Big Questions and Philosophy

As part of our Practical Pedagogies Conference, Rosy and I ran a workshop on Big Questions and Philosophy for Children.

It's been great working with Rosy to prepare this session, discussing our approaches, visiting each other's classrooms.

She uses a lot of playful activities that help everyone to participate in philosophical thinking, and I've been learning lots from what I've seen.

Here's the slideshow we used for the session:

Here we are, sorting the big philosophical questions from the not-so philosophical ones:

And discussing which big questions could come from a reading of Anthony Browne's Voices in the Park:

Here are some of the ideas we came up with. There were so many great ones!

• Why do other people see things differently to me?
• Why do we fear what's different?
• Why is there a tree on fire in the park?

   (- This question, although perhaps not a "big" question, leads on to how Anthony Browne is using so many visual metaphors in the book. And  understanding of metaphor in stories unlocks all sorts of potential for discussion of them.)

• What is fair?
• What's wrong with a mongrel?
• What makes us happy?
• How do we perceive/define love?
• Why are they unhappy?
• Why do people go to communal places?
• Is discrimination learned?
• Why do the adults not interact?
• Why can't scruffy kids play with smart kids?
• Why do some people treat their animals better than their children?
• Why don't boys like playing with girls?

It's not easy coming up with questions, but ultimately we'd like a situation where the students themselves can generate questions from a stimulus, and decide which one to discuss!

Knowledge

I'm interested in exploring with the class, in general terms, what it means to know something. There's Plato's three-part definition: that

1. the thing must be true, 
2. you must believe it, and 
3. you must have grounds for believing it.

I'm especially interested in that last one. I don't want to "teach" any of this of course, but I'm interested in providing stimuluses that will provoke the class to explore the whole area.

Here are three short lessons from the last three weeks.

① I told a story about a girl called Leena who sees the poster for Star Wars, and although she hasn't seen the film, she tells the basic story of the film to her friends, which they like.

 And I asked the question:

Quite a few children found the question quite a challenge, but I was determined to press on. Next week...
② I've mentioned the story The Sound the Hare Heard before. It's basically an ancient Henny Penny story, with the difference that Lion sorts out the problem by investigating the truth of it.

Here's some whiteboard notes of some of the responses to it:

This time I felt like the ideas and conversation was flowing a bit more. Probably a better story!

③ This week we started by reviewing the previous two. Having seen Rosy's great philosophy sessions with Year 5, there was going to be more moving about, more quick-fire involvement. Children had to stand up and go to one side of the classroom (or stay in the middle if they were unsure) depending on what they felt about these.

Most went to the left. When it came to justifying their position there were a variety of examples:

• A time I'd been scared, but not of anything real,
• When I'd thought a book was going to be about a boy, but it turned out to be about an animal,
• When I thought I'd broken my leg but I hadn't really.
• I have lots of crazy ideas.
• I thought I couldn't breathe (and then thinking this made it come true),

This provoked some really interesting ideas. Most went to the right, with lots in the middle too.
On the right, justifications:

M: It's fun discovering things, good to learn,
B: There is too much knowledge in the world for one person to know,
R: What about scary truths, that once you know them you can't hide from them any more?
R: What about secrets that you're not supposed to know,
T: Some things different people think different things, and one is not more right than the other.

I was really pleased to hear such interesting ideas. And pleased too because Rosy was sitting in on the lesson. I'll be visiting her's again later this week, perhaps to video this time.

I rounded this one off by telling the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, which most of them know, but is worth retelling.

None of what we've done is what you'd call conclusive. But

• I do think we're getting more at home in the territory;
• We're getting used to some of the ways of doing this: justifying opinions, giving examples, changing our mind, listening to each other carefully.
• It seems to be getting more fun, and everyone is joining in more.

Watch this space.

Equality, equivalence, sameness

I've already blogged about equivalence. But there's a philosophical discussion children could have here.

What does it mean when we say things are the same?

Heraclitus famously said, "You can't step into the same river twice." The water, of course, has changed.

This statement, I think, could be a great starting point, stimulus, for discussion. Peter Worley suggests the line could be taken away from Heraclitus and given to Tina, talking to her brother Timmy, while they're visiting a river.

There does seem to be a lot to think about here, and it relates to the idea of equality in maths.
Peter James Jackson in one of his wonderful videos wants us to say = as "is equivalent to".


Why? Maybe to emphasise the idea of the balanced equations, rather than, as with the  = button on the calculator, "gives the answer..." This is good, but I'd like to get equals to be associated with balanced equations too.

Maybe too, to stress that the two are different but the same. But then I'd say that equality has the idea of difference in it.

Parmenides famously "answered" Heraclitus by saying, "You can't step into the same river once."

For a long time I thought he was just being ridiculous. Well, he was in a way, but within that craziness, there is, for me now anyway, a serious kernel.

Whenever we call two things the same, they are also different in some way. They're maybe in a different place, or a different time. They may be in a different form.

For instance, if we say that two celebrities arrived at an event in the same dress, we never mean that they've both squeezed into the one dress. They are wearing two separate dresses in all-too-slightly different places, with all kinds of subtle differences, definitely taking different shapes, possibly different sizes.

So same never means "completely the same". That's what Parmenides is saying: you have to have two (at least) different things to have sameness. Those things will be the same in some important way, but will be different in others.

Now I wouldn't say all this with my class, of course. Or even lead towards any of it particularly. But I know it's there, a linguistic and thought territory to be explored, every bit as "out there" as the little forest behind the houses across the road from school where children come back with all sorts of insects I can't immediately identify.

I think it would be good to have the philosophical discussion and the maths discussion about equality at roughly the same time, preferably near the beginning of year. I'm looking forward to hearing what my new class have to say!

Practical Pedagogies 2015

We're having a two-day conference at my school, the International School of Toulouse, in October. If you can, come. It will be good.

Click on the image to go to the conference website. You can click through to see the programme. It's really varied - a whole range of approaches to teaching across Primary and Secondary that teachers want to share!

It's being coordinated by Russel Tarr, our impressive history teacher. Russel also runs the brilliant history site activehistory.co.uk and also classtools.net!

We had a coference like this back in 2012, "Practical Learning Technologies in the Classroom", focused on technology in particular. I ran a session with Estelle on blogging in primary and got my first taste of this kind of thing. The whole event was great!

The conference owes something to the "teachmeet" model - which is where teachers meet and have short 7 minute presentations on something that works well for them and that they want to share.

For instance, at the teachmeet at BETT this year I did a 7-minute micropresentation on getting the students contributing voluntarily to the class blog.

This year I've put down to jointly run three workshops. I'm so pleased to do this jointly, partly because it's with three brilliant colleagues, partly because it means more sharing of and reflecting on good ideas in the run-up to the conference. And because there's ten months to go, there's space for more experimentation, reading, thinking for us before we run the sessions.

Valuing talk in the classroom

I'm doing this one with E. We began to talk about our session and what we're going to explore when we were at BETT, and we still need to talk more about this, but there are some directions I'm wanting to explore.
One is dialogic teaching. Have a look at Ilana Horn's summary of the book Beyond Best Practice to get some idea of this: responsiveness to what children say.
The next is the Thinking Together project. I want to start with their way of getting groups to define the rules for how they work together and move on from there: Are these useful rules for discussion? (pdf)
And then there's Pie Corbett's Talk for writing - giving children spoken models that they can imitate and improvise from.
[Edit: here I must add in a photo from my friend Mick and his EAL group discussing friendship:

]

So, a lot to be exploring!

Big questions & philosophy with children

This one I'm doing with R. Last year I did regular "Big Question" times with my class. But I need to see what other people are doing in this area - and the main approach is Philosophy for Children (P4C). This will give you an idea of some of the key principles of P4C. But central is a kind of pattern: a stimulus (perhaps a story), children posing questions, knowing how to select the ones that are big, ie  not just specific to the stimulus, and debatable, not just a question of finding information. The children then select a question to discuss, get in a circle and begin. Hold the egg when it's your turn to speak, pass it to someone cupping their hands when you've finished.
For me, I want to make it a bit wider than what is these days considered philosophy, to include psychology, cultural studies, anthropology and the like - matters which in the past were within the ambit of philosophy.

Next week we're going to try reading/telling The Hare and the Tortoise to our classes and see what questions come up from this.

Students’ creativity in maths in Primary and Secondary

With J - great to have a session spanning Primary and Secondary. "Designing tasks that have a divergent component. Everyone can do something different, at some point. Everyone can interpret the task in some way that’s their own. Creating space so that students can show their own approaches to whatever maths is being studied. This can be just the way different strategies are acknowledged for a piece of arithmetic." We'll kick off with a practical activity which allows participants to go off in their own direction - then share our experience. Really want to look at the importance of talk in this too!

RT @MathsinP5: Best Maths visualization this half term! pic.twitter.com/0FbFrIX9kL
— Jim Noble (@teachmaths) October 14, 2014

The problem with running sessions though is that I'll miss so many other brilliant sessions!