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Newsletter February 2010
Kia
ora tatou!
News:
Workshops
in Auckland, Christchurch, Gisborne, Hamilton, Wellington
P4CNZ
coming out of recess!
Workshops
Great
news for those in the South! Two P4C workshops are being offered
in Christchurch in May: one two-day basic training, and a "refresh
and extend" one-day workshop for those with some prior training
and experience. These will be facilitated by Vanya Kovach,
and offered through EducationPlus at the University of Canterbury
See "Training and Events" page for details
The
same package is also available in Hamilton in August, and basic
training workshops are being offered in Wellington and Gisborne
too. The Auckland workshop is now full to overflowing, and
no more registrations can be taken. See "Training and
Events" page for details of available workshops.
Special General Meeting
P4CNZ has officially been in recess since 2008, though
some workshops have still been taking place. But the time
is right now for re-vitalising the association. A special
general meeting will be held (date to be confirmed - end of March
2010) to elect a new committee and begin to make new plans for how
to meet the needs of those who want to continue to develop their
skills in facilitating philosophical inquiry in the classroom. Watch
this space.
If you are keen to be part of this, then join the google
group, and also directly contact me as well, [v.kovach@auckland.ac.nz]
Special General Meeting - Tuesday 23rd March, 6pm at Balmoral
School, Brixton Rd, Balmoral, Auckland
Kia pai to ra
Vanya Kovach
r
Of interest from a past newsletter - reflections
from Lynne
Petersen
(Lynne Petersen did her level one a couple
of years ago. She has kindly written some reflections on her experience
as a P4C facilitator for us to share with you, and I am sure you
will find these really inspiring and useful . . .)
Working
with my year three/four class of quite diverse (ethnically, linguistically,
academically, socially!) individuals I was quite amazed by the spin
off effects of running a Community of Inquiry on an ongoing basis
within our classroom programme. As many wise people before
me have said, “It won’t happen overnight, but
it will happen”. I found this to be true in spades.
For the first few weeks (okay, maybe a month or two if
I’m honest!) of trying to get a Community of Inquiry up
and running in my room I felt at various moments: frustrated
(how to give ample time and opportunity to all students to share
their thinking?), overwhelmed
(so many things to focus on: Cognitive skills, Cooperative
skills, where to begin??), confused
(where
have we got to in our thinking??... more muddled?... what was the
question again??)… and then, a moment of clarity would
arise and I would feel at once … excited,
engaged,
intellectually
challenged
because
I could see after weeks of apparent plodding, my students were gradually
becoming more sure of themselves within the Community of Inquiry.
They, like me, began to renegotiate our roles and take on
more ownership and ultimately responsibility for the process as
I gradually learned how to turn over more ownership to them and
adopt more of a “facilitator on the side” role
within the Community of Inquiry.
As I said, this
didn’t happen overnight. Rather as the following quote
encapsulates:
“’The
germ of an idea doesn't make the sculpture that stands up... so
the next stage is hard work' (Csikszentmihalyi 'Nature of Insight.)”
So,
my class of thinkers, and I, worked through the process together
by asking ourselves each week the fundamental question:
“How
can we improve our Community of Inquiry?”
I tried to ensure I really
listened
to things they were saying to me such as:
- We
need to find a way for more people to have opportunities to be involved
(a logistical challenge with 30 children aged 6-8 years old which
we ultimately ‘got around’ by restructuring
our process and splitting into 3-4 smaller Community of Inquiry
groups which the kids themselves chose in order to allow us to have
everyone participating to the maximum of their desire/ability);
- We
need to be discussing things we are really interested in, things
that matter to us
(from me
setting the agenda for our Communities of Inquiries, it quickly
devolved to the students themselves being the ones to bring important
thinking matters “to the table” with my role
then becoming one of “searcher of stimulus/examples to
springboard our ideas”);
- We
need time to be able to reflect on our thoughts rather than just
20-40 minutes available in our Community of Inquiry
(again, we gradually moved to a variety of structures to assist
this including: me providing a section of our white board for weekly
P4C focus questions so that students could be thinking about and
discussing these ideas throughout the week and even at home; keeping
a book of our questions/ideas so that at any time during the day/week
students could record ideas/questions that had occurred to them
so they wouldn’t forget them by the time our next Community
of Inquiry came around; having “listening in”
sessions where some groups did “low level thinking”
tasks at their desks while I helped lead a Community of Inquiry
with another group – the “listening in”
groups of students could then be hearing the discussion from “outside
the circle” and already formulating thoughts, questions,
examples to bring to similar questions they would discuss in their
Community of Inquiry that day/week).
All of which
gradually led to at first a subtle shift, but more noticeably a
significant shift, in the ways our classroom thought, discussed
and ultimate “ran” in general in other areas
of the curriculum.
One of the first times it “hit
home” for me that things were operating differently in
my room since engaging in the Communities of Inquiry was when a
little boy in my room (I’ll call him Yi Kung) - who had
never dared to say too much - said to me in the context of a mathematics
discussion one day “Mrs
Petersen, I disagree with you because…”.
Now, this might not seem too radical to you, but taken in the context
of who this child was, it nearly blew me away. He was a child
who had emigrated with his family to New Zealand from mainland China
a few years ago with no English. He was a very intelligent,
highly creative, incredibly respectful young boy who would never
dare to openly ‘challenge’ (i.e. in his world
“disagree” = “challenge”)
adults as this was just outside of his cultural and personal norms
for behaviour. I almost kissed him when he said those magical
words to me! … “Mrs
Petersen, I disagree with you because…”
(We had been practising as a Cognitive skill within our Community
of Inquiry that past month the ability to agree and disagree with
others to add to our thinking.)
Ultimately, through
being involved in the Community of Inquiry together, I really feel
it enhanced all
of
my students’ abilities to be active participants in of
our classroom discussions in different curriculum areas. In
every classroom there are always one or two students who tend to
dominate class discussions. They, and teachers who let them
(myself included) , don’t mean to do so but the reality
is there are individuals who are more confident, more quick in their
processing, more able to describe connections, more orally able
than others which means they jump in and offer their opinions before
others have even begun to process the question!
The
interesting thing about developing a Community of Inquiry for me
has been that all individuals are really truly valued for their
contributions – and listening
intently, actively and respectfully
is a serious contribution that needs to be made by all individuals
in a Community of Inquiry. And through different structures
that are suggested in P4C materials, students are actually able
to build skills that enable them to participate more fully in discussions
(as listeners, and as speakers, and certainly as critical thinkers)
than they might otherwise have done. Also, it seems clear
to me that some students who might otherwise remain “hidden”
within the daily life of the classroom subjects of reading, writing,
maths, sport, art, science and the like, suddenly come alive when
the items for discussion are “what is beauty?”,
“what is a truly bad action?”, “what
really makes a best friend?” and when the only criteria
for participating is that you have an opinion and try to back it
up with reasonable examples. In this way, I have seen some
students absolutely “shine” in the Community
of Inquiry and I have gained an entirely different insight into
who they are as individuals and the into power of their thinking.
Thanks!
Lynne
REFRESHER EVENING MOST VALUABLE; MORE TO BE
HELD
In March, Vanya Kovach and Marilyn Stafford
hosted a very refreshing Refresher Evening at Auckland Uni. We swapped
notes on a wide range of things, e.g.: uptake of P4C by primary
and secondary schools; the importance of offering philosophy to
not only GATE students (least ‘gifted’ entrants
may show greatest improvement); using P4C as an identifier for GATE;
mixed versus streamed COIs; measuring cognitive improvements.
We also reviewed some practical classroom strategies:
assigning skills ‘job cards’ to flag e.g. assumptions;
everyone using protocols like ‘I think differently’,
‘An assumption might be…’; using
a crocodile with mouth open/closed for teaching open/closed questions
to littlies (thanks for that Nola!); finer grained hand signals
for regulating discussion - inquirers to hold up a finger up if
building on or questioning something already under discussion, and
a full hand for a new tack . . . and much more!
An elegant shared definitional exercise followed:
see an earlier newsletter for details of this technique from Janette
Poutlon.
Vanya circulated the great, short ‘Selling
alibis for people having affairs” and ‘Featherless
Chicken’ stimulus articles as parting gifts.
Join us at the next one – Wednesday
May 10th! Thanks as always to the organisers.
David
Thompson
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