18/03/2025  •  7 min read

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About this episode

Theory of Knowledge is one of the most talked-about and least understood parts of the IB Diploma Programme. In this episode of IB Unplugged, veteran IB educator David Spooner makes a straightforward case: there is nothing mystical about TOK. Drawing on more than two decades of teaching TOK, philosophy, and literature across nine countries, he strips the course back to a single question and shows how any teacher can bring it to life.

Episode chapters

• 2:58 Why teach, and what needs to change in education
• 11:21 Demystifying TOK: the one question at its heart
• 17:53 A TOK teacher’s journey, and why TOK has no content
• 29:54 Flipping the model: bringing subjects into TOK
• 47:26 What makes a great TOK teacher
• 50:27 The themes teachers overlook
• 57:37 Where TOK thrives

The one question at the heart of TOK

Theory of Knowledge has a reputation. Ask around an IB staffroom and you will hear it described as abstract, or as the course only a certain kind of teacher can handle. David has taught TOK since the early 2000s and led IB workshops for almost as long, and he thinks that reputation has done real damage, and that the reality is far simpler than the mythology suggests.

“How do you know what you claim to know?”
“At heart TOK is really simple,” he says. “It’s asking one question. How do you know what you claim to know?”

Everything else follows from that. When students interrogate where their knowledge comes from, what counts as evidence, and why one claim holds when another doesn’t, they are doing TOK, whether the timetable says so or not. The teacher’s job is to keep bringing everyone, students and colleagues alike, back to that question.

Why TOK has no content of its own

Part of what makes TOK feel intimidating is that teachers go looking for the “stuff” they are meant to deliver and struggle to find it. David’s answer is that there isn’t any, and that this is exactly the point.

“There is no TOK content,” he explains. “What there is, is reflection on content that they’re being exposed to in their other subject classes.”

In other words, the raw material of a TOK lesson is already sitting in the economics or physics the students are studying. The TOK teacher’s task is to hold that material up to the light and ask a different kind of question about it.

Flipping the model: bringing subjects into TOK

Most schools try to sprinkle TOK into their other subjects: a “TOK link” flagged in a biology unit here, a knowledge question raised in a history lesson there. David turns that on its head. Rather than integrating TOK into other subjects, he integrates other subjects into TOK.

The practical way in, he suggests, is through the TOK concepts. The course is built on twelve of them, and they are not TOK’s private property. They sit at the foundation of every discipline: four or five underpin economics, a different handful anchor the natural sciences. That overlap is the opening.

His advice is to make the connection at the very start of a unit. Before the content begins, ask why this material matters and where else those same concepts appear. He pushes the idea back to why teachers chose their own subjects in the first place. Nobody, he points out, went to university at eighteen because they were gripped by zygotes in themselves; they went because of the bigger concepts those things illuminate. Reminding students of that, and reminding yourself, is where TOK and subject teaching meet.

What makes a great TOK teacher

If TOK needs no special content, what does it ask of the person teaching it? For David, the answer has little to do with breadth of knowledge across the disciplines. What matters is intellectual humility: the willingness to sit with uncertainty and to have the foundations of your own subject questioned in front of you. He would hire, he says, for exactly that quality.

“If they appear to lack intellectual humility, then they’re never going to become a good TOK teacher.”

It is a reassuring message for any teacher handed TOK for the first time and quietly panicking. The questions TOK asks are the ones you already ask in your own classroom. You are simply asking them across a wider range of material.

The themes teachers overlook

Some of the richest TOK territory, David suggests, is the ground teachers instinctively avoid. Two of the optional themes, knowledge and politics and knowledge and indigenous societies, are regularly reduced to something smaller and safer than they should be. Politics gets read as governments and parliaments, when the deeper prompt is about human relationships and how we understand them. Indigenous knowledge gets reduced to a handful of surface-level cultural markers, or avoided altogether for fear of getting it wrong.

“To separate an idea from its cultural and intellectual origins is like trying to take the egg out of a cake which has already been baked.”

His most striking example turns the tables on the very idea of indigenous knowledge. The scientific method, he argues, is itself the product of a particular time and place, the European Enlightenment, rather than a universal, culture-free default. To separate an idea from its cultural and intellectual origins, he says, is like trying to take the egg out of a cake which has already been baked. When students grasp that even the scientific method carries a cultural origin, TOK stops being a hoop to jump through and starts reshaping how they see every subject.

Where TOK thrives

David is candid that the course flourishes in some schools more than others, and that the difference is rarely about resources. It comes down to how much a school, and the society around it, trusts its teachers. He points to Finland, where he taught for six years and teachers were trusted to work as professionals. That trust, he says, is what gives TOK room to flourish. Where teaching is treated instead as a mechanism for delivering high grades, it becomes one more transactional box to tick.

Concepts first: a principle worth carrying into every unit

The shift David describes, from content to be covered towards the concepts and questions that give content its meaning, is where strong subject teaching begins. It is a principle that shapes how we build our own IB DP resources at Kognity, where every unit opens with a big-picture overview designed to put the concepts first, before the detail arrives.

About David Spooner

David Spooner is an IB educator and Theory of Knowledge specialist who has taught TOK, philosophy, and English since 1999. His teaching has taken him across Ghana, the UK, Spain, Finland, Greece, Lebanon, Jordan, Italy, and now India. An IB workshop leader since 2004, he is also an IB examiner and a Diploma Programme verification visitor and consultant.

You can hear the full conversation with David Spooner, including his take on the future of education and what he looks for when hiring a TOK teacher, in this episode of IB Unplugged. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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