How can teachers go ‘beyond their syllabus’? TOK provides the answer...

By Michael Dunn, creator of theoryofknowledge.net, the world’s most popular site for the theory of knowledge course.

What do you remember about your school? What were the formative experiences, the Eureka moments, the times when you felt genuinely excited about discovering a new idea or experience? Was it an exam that you sat? An essay written in test conditions? A homework that obliged you to memorize facts for a timed assessment? The days, or weeks, or months spent revising for A-Levels or GCSEs or AP finals? 

Or do you remember none of those moments with any clarity (beyond a vague recollection of having to grit your teeth and endure them), and, instead, remember a moment when a teacher went off-piste? When they taught you a skill you didn’t need for an exam? When they took you outside your usual classroom environment, and demonstrated something in the school fields? When they couldn’t avoid becoming overcome by the passion they felt for a person or an idea unrelated to the syllabus? 

For me, it was a history teacher who spent weeks showing us how to do The Times crossword puzzles when we were eleven, a chemistry teacher who was a brilliant landscape painter, an English teacher who liked to recite poems in Anglo-Saxon, an art teacher who spent most of his time discussing the merits of The Cure, a geography teacher who made us all want to emulate explorers like Shackleton. None of these experiences prepared us for exams; all of them enriched our classes, inspired us to learn, and made us more complete human beings. 

As teachers, we have a hard task. Stick to the syllabus, drill your students, practice past papers, teach them how to answer certain questions in a certain way, and they’ll probably do well in the final exam - but be bored out of their minds. Veer off the syllabus, build in amazing experiences and content, be unafraid to draw on your own passions and interests and heroes, and you’ll create a brilliant, engaging course - but it may end up prejudicing their chances in those stuffy exam halls.

I’m lucky. I teach the IB Diploma theory of knowledge (TOK) course. There’s no final exam, no concrete curriculum, and there’s plenty of choice built into the summative assessment tasks. You can draw on students’ own experiences to help you design and explore the course, and indulge your own tastes as much as you want, via concepts and thinkers, books and films, articles and talks, that have all inspired and interested you.

TOK also acts as the means for other subjects to go beyond their syllabus, hone critical thinking and other skills, encourage students to draw on their own experiences both inside and outside of the classroom, and engage in what’s going on in the world right now. It helps to integrate the different strands of the IB Diploma course, by getting students to question and compare the source, use, and integrity of knowledge in different subjects and contexts.

In other words, TOK helps you to go beyond the syllabus. It provides you with a structure that legitimizes developing crossword puzzle skills, considering the relationship between art and science, thinking about the way language was used by the Anglo-Saxons, using music to explore painting, considering the need to acquire knowledge about the world via first-hand, empirical field work. 

Name an influential philosopher, scientist, writer, or artist, and you can draw on their ideas in TOK - and link it back to the other subjects. We can learn about history and power from George Orwell; Frida Kahlo can help us explore our emotions; John Stuart Mill shows us that humility is the key to learning; Elizabeth Loftus provides us with a way to evaluate the trustworthiness of memory; Taiye Selasi can help us understand where we're from.

We look at incredible ideas that both form a central part of the TOK experience, and can also be used to deepen students’ understanding of their other subjects. We consider the implications of mixing up correlation with causation - crucial to an understanding of the social sciences. We examine how perspectives shape the way we access the truth about the past, which is essential to history. We evaluate whether the provisional nature of scientific knowledge undermines its validity. We consider whether technology has enriched or dumbed down language. 

TOK also challenges the most fundamental of assumptions held by students, such as whether the reality we see matches the reality that is actually out there. Whether visualizations of the globe can ever be accurate. Whether empathy really helps us make moral decisions. Whether society’s knowledge is really progressing. Whether certainty is a desirable characteristic of knowing about the world. 

All of this can be fed back into other subjects, enriching them, making them engaging, and ensuring that they are more relevant to the real world world. Going beyond the syllabus, in other words, helps to make the syllabus more meaningful, and the TOK course makes that happen. 

The only problem, of course, is that TOK is only available for IB Diploma schools. There’s no equivalent course in other programmes that enables anything like this level of integration, or invites a consideration of quite such a wide range of thinkers and ideas. There are critical thinking courses, there are philosophy courses, there are meta-learning courses, but TOK is all of these things rolled into one - and a whole lot more. 

In June, we’ll be launching a new website that will enable all schools to offer something similar. It will develop vital skills, integrate the different subjects, and offer students a wonderful educational experience. critivicate.com will promote those off-piste moments, connect students to a huge range of brilliant thinkers, and help teachers to make digressions meaningful and helpful. Members of the site will have access to a fully-developed ‘4C’ course which can be deployed in a number of different ways to fit in with your timetable, receive a monthly newsletter helping students to unpack and make sense of the biggest contemporary events and issues, and be able to draw on a huge range of additional teaching and learning resources to enrich students’ learning. The site and its course will be built on the ‘Big Question’ framework of theoryofknowledge.net, which you can find out about here.

In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you. Please tell us about the way in which you and your school goes ‘beyond the syllabus’, the role that critical thinking plays in that, and the support that you feel could help you do this more effectively. 

Get in touch with Michael at [email protected]