“My brain hurts…but like a good hurt.”
-Grade 6 student at the end of a P4C lesson
The biggest advantage of the philosophy for children approach is engagement. Children love that it is something different, that there are no wrong answers, and that they are continually forced to think. Children love the stories, and find it fascinating and surprising that so much discussion can be derived from what appears to be a simple little story. Because P4C lessons are often so engaging, the range of active participants (children who voluntarily contribute to the discussion) is broader than in a normal lesson. Moreover, because the entry point for the lesson is usually a story book at or below grade level (kindergarten-level books can easily be used for middle school-aged children), English Language Learners find these lessons appealing and engaging.
An important small tip for engagement: how a story is told matters. Use voices. Be loud. Exaggerate. Pause. Emphasize the philosophically meaningful parts and have fun with some of the fluff. This aspect of the P4C approach is borrowed from Kieran Egan’s Imaginative Education pedagogy (link below). Performance matters!
“They blow you away and your jaw just drops.”
-P4C practitioner in Oregon
Teaching philosophy to children can be wonderfully rewarding. Children are so incredibly capable, and the responses and dialogue students have can, no doubt, “blow you away.” Beginning a lesson with “Morris the Moose” and ending with a student asking another “but what if all of this is just a dream?” and the other saying “but – I – would still be the one dreaming” is enough to give a teacher goosebumps.
Critical thinking competency encompasses a set of abilities that students use to examine their own thinking, and that of others, about information that they receive through observation, experience, and various forms of communication.
-British Columbia Curriculum
One of the core competencies of the new British Columbia curriculum is critical thinking. It was almost as if the new curriculum was designed with a P4C approach in mind. The collaborative and dialectical approach of P4C is perfectly suited to having students examine their own thinking and that of others. P4C helps students identify holes in arguments, produce counter-arguments, disagree respectfully, and learn collaboratively. P4C’s connections to the core competencies will be the subject of an upcoming blog.
Resources:
Imaginative Education: http://ierg.ca/
Article on undergrads giving P4C lessons to elementary students: https://cascade.uoregon.edu/spring2014/features/school-of-thought/
Big Ideas for Little Kids (PBS video – 29 mins): https://video.wgby.org/video/wgby-documentaries-big-ideas-little-kids/
Philosophy for Children in the British Columbia Classroom 