The Individual Oral is a difficult assessment.  Students will need to prepare for it in advance, and you will want to be a part of that process.  In advising students on what to do and what not to do, you may find it helpful to give students a wide variety of possible organizational structures for organizing their IO.

There’s no one right way to do this.  This cannot be emphasized enough.  There are many paths to success and many very different ways that could equally allow students to achieve top marks.  If you believe that the argument should drive the structure of the IO, then it is incumbent upon us to guide students in developing and focusing that argument, not imposing an arbitrary structure upon that argument.

Before students use any of these outlines, they should already have picked their global issue and narrowed it down.  They should have already found their literary and non-literary extract that explores that narrowed down global issue.  They should have already had conversations with you about what would work or wouldn’t work.  Some of you may use a proposal process.  Others will quickly confer with students to suss out their ideas.  However you work, only have students use these outlines once you have “approved” their initial ideas and thinking. 

Once all of that has happened, then one of the wide variety of outlines below can be used to help students structure their IO.  Remember, students cannot bring this into the oral.  That’s absolutely not allowed.  Instead, the thinking here is that they will use one of the diverse outlines to guide their thinking, to lay out their argument, to see what needs revising and fixing.  At this point, you can have very rich conversations with students into creating a much more effective and convincing oral.  But remember, this should be an outline.  Students are not to type up an entire essay, memorize it, and then speak it back to you verbatim in the IO.  That’s a terrible idea!      

Once students have completed an outline, students will then use the official IB form and “transfer” their ideas as needed.  But, it won’t and can’t be a direct transfer.  Why?  The outline is too detailed and contains too much information.  The official IB form only allows for 10 bullet points – not whole chunks or multiple complete sentences as one bullet point.  That’s okay.  This paired down official IB outline gives them just that, the outline of what they are going to say in the oral.  They don’t need more.  They have the extracts (clean copies only!) in front of them and they know what they want to say and the order they want to say it in.  The detailed non-IB approved outline just helped them in figuring out the order of their ideas and why the argument would be most persuasive if said in that way.    

There are three more additional notes to add about the outlines.  The first is that they always list literature as going first.  This is a completely arbitrary decision.  Students can and will discuss the non-literary extract first in many instances.  Literature was listed first just to create consistency among them.  However, students will need to decide, based on the argument they are delivering, whether the non-literary or the literary is best positioned first.   The second note is the outlines are not meant to be printed and handed to students as is: you will have to modify them to meet your needs.  I’ve left them as Microsoft Word documents so you can download them, adjust the spacing, and revamp or revise for whatever reason.  The third note is that you might like some of the approaches mentioned.  That's to be expected and you don't have to use what you don't like.  These are all possible approaches, but not the only approach students can take. 

Finally, it’s important to reiterate that the IO should not occur before the end of the first year of the course.  For schools that end in June, anything earlier than May of year 1 seems too early and goes against the spirit of the program and the spirit of the guide.  Your students should not be making final decisions about their IO in February of year 1.  They should not be using these outlines to finalize their IO and their thinking in March of year 1.  That’s just too early. 

Possible Outlines and Approaches

Outline #1

Use this outline if you find your argument works best by first zooming into the extract and then you want to zoom out to explore the whole work or body of work in connection to your global issue.  This structure also provides a clear separation between the extract and the larger work or body of work.

Outline 1 (downloaded as a word document so you can type and modify to fit your needs)

Outline #2   

Use this outline if you find your argument works best by first beginning broadly, discussing the entire work or body of work.  Then, you can zoom in on particular details in the extracts to provide more clarity and specificity to your argument.  This structure also provides a clear separation between the larger work or body of work and the extract.

Outline 2 (downloaded as a word document so you can type and modify to fit your needs) 

Outline #3

Use this outline if you find your argument works best by combining the extract with the non-literary body of work or whole literary work all together.  In this approach, you will find that you are zooming into the extract, but also zooming out to the broader picture often.  You will go back and forth between the two making sure that there is balance in the discussion of the extract and larger whole.  in other words, you will not break up the discussion of the extract from a discussion of the whole work/text.

Outline 3 (downloaded as a word document so you can type and modify to fit your needs) 

Outline #4  

Use this outline if you find your argument works best by first discussing both extracts and then discussing the whole work and non-literary body of work.  This structure allows you to offer more comparisons between the work and the text on both an extract level and on a broader whole text/work level. 

Outline 4 (downloaded as a word document so you can type and modify to fit your needs) 

Outline #5   

Use this outline if you find your argument works best by first beginning broadly, discussing the entire work and body of work.  Then, you will move to discussing each extract.  This structure allows you to offer more comparisons between the work and the text on a broader level before getting into the details of the extracts. 

Outline 5 (downloaded as a word document so you can type and modify to fit your needs) 

Outline #6  

Use this outline if you find your argument works best by delivering the oral in almost two separate chunks.  You will first offer an introduction to the literary work and then zoom into the extract before zooming out to explore the whole work. Then, you will offer a second mini-introduction before doing the exact same thing for the non-literary text.  This structure provides a clear separation between the literary work and the non-literary text.   

Outline 6 (downloaded as a word document so you can type and modify to fit your needs) 

Outline #7

Use this outline if you find your argument works best by delivering the oral in almost two separate chunks.  You will first offer an introduction to the literary work and then remain broad, discussing the entire work.  After that, you will zoom in on particular details in the extract to provide more clarity and specificity to your argument.  Then, you will offer a second mini-introduction before doing the exact same thing for the non-literary text.  This structure provides a clear separation between the literary work and the non-literary text.