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.

There are a variety of different tasks that teachers can use in order to enable exploratory talking, such as ‘Would you rather’ - in which students are given two hypothetical scenarios, ‘always, sometimes, never’ - for insistence, using to consolidate skill knowledge or moral questioning. or even tasks such as ‘ranking sources for reliability’. However, what I am most interested in is using abstract statements to encourage deep thinking and discussion.

One such example of this is during preparation for my year eights end of unit assessment on ‘The Tempest’. My students were having to answer whether or not they believed the character of Caliban to be a monster. To prepare them for this I gave them the statements of ‘evil is not in our actions, but in our intent’, and ‘we are who we are because of those around us’. The students then debated their opinions on these statements as abstract concepts before then applying them to the character of Caliban. I personally found that the students engaged with this concept and quickly adapted their responses in order to develop what their peers had said. During these conversations, students raised points such as the ethical implications of killing someone in self-defense and the ‘nature nurture’ debate. They were then able to use these conversations as inspirations within their assessments allowing them to develop a thoughtful and personal response to the question. For example, one student wrote that “because both monstrous traits I have looked at seem to be brought out by Prospero’s treatment of Caliban, he would have had no need to be malicious or rude if Prospero had treated him well” and another student wrote that “Caliban cannot help but become a monster after his torturous life”, with a third student linking Caliban’s behaviour back to what “his mother, Sycox, would have taught him”. By including these ideas as debate topics in their lessons, the students were able to develop their thoughts and apply it to their work.

Using these debate discussions students can use oracy for metacognition opposed to metacognition for oracy this means that instead of merely learning skills to improve their oracy, the students are “offer[ed] ways in to thinking more deeply about the subject under discussion.” (Palladino, Voice 21) and that the role of the teacher is to ensure only that these conversations are “facilitated, mediated, probed, and extended” (Alexander, 2017). These concepts coincide with the recommendations of the Newbolt report in 1921, that highlighted the idea that “oral work is the foundation on which proficiency in the writing of English must be based” and that children should be taught not only to read and write, but to actively listen. It is our role as teachers to not only provide and model the language to use, but also model how to actively listen and respond. Furthermore, Grant and Scott (2019) highlight that creating a space in which students feel safe and valued in their opinions. This also helps them to “develop confidence and self-esteem".

Overall, it is my belief that we should be constantly and consistently encouraging our students to explore the world around them; to use abstract statements and the ‘big ideas’ as a lens in which to inspect not only their work, but also their personal beliefs and ideas. To develop themselves as not only academics, but as people.