CEC CPD Journal 2021

Katie Samuel - Exploring the use of abstract thought in developing student responses.

It is well recorded the benefits of dialogic discussion in helping students to develop their thoughts, and subsequently their writing, but I intend to highlight how the use of seemingly abstract statements (inspired by concepts such as philosophy for children) can further push our students to develop high levels of personal responses.

Throughout the year, one of the things that has most interested me with engaging with students is the use of exploratory talk, specifically that which has been inspired using abstract statements. Therefore, when choosing the topic for my CPD, I naturally gravitated towards the idea of exploring philosophical questions and metacognition to expand students’ reasoning and rationale. Throughout my review I intend to combine aspects of Philosophy for Children (P4C), metacognition, and dialogic teaching in an attempt to highlight the benefits of abstract thinking.

Inspired by Professor Matthew Lipman, P4C originated in 1972 in the United States to encourage students to philosophies and question the world around them. Steve Williams highlights in ‘A brief History of P4C’ that Lipman believed education should not only be for the students' future, but a way in which one lives their lives. The concept of P4C is that the teacher facilitates questions that students can use to explore the world around themselves, not only examine concepts of religion and morality, but also art, culture, power, history and community. Essentially all the aspects that make humans human. To follow the path of progressivism.

Williams also outlines, on the P4C website, that the purpose is to encourage a dialogical discussion to explore themes and ideas to “become self-reliant and systematic thinkers” I personally believe that this is something that we should be encouraging our students to always do. To question their own thoughts and beliefs and explore the world in which they live – to discover who they are as people and the society that they live in; to decide if this is a society that they want for their future to be based in. Furthermore, by examining their own beliefs they can develop their cognitive links and general knowledge helping to solidify new information. It also helps students with the development of their language – specifically their emotional language.

P4C has also been used within the UK school system since the early 90s and the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) (2021) highlights that since 1972, “Philosophy for Children has been adopted by schools in over 60 countries as a way of developing children’s higher order thinking skills”. Studies by the EEF found that P4C secured, on average, two months progress in reading and four months progress for financially disadvantaged students with a further two months progress in their writing. This evidences that the use of philosophical debate is beneficial to all students as “75 percent [of students] arrive at school below average in language development.” (Gaunt and Scott 2019, ‘Transforming teaching and learning through Oracy’). The benefit comes from the idea that students are encouraged, not only to explore and explain their own opinions, but also to become active listeners - and witness high level oracy and language skills performed by their peers through teacher facilitation.

Williams gives example questions such as “I want to find truth, but how will I recognise it?” and “people say ‘mind your own business’. But when should I think something is my business?” and that as well as questioning, these ideas can be facilitated by looking at films, video clips and images or listening to music.

The main criticism of P4C is that the majority of research, and indeed practice, has primarily been aimed at primary aged children. However, the question we must ask ourselves is whether or not any of these tasks can be applied to secondary school students. It is my personal belief that they can. For example, for secondary English students, for example, within Cowes Enterprise, alongside many other schools, we study ‘An Inspector Calls’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’ as GCSE texts. Both of these aforementioned questions could easily be applied to each of these texts or even used to during revision; applying these statements to Marley’s “Mankind was my business”, or Inspector Goole’s “we are members of one body”. Likewise, History teachers could use these questions to examine the reliability of sources. Gaunt and Scott (2019) state that these skills are also beneficial cross-curricular; helping students to develop their rational and problem-solving skills and teaching them to work together as part of a group.

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