How to Structure a Theory of Knowledge (TOK) Presentation

The following Theory of Knowledge (TOK) presentation structure has been designed very carefully. (It’s taken several years of conversations!) It’s easy for you to follow and ticks all the boxes.

I'm going to tell you how many slides to have (nine), what text should go on each slide (less is more) and what you should talk about while each slide is up (focus on the interesting parts).

A clear structure like this is essential because it helps the audience follow what you’re saying. It also keeps you from wasting time, both during your presentation and in your preparation phase.

(This is also done for the TOK Essay, here).

There are a few things I need to go over before we get into the slides.

The Development Section

When you get into the Development section (where the knowledge question is explored and analyzed with reference to the AOKs and WOKs), you’ll see that we use a Claim, Counterclaim, Mini-Conclusion structure. We do this (claim, counterclaim, mini-conclusion) for each of your developments (AOKs or WOKs), so we do it 3 times in total. Here’s an example, for one of your developments:

-Your claim might be that emotion is reliable when trying to achieve new knowledge art and you show this using some theory (evidence) you learned from your teacher or your pal Google.

-Your counterclaim is a problem (a limitation) with your claim, or an opposing idea in the same perspective. It might be that emotion can sometimes lead to unreliable insights in the arts (i.e. creating or interpreting art). You show this using (as evidence) an example from your own life experience or some other kind of evidence.

-And then, in the mini-conclusion, you basically have to find a way to draw together the two opposing sides. You have to somehow synthesise these two insights to arrive at a more insightful understanding or some kind of summary. So you might say that emotion can be both reliable and unreliable at the same time, or perhaps there are situations where it's pretty hard to know whether emotions are helping or not (in terms of achieving reliable knowledge). So your MC (mini-conclusion) is a possible conclusion to your KQ (Knowledge Question).

In the final conclusion of the presentation (I call that your Big Conclusion) you will try to combine (draw together/synthesize) the insights of this mini-conclusion as well as the other ones (from the 2 other development sections) to show a really sophisticated/developed answer to your KQ.

Using Evidence

Use evidence for each of your claims and your counterclaims. It will make your talk much more compelling.

Evidence can be:

-Examples of from the course or from your research. For example, stories of real scientific experiments or how society responded to a certain piece of art.

-Personal examples. Specific and realistic examples from your own life experiences are really powerful in presentations, because if they're true (and the audience can normally tell) they are normally really convincing. If you processed your break-up grief by creating a powerful piece of art and you can talk about how you did that (how much this knowledge-generation was coming from emotion).

-Also I've made some notes you can use.

Now let’s go through the structure of your presentation, slide by slide. (The suggested timings in green are assuming you're in a group of two , so you'd have 20 minutes). Don't work by yourself.

The TOK Presentation Structure

Slide 1: Title Page (1 minute)

Text on this slide: