Building skills
for philosophical enquiry
Building skills
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Your pupils may need short, teacher-led, practical activities before moving into the more traditional P4C session, to ensure they have the skills to get the most possible from the process.
Here are our 4 top tips!
| 1. Community rules | 2. Make a story | 3. I agree or I disagree | 4. Sorting questions |
Allow the group to establish, and agree to keep, their own community rules.
Consider how these rules might differ from typical classroom rules, e.g. to promote dialogue rather than to promote safety issues.
Rules can be developed through a ranking activity, using a list of suggested rules for the group. Encourage the group to generate their own rules and develop the thinking skills of justification, through giving good reasons for the rules they have chosen. They can then vote on their top 8 rules and these can be made into a poster by the students for all to sign. Signing of rules is important, indicating that the students are entering into a contract of behaviour.
Remember to refer back to these rules each session, reminding the group of what they agreed, and making sure they see you are keeping to the rules too.
Start a story (a couple of sentences), then invite someone to swap places and continue the story, adding a couple more sentences. That person then invites someone else to swap and carry on so that everyone has the opportunity to have a turn.
Doing this exercise mixes up the group if they are sitting next to friends, and encourages the development of listening skills as the participants assist in the development of the story by following on from one another.
Distribute cards depicting behaviour that could be considered as acceptable or unacceptable in the group's local community. Ask the group to go and stand on an 'I agree'-or-'I disagree'-line. They can stand at either end of the line or place themselves at different points along the line depending on whether they agree/disagree strongly, or are undecided.
After each example, ask for reasons for the group's answers.
As a follow up students could be asked to come up with other statements that they consider important.
From a familiar stimulus, for example a story they know well, ask the group to sort the questions into:
- Questions we know the answer to
- Questions we could find out the answer to
- Philosophical questions, i.e. questions that have lots of different answers
that the pupils would be interested to talk about
| P4C in PRU Index | Introduction | Who took part | Results and Tips | What you can do |
