My school doesn’t offer IB, but there’s an ToK equivalent under our CIE (Cambridge International Examinations) course called Thinking Skills. It’s a bit more focused than ToK—it doesn’t try to teach students how to think, but instead focuses more on specific thinking techniques. For example, there’s an emphasis on deconstructing arguments, analysing essays, and identifying logical reasoning. While that’s not quite as useful as what well-applied ToK sounds like, it’s probably a bit more realistic in terms of ability to convey information to pupils—it’s still very much an assessed subject. There’s also a multichoice problem-solving section, although I’m not sure to what extent this can be taught—it seems to measure inherent logical skills and IQ as much as anything else.
My school doesn’t offer IB, but there’s an ToK equivalent under our CIE (Cambridge International Examinations) course called Thinking Skills. It’s a bit more focused than ToK—it doesn’t try to teach students how to think, but instead focuses more on specific thinking techniques. For example, there’s an emphasis on deconstructing arguments, analysing essays, and identifying logical reasoning. While that’s not quite as useful as what well-applied ToK sounds like, it’s probably a bit more realistic in terms of ability to convey information to pupils—it’s still very much an assessed subject. There’s also a multichoice problem-solving section, although I’m not sure to what extent this can be taught—it seems to measure inherent logical skills and IQ as much as anything else.
The Role of ToK is NOT to “try to teach students how to think”.