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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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