Friday, March 11, 2016
Valuable idea but misdescribed
Via RCS, an interesting education experiment with a whole bunch of 4th and 5th grade kids in England. Headlines describe it as "Philosophy for students". It led to improvement in other subjects, especially math.
Easy to see why it caused improvement, and it's a VALUABLE ADDITION to schools, but it's NOT PHILOSOPHY.
From the PDF of the actual project:
....The range of stimuli used in P4C sessions includes short stories, poems, images, picture books, passages from novels, short video clips, newspaper articles, and material taken from other curriculum areas. 3. Thinking time A minute of silent, individual thinking followed by pupils in pairs sharing interesting issues and themes, or jotting down key words. The teacher often records some of the key words and ideas that emerge. 4. Question making The teacher may suggest a question based on the outcome of thinking time. This is appropriate if the children are very young or new to P4C. More commonly, the class is split into small groups and asked to decide on a question they think is interesting, worth discussing, and that requires an answer based on reasoned judgement. 5. Question airing Children present their group’s question so all can see and hear it. When all the questions are collected and recorded, children are invited .... etcQUESTION MAKING. There's the key. If you know how to properly form a question that can be understood and answered by Nature and by other people, you've got the handle on life. Every problem, every type of learning, solves better when you ask the right question. Until recently, US schools never taught question-making. Unlike Soviet schools, our goal was blind obedience. We don't want the XENOPHOBIC BUFFOONS to ask questions. Some people have an intrinsic talent for questions, but most Americans don't know how to get info from a bus driver or a dog or a librarian or a toilet or a Tech Help Desk. Common Core is aimed DIRECTLY at this problem. I don't know if it's yielding any results yet, but the Core of the Core is learning how to make questions.
Labels: Asked and answered, Experiential education
¶ 3:55 PM
