Hello! I’m Morven a fourth year B.Ed. student at Jordanhill. I’m currently out on placement with a p1 class, and this is a blog post about my experiences with philosophical inquiry in the classroom!

Last year on my third year placement I had a primary 7 class. I wanted to try out different teaching strategies that I had learned about at university. One of which was philosophy. The children were looking at ‘vivisection’ (class teacher’s idea!) as their topic to develop arguments within language. I decided to put I a philosophy lesson to allow the children to think as a group about what vivisection means to them which would help them develop their arguments for writing. However it did not go as I had planned. In fact the lesson was an absolute disaster!
I went into the lesson the wrong way for two reasons. Although we had already discussed vivisection as a class with reading books, the pupils never actually chose to talk about vivisection. Secondly I never had any stimulus to allow the children to think about something in context, such as a story or a picture.

This year I decided to try out philosophy again, this time with my primary one class! We are learning about different feelings you have. Each feeling is firstly explored through a story within a drama lesson, with the story being set in a toyshop (to link in with their environmental topic) and the children hear stories of toys who have different feelings, i.e. sad because their friend has been bought and left the toyshop, or angry for being teased by another toy etc. The feeling is then explored by a philosophical discussion. I tried this out with my primary one class a few weeks ago and I was so surprised how well it had gone, considering my last failed attempt!

I started by introducing a talking teddy toy. Whenever someone was holding the teddy that meant they got to speak. This helped to stop any interrupting and shouting out which may put shyer children off. I then showed the pupils a large image of a child feeling ‘left out’ on the whiteboard. I initially asked them to talk to me about what they see getting responses like “That girl is not being allowed to play by the other girls” “that girl is alone!” and asking the children to then elaborate on their responses, describing how each child may feel, or what they should do in the situation. The children needed very little from me, only a few questions and thoughts to help encourage the children to think about their opinions and ideas, but they had ownership of the conversation as they were responding to each other’s ideas! This is the difference between the first time I tried philosophical inquiry with my primary 7 class; although my p1s didn’t choose the topic they did choose the flow of conversation and of thought. My primary 7 class were not motivated or enthusiastic to talk about a topic they had little interest in in the first place, so they were then unable to use each other’s ideas as a basis to consider their own. Also by giving my primary one class a stimulus of the picture, this hooked them into the lesson and allowed them a visual reference to consider ideas.

The creative thinking and the way that the children spoke about their ideas was fantastic, it did show the ‘power’ of philosophy with young children. Young children love to talk to teachers- philosophical inquiry gives them opportunities to share with their teacher what they think about deeper issues and situations.

I hope this inspires some people to think about how they can implement philosophical inquiry into their classroom (and learn from my mistakes!)- after all if p1s can do it…

what is stopping the older children?!

I’d like to thank fellow B.Ed.4 Nicholas McMahon for giving me advice for planning philosophy with p1’s! : )

Some week ago, I shared the self-evaluation tool for Bloom’s Taxonomy. The checklist is here http://wp.me/p1KaF0-x if you wish to re-visit it.

I was leading an after school professional discussion yesterday where this was to be the focus of a self-improvement opportunity.

During the discussion regarding Higher Order Thinking, we stumbled upon a question that made some of us think. “Does Evaluation and Analysis need pupils to be older before they become of any educational benefit?”

If you are a secondary specialist, it may take a minute to think about this, and we did take a minute to consider it. If I ask a pupil in S1 to talk for twenty seconds on what it means to be analytic or to tell me what evaluation is all about, I do doubt they will be able to tell me. Ask them to tell me why Celtic Park is so much more impressive to see than East End Park, there will be fairly easy discussion about number of fans, ticket price, money from being in Europe…. It could go on a long time. If you said “Evaluate the differences between two polarised Premier League Teams!” then you may not get the same answer.

We agreed that all pupils are good at higher order thinking. They are fantastic at it. Only last week, my two year old asked for a 10p bag of Haribo sweets and a £2.00 bag of chocolate buttons. I told him he had to choose one, and one only.

If that had been my six year old, he would have evaluated it based on weight of sweets and I would have spent the £2.00. For the two year old, he evaluated this himself and came up with the fact he wanted the Haribo more than he wanted the chocolate.

This is a very basic example, but it proves a very important point. We discuss Higher Order Thinking and rich questioning as though it is exclusive to education. Education never stops, I am not sure where learning starts but in the delivery room I remember my youngest stopping what he was doing (Urinating on the midwife, as it happens) and turn to face my voice. He had heard that voice through a load of water for months and clearly recognised it as something of interest to him. He was certainly curious and there had been less than five minutes since his grand entry.

Indeed, the enrichment of learning that we create using Bloom’s Taxonomy is not just for high school, it is not just for primary but it is something our pupils do learn from a very young age. 

As professionals, we question and engage using this method a lot naturally. If you are unsure, have a go at completing the self evaluation tool yourself and you will see quite how much of the process you are already doing simply from experience in your own profession.

The question I am left to consider is this. Do we share this basic process with parents? And should we?

I believe it is vital that parents truly are partners in this process and I would openly welcome any parent to look at what questions they ask their children. Parents are the most important teachers and if a school doesn’t have its parents on board, it really doesn’t have its pupils on board.

My son goes to a smaller primary school in Prestonpans and I can say with pride I see the homework does come home with questions for parents to ask pupils – I always make a point of doing this with my son. 

However, there is still a feeling of poking around in the dark. What is the holistic thing about questioning and would parents be interested in spending an hour finding out about the work of Higher Order Thinking?

It is hard for me to answer for two reasons.

1) As a teacher, I am quite up-to-speed with the process
2) As a teacher, I have a natural interest in the area anyway so don’t know if other parents do too.

As we move to using the Curriculum for Excellence, which appears to be underpinned by this whole Higher Order Thinking, more parents should get an opportunity to find out about our processes and they may learn that education is moving more to a natural learning process. As parents see that we are changing to help pupils learn like the have done from day one, parents may start to not only engage better with this change but also trust it more.