This latest post is for subscribers only.  You can access the newest Individual Oral exemplar here or you can go through the top level headings and find it under "Assessment (2021 exams)" then "Individual Oral," then "IO Sample Work."  Below, I explain a bit about the Individual Oral itself.  

Best,

Tim

In the fall of 2020, as my students went about preparing for their Individual Oral, I decided to do one myself.  I had several goals in mind here.  I wanted to experience what they were about to experience, especially on an emotional level.  I wanted to figure out how the processed worked for me so that I could help them out too.  I wanted to see what went wrong so I could talk to them about my own mistakes and how I corrected them (or didn't).  I also simply wanted a model example I liked.

To be crystal clear, the Individual Oral here is me, pretending to be a student in the May 2021 exams.  I did it under strict examination conditions, just like our students.  My department head generously offered to be the teacher and asked me the required 5 minutes of questions.   

I cannot recommend this enough!  Do your own Individual Oral, have your department "grade" you, and use your sample with your students.  It was some of the best professional development I did in preparation for the guiding students in creating their own Individual Oral.

At the time of publishing, we don't know the final grade boundaries for the Individual Oral.  Coming in at 33 out of 40 total points, I imagine that this would translate into a strong 6, but we just don't know yet.  I was so focused on getting the balance right between the extract and the larger work or body of work that I didn't pay enough attention to pinpointing the analytical arguments I wanted to make.  In other words, I winged it more than I should have in criterion B and I paid the price.  It was a great lesson to teach my students! 

Finally, a caveat on the text/work themselves.  We teach both Macbeth and World War 1 propaganda posters in 10th grade.  I used 10th grade texts because the IB has said that one way in which to conduct mock IOs is in this manner: using works/texts from previous years.  In this way, students heard an IO, but it wasn't on a text or literary work they studied as part of the course.  .