Here are my top tips for get­ting to top marks on your The­ory of Knowl­edge essay.  All ToK essays are cross-disciplinary; they are never just about one way of know­ing (per­cep­tion, lan­guage, rea­son, emo­tion) or one areas of knowl­edge (math­e­mat­ics, nat­ural sci­ences, human sci­ences, his­tory, ethics, the arts). In gen­eral you’ll want to include at least […]

Essen­tials You can down­load the new eco­nom­ics course guide here: 2013 Guide. And for those still on the old guide that one is here 2003 Guide. The IB Course Com­pan­ion is writ­ten specif­i­cally for this course. It is very read­able and easy to under­stand. The Eco­nom­ics for the IB Diploma book is also very good. It’s perhaps […]

Here is a rough out­line of how you could struc­ture your TOK essay. Feel free to mod­ify this or take a com­pletely dif­fer­ent approach, as long as you are meet­ing the require­ments of the rubric. The fol­low­ing is the struc­ture I sug­gest you try for your TOK essays. In the end you will be bringing […]

As you do your IB Com­mu­nity, Action and Ser­vice activ­i­ties you’ll need to reflect on your learn­ing. This serves as evi­dence of all that you have accom­plished, but it also helps you to make sure you are learn­ing as much as you can out of each activ­ity. Writ­ing is like that. William Faulkner said, “I never […]

I have found that the biggest chal­lenge my stu­dents are hav­ing, in terms of scor­ing the top marks in the Busi­ness IA, is related to their use of ana­lyt­i­cal tools. In gen­eral, you have a Research Ques­tion and you’re try­ing to arrive at your answer. A very com­mon mis­take is that stu­dents do a lot of […]

This is your lucky day. You are finally going to find out the secret time-management weapon which has only been known to a few wildly suc­cess­ful stu­dents. Until now. (WARNING: Do not read this unless you are pre­pared for incred­i­ble aca­d­e­mic suc­cess! How­ever, if ready to have your life com­pletely changed, read on.) I have had the […]

Some­times (nor­mally in 8-mark ques­tions) you will be asked to eval­u­ate. This is about going beyond the insights you have made from doing your analy­sis (your Dr Tests). But let’s make sure you are clear on the dif­fer­ence between analy­sis and eval­u­a­tion. By ana­lyz­ing in Busi­ness we mean giv­ing your Defi­ni­tions, Expla­na­tions, Exam­ples and Development […]

There may be two main func­tions of an edu­ca­tional sys­tem. One is about hav­ing a cer­tain set of skills: the abil­ity to mul­ti­ply or list uses for a paper clip. The other func­tion is about devel­op­ing mem­bers of a soci­ety, teach­ing peo­ple how to get on and inter­act with each other. This way peo­ple know how […]