The TOK Classroom

Having a dedicated classroom in which you teach TOK is a huge advantage for delivering the course, as it gives you the opportunity to display the work that your students create. Far from this being the preserve of younger children, decorating your physical learning environment with the ideas and musings of your DP1 and 2 learners is a fantastic way of enriching their TOK experience.

Ensure that you arrange work in a structured and organised way, for example, dividing up your room into different sections to correspond to the order in which you deliver the course. This will help to achieve the following...

...empowers learners	There are few simpler yet more effective (not to mention appealing low-tech) ways of empowering your learners than pasting their work to your walls.
...encourages creative and visual learning	Designing activities that lead to the production of a visual product guarantees that you’ll come up with interesting, creative, and engaging learning activities.
...supports understanding of TOK	Decorating the walls of your classroom grants your students instant access to the ideas and concepts of TOK, its aims and structure, and key thinkers you use to enrich the course. It also helps you to link the different parts of the course - the core and optional themes, and the different areas of knowledge. If you keep work on your wall, you’ll also have great exemplars which the next year group can use as exemplars of effective work.
...provides assessment reminders	When students come to create their exhibitions and essays, they often find it hard to recall the key elements of the course in order to create their assessment tasks. Being surrounded by what they have learned over the previous year or two will allow them to recall their learning, and perhaps hone in on concepts, real-life situations, and thinkers, who they can incorporate in what they are designing.
...markets TOK	Having TOK displays on your walls is the clearest way of demonstrating to teachers, students, and even parents, what TOK is, as well as proving that the learning that goes on is thought-provoking, significant, and interesting.
...makes the learning environment more appealing	Classroom environments are often neglected, either because of time-constraints, or because there’s a perception that it makes little impact of your students. However, there’s plenty of evidence that creating a great ambience in your room stimulates learning, as well as demonstrating to your students that you care about their well-being. If you can find the time to turn those bare walls into a TOK-themed visual masterpiece, you’ll be glad you did.