After you have finished writing your commentary, and submitted it for internal assessment, you’ve done the hard work. Now it’s time to celebrate your achievement, and show off what you’ve created to a public audience.
This is what we call the TOK Exhibition Day, and it should be a very special event involving as many members of your school community as possible.
Members of the site have access to much more support for the TOK assessments, including lesson presentations, real-world examples, and advice on making links to the course, such as via the key concepts. Join us in seconds here!
Step 5 – Exhibiting your work (TOK Exhibition Day)
TOK Exhibition Day should be one of the most intellectually exciting events in the school calendar. It is a genuine celebration of your thinking, a chance for the whole school community to encounter the ideas, objects, and questions you have been wrestling with, and to see authentic critical thinking on display in its most personal and creative form.
Treat it as exactly that: a celebration rather than an obligation. The more ownership you feel over your exhibition, and the more the event feels like a genuine public showcase rather than an assessment exercise, the more memorable and meaningful it will be, both for you and for everyone who engages with your work.
The exhibition also has a practical dimension that is easy to overlook. The objects, ideas, and arguments you develop are precisely the kind of material that makes a university personal statement or college interview come alive.
Being able to describe a specific object, the TOK prompt it connects to, and the line of reasoning it prompted is a far more compelling demonstration of critical thinking than any generic claim about intellectual curiosity. Document your exhibition carefully, reflect on what the process taught you, and keep your work somewhere accessible so you can draw on it confidently when the time comes to apply.
A 3-minute guide to the TOK exhibition
Our three-minute explainer video goes over the basics of the TOK exhibition, discussing the relationship between the prompts, the objects, and the context you’re meant to create your commentary.
You’ll find more videos on this and other aspects of TOK here, and you can dive into much more depth via our free and premium webinars, here.
More support for the TOK exhibition
Make sure you have access to all the documents and online material supporting the exhibition. These include the TOK subject guide, where you’ll find the IA prompts, and the exhibition rubric, and the exemplar TOK exhibitions (found in ‘MyIB’, which is accessible to teachers).
Follow the links above to take you to the three different elements of the TOK exhibition; we’ve also created a page giving some tips on how to put on your exhibition if your school is running a public ‘exhibition day’ which you can visit here. It suggests ways of presenting ideas to an audience.
If your school is a member of theoryofknowledge.net, we have designed a series of lessons on the exhibition, with a three practice exhibition tasks. These will familiarize you with the IA prompts, how to select effective objects, and the assessment rubric. If you are signed into the site, you can access these lessons here.
You can also find out our thoughts on the TOK exhibition (and the TOK essay) in several webinars that we have delivered. You can see these webinars on this page of the site.
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