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 […]

As you write (before and dur­ing your writ­ing, and then again when you edit) touch base with the grad­ing cri­te­ria. You can find that doc­u­ment here, a. Make sure you under­stand them and then make an effort to adjust your essay so they match the cri­te­ria. ToK expert Richard van de Lage­maat  has done a really […]

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 […]

Dan Pink is a mas­ter of cre­ative swip­ing, which is MBA-speak for “he steals other peo­ples’ ideas.” Which isn’t to say he’s not a clever chap. And we cer­tainly guys like him, crafty writ­ers who aren’t put off by research, who weave the lat­est ideas into pithy, punchy, com­pelling nar­ra­tives. Cer­tainly, for every artic­u­late Dan […]

Today’s grad­u­ates face a new breed of chal­lenges as they enter the work­force. They will con­front messier, intractable prob­lems such as cli­mate change, global ter­ror­ism, antibi­otic resis­tant dis­eases and per­sis­tent mar­ket weak­ness. The same tech­nolo­gies that empow­ered them as learn­ers at the same time also mul­ti­plied the poten­tial for global havoc. And this has changed the definition […]

Nain is the Welsh word for grand­mother. My nain Gwenda Thain was born on this day in 1922. In hon­our of her birth­day, I’d like to share some of her advice about life: