes up when trying to answer question --> ......

You need to show the marker how you went from one example or thought process to another when considering how valid the argument you presented is. Therefore, you can use arrows to separate your "stages" of thinking.

**Extension refers to a question that can be posed regarding the arguments you just presented. These are known as the "related knowledge questions" stated in the title of this section. These are just smaller KQs that you can briefly state which are relevant to the arguments you've presented. In this structure, they pretty much serve the purpose of concluding the section you're covering, almost like a rhetorical question.


Show the significance of your conclusions with particular reference to your real-life situation and indicate how those conclusions might be relevant to other real-life situations:

You don't want to write too much in this section, just enough to show how you kind of answered your central KQ (as you'll find out, there aren't any clear answers in TOK, so this conclusion should reflect that to some extent). Not only will you write 2-3 sentences trying to wrap up your findings and connect it back to your original RLS, you should introduce 1 more RLS that the findings can be applied to as well.

This 2nd RLS should be practically unrelated to your first RLS, but still is connected to your KQ. This is meant to show how the knowledge you've gotten from this presentation can be applied to other situations. You, as a TOK student, essentially show how "broad" your knowledge is by including this 2nd RLS.

How is the TOK Presentation and Outline marked?

The combination of the presented work and the outline will be assessed by your teacher and given a score out of a total of 10 points. Below is the rubric used to assess what marking level you slot into according to how well you did in your presentation.

I gotta admit though, even the teachers were pretty baffled at how vague the rubric is since it doesn't give any concrete elements that need to be present. It looks as if a thesaurus was used for the italicized words in each level, so don't be too scared if it looks totally foreign and waffly. It pretty much is.

Considering this, by following this step-by-step guide, you can hit all the high-scoring level criteria and better understand what it actually means when the IB refers to 'a specified RLS', 'different perspectives' and 'significant to the chosen real-life situation and others'. From here, you can

from ibo.org 

---------------

That's it! You've come to the end of my post on how to do your TOK Presentation. This is definitely not an easy assignment you can get done in a night, so feel free to look around on my website for my other posts on the assignment to get some insight into how you can do it. Otherwise, keep checking into this website for regular posts on other assignments and don't forget to comment if you have questions or suggestions for future posts :)