Talk, Thinking and Philosophy in the Primary Classroom

John Smith

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781844452972
• eBook ISBN: 9781844456864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Talk, thinking and philosophy are crucial components of children?s learning. This book is a practical and readable guide to the ways in which teachers can provide children with the opportunities to develop and use these skills to their greatest effect. It begins by asking why talking and thinking should be taught and examines current approaches in this area. It goes on to look at how teachers can develop talking and thinking skills across the six Areas of Learning to help children gain confidence and deepen understanding.

1

Introduction

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Chapter objectives

By the end of this chapter you will have begun to appreciate:

• how much better your own teaching can become as you develop your professional skills and understanding in talk, thinking and philosophy;
• the importance of these skills in the new primary curriculum.

This will help you to make progress towards these Professional Standards for the award of QTS: Q1, Q3a, Q15, Q19

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The importance of talking and thinking in the primary classroom

One year the Inspector, observing a small boy sitting bolt upright gazing before him, called savagely: ‘Why are you not writing – you at the end of the row? You have your pen and paper have you not?’

‘Yes, thank you sir.’

‘Then why are you idling?’

‘Please sir, I was only thinking what to say.’

A grunt was the only answer. What other was possible from one who must have known well that pen, ink, and paper were no good without at least a little thinking.

(Thompson, 1939, p190)

As this quotation from Flora Thompson’s novel suggests, thinking can easily be confused with idleness. Perhaps the most telling sentence is the last one. How could anyone seriously believe that the simple act of using a pen or even, in our own times, the most sophisticated word processor could lead to a worthwhile outcome without some thinking on the part of its user. Yet thinking is very easy to overlook, even for teachers. The constant flow of thought through our minds is well described by Steve Bowkett:

Thoughts stream through our minds all day long, often without us paying much attention to them. Even when we do notice what’s ‘on our mind’ we might take this mental material quite for granted or, alas, forget most of it without considering how it can be used to our greatest benefit.

(Bowkett, 2007, pxiii)

So how can we fail to notice something of such vital importance? When we drive a car we are generally unaware of the workings of the engine. Similarly, every reader of this book knows that children are thinking constantly and could easily recognise the accuracy of Steve Bowkett’s description. Like the busy driver, however, teachers are caught up in what they do – the very demanding business of classroom teaching. They often forget the importance of thinking and imagine, as the school inspector seems to have done, that what is written down or recorded in some other way is all that matters. If we make this error, another error follows on from it quite naturally: the idea that no serious attention needs to be paid, by teacher or child, to the process of thinking. This book will help you to challenge that notion. In the process of challenging it, you will find it easier to meet the Standards for Teaching and you will become a better teacher.

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REFLECTIVE TASK

The next time you undertake a piece of written work – a lesson evaluation or course assignment for example – try to capture some of your thought processes as you prepare to write it. You could jot down some notes or draw a diagram to try and represent this. How does one thought lead to another? You will not be able to capture much of this: there are too many strands to our thinking and our thoughts are elusive and rapidly changing. A brief attempt though should be enough to prove just how complex and diverse your thinking is, just like that of your children.

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As far as classroom talk goes, there is a similar picture. Although every teacher is aware of its importance, evidence strongly suggests that classrooms often fail to provide children with the opportunities that they need to talk in ways which best support learning. There is of course a need for order to be maintained within your classroom and therefore to encourage children to talk as much as they want, at all times, is not necessarily the best approach for you to take. As you work your way through this book you will develop achievable strategies for encouraging the kind of talk which is purposeful and which allows for the development of thinking. Better still, you will develop the ability to help children to recognise and regulate such talk themselves.

An exciting time to develop talk, thinking and philosophy

How can we set up the conditions for such productive talking and thinking to emerge in our classrooms? There is a range of approaches which will be examined in this book. One approach which will be discussed a great deal is Philosophy for Children (P4C). As the name suggests, P4C is a classroom approach which has strong roots in philosophy and which helps children develop their skills in talk, in thinking and in other important areas too such as ‘emotional intelligence’, which will be considered in Chapter 4. You may still wonder why it is important to invest any time or effort into these areas. Can the teacher have any influence over the development of children’s talk and thinking or will they just happen by themselves if we get on with our teaching? The bad news is that if we ignore them we are likely to offer children inadequate opportunities for development. The good news is that there are tried and tested ways of encouraging them and some of these are quite straightforward. Others require more investment in terms of time and energy but the benefits they offer will easily repay this investment. To give you a clearer idea of some possible directions that you may eventually travel in as you work through this book, consider the following three Classroom Stories. They are composite pictures but, like all of the Classroom and School Stories in this book, they are based upon real trainee and teacher experiences.

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CLASSROOM STORY 1

Amy has decided that she would like to help the Year 5 children in her placement class to develop their talking and thinking in her science lessons. She has obtained a book of concept cartoons (Naylor and Keogh, 2000) and she asks the children to discuss their ideas about light and dark using the example shown in Chapter 7. She notices how the opinions aired in the cartoon act as a stimulus for the children in her class to explore their own ideas about this area of science. The device of considering other children’s ideas about the topic seems to ‘unlock’ her children’s beliefs and misconceptions.

CLASSROOM STORY 2

Ben has read about P4C and has also heard a colleague in school speaking enthusiastically about it, following a training course she has attended. Ben has decided to run a ‘community of enquiry’, the core practice of P4C, with his Year 1 class. Using the book But Why? (Stanley, 2004) for guidance, he decides to use the children’s book If I were a spider (Bowkett, 2004) as the stimulus for an enquiry. He is astonished by the quality of questions the children in his class generate themselves and then attempt to answer. He decides that he will continue leading enquiries in his class and try to undertake training as soon as possible to develop his understanding further.

CLASSROOM STORY 3

A school which takes many trainee teachers on their placements has implemented a range of approaches to the development of thinking skills. In particular, the school uses Thinking Actively in a Social Context or TASC, an approach devised by Belle Wallace and collaborators (see, for example, Wallace, 2002) alongside Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats (de Bono, 1985). Trainees have valuable opportunities to witness the development of children’s thinking skills as they move through the school. They notice that children seem able to produce many creative responses when they are faced with problem-solving situations. They also notice how confident and self-reliant the children seem to be and how well they evaluate their own learning.

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As you read through these classroom stories you will probably have noticed that some changes in your practice – like the use of concept cartoons in Classroom Story 1 – can be put into place very easily. You could introduce such changes within a matter of days. Other changes, like the introduction of P4C in Classroom Story 2, require more preparation but you could make a start in your own classroom quite soon. This book will explain the rationale and basic practices of these and other approaches to talk, thinking and philosophy. It will also help you to understand some of the important background issues which underpin classroom work of this kind and it will point you in the direction of further reading and training which will be essential if you wish to continue developing your practice in these areas. If you are lucky enough to be placed at a school like the one in Classroom Story 3, this book will enable you to take advantage of what it has to offer and, after you have qualified, to contribute to similar development in the schools in which you work. This is a project that could last for your whole career in teaching.

How can this book help you to develop?

If you are a trainee teacher you will find this book particularly useful as it has been written primarily with your needs in mind, along with the other books in the Learning Matters Achieving QTS series, particularly the Cross Curricular Strand series to which it belongs. However, given the diversity of teacher training routes currently available, the circumstances in which training is undertaken will vary greatly from one reader to another. This book will refer both to your own classroom situation and to a wider picture of national and international research. Whatever the circumstances of your training, therefore, you will be able to develop your own knowledge and understanding of the issues covered, as well as the skill and confidence needed to try out some of the ideas described here in your own classroom. The book is intended to equip you with a ‘survival kit’ to get you started on a mission to create the best possible conditions for talk, thinking and philosophy in your classroom, which in turn will create the best possible conditions for teaching and learning across the curriculum. Within the book you will encounter ideas that you may meet in the taught elements of your teacher training programme. The book will support and extend such work but it can also be used for independent study if you do not have access to such elements in a taught programme.

This book should also be useful to newly qualified and experienced teachers because, once you have acquired the survival kit required by the trainee teacher, the issues raised will continue to pose challenges for you as a more experienced teacher. All good teachers work hard to develop their existing practice and there are few areas more fruitful to develop than those covered by this book. As a more experienced teacher, you might also be looking beyond your own classroom and considering ways in which whole-school change might be brought about so that you can help make your school one in which talk, thinking and philosophy are celebrated as vital activities. Chapter 8 offers some guidance about how to help your school develop into a Thinking School.

This book will build up a case for collaborative work in the classroom in which ideas can be exchanged through talk. In the same spirit, you are recommended to try to work collaboratively with others as you study the book. It can certainly be studied alone but you are likely to reap even greater benefit through discussion with others about the issues raised. The Professional Standards at ‘Q’ level relating to the topics covered are listed at the beginning of each chapter.

There are already many excellent books about talking, thinking and philosophy in the primary classroom. Some link the three as this book does although many others deal with just one or two of these three areas. Reference will be made to some of these books in the chapters to come. This book, though, tackles all three of these interrelated areas from the point of view of the trainee teacher. Quite a number of other books examine one particular approach to the development of talking or thinking, such as TASC or P4C, and one of the purposes of this book is to draw some of these approaches together so that you can see the similarities and differences between them. I will repeatedly remind you that no single approach is likely to meet all of your children’s needs. By considering a variety of a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the author
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Why teach talk, thinking and philosophy?
• 3 Talk theory
• 4 Thinking and philosophy theory
• 5 Classroom strategies to develop talk
• 6 Classroom strategies to develop thinking and philosophy
• 7 Talk, thinking and philosophy in the primary curriculum
• 8 Developing a Thinking School
• Index