Peter Worley

Although expert consensus states that critical thinking (CT) is essential to enquiry, it doesn’t necessarily follow that by practicing enquiry children are developing CT skills. Philosophy with children programmes around the world aim to develop CT dispositions and skills through a community of enquiry, and this study compared the impact of the explicit teaching of CT skills during an enquiry, to The Philosophy Foundation's philosophical enquiry (PhiE) method alone (which had no explicit teaching of CT skills). Philosophy with children is also said to improve metacognitive (MC) skills but there is little research into this claim. Following observable problems with ensuring genuine metacognition was happening in PhiE sessions - on a reasonably strong understanding of what metacognition is – a method has been developed and trialed in this study to bring together, in mutual support, the development of critical thinking and metacognitive skills. Based on the work of Peter Worley and Ellen Fridland (KCL)The Philosophy Foundation ran an experimental study with King's College London in Autumn 2017 and Autumn 2018 to compare the impact of teaching CT skills and MC skills against classes that just have philosophical enquiry. The approach developed and used for the study employs the explicit teaching of some CT and MC skills within the context of a philosophical enquiry (as opposed to stand-alone teaching of these skills) and yields some positive findings both qualitative and quantitative. Both studies took place over one term (12 weeks) and a control and intervention group were used in each study. This report focuses on the second year of the study, with 220 ten and eleven-year-old children involved in eight classes across three state schools in South East London. Although there were limitations to the study the results indicate that the explicit teaching of these skills during a philosophical enquiry can help children use CT and MC skills more successfully than philosophical enquiry alone.

In this paper, I identify a confusion that follows from how open and closed questions are ordinarily understood. I draw a distinction between two kinds of open and closed question: ‘grammatical’ open and closed questions and ‘conceptual' open and closed questions. I claim that this distinction resolves a confusion identified in the first part of this paper and I reply to anticipated, possible objections to the distinction. The second part of the paper describes a practical questioning strategy called ‘the question X’ that I have developed, making use of the distinction from the first part of the paper. The question X shows how the best of both closed-ended questioning and open-ended questioning can be combined in classroom questioning to maintain the focus and specificity of closed questioning while also maintaining the richness and invitation to say more of open questioning. In addition, the strategy of the question X also encourages the formulation of standard form thinking and expression in those questioned.

In this article, I begin by saying something about what metacognition is and why it is desirable within education. I then outline how Plato anticipates this concept in his dialogue Meno. This is not just a historical point; by dividing the cognitive self into a three-in-one—a ‘learner’, a ‘teacher’ and an ‘evaluator’—Plato affords us a neat metaphorical framework for understanding metacognition that, I contend, is valuable today. In addition to aiding our understanding of this concept, Plato’s model of metacognition not only provides us with a practical, pedagogical method for developing a metacognitive attitude, but also for doing so through doing philosophy. I conclude by making a case for philosophy’s inclusion in our school systems by appeal to those aspects of philosophy that are metacognitive or that are conducive to developing metacognition, as revealed by the insights afforded us by Plato’s Meno and Theaetetus.

ABSTRACTThis article is a critical response to a short book by John C. Lennox entitled Where is God in a Coronavirus World? in which he rejects atheism as a world-view equipped to deal with an event such as the coronavirus crisis and makes a case for the Christian outlook as the best way to meet such a crisis. The aim of this article is not to affirm or deny theism, but to examine critically the key arguments put forward for Christianity and against atheism by Lennox. Because of the centrality of the appeal to free will by Lennox in his article, some time is spent considering the free will response to the problem of evil, in which some close examination of the Bible is undertaken. The article finishes by outlining a personal, humanistic, secular response to the coronavirus crisis, and addresses solace and hope, two things Lennox denies atheism can provide.

Drawing on fifteen years of experience as a practitioner of doing philosophy in primary and secondary school classrooms, I will describe and attempt to justify two broad, over-arching principles, presence and absence: the extent to which a facilitator influences or deliberately refrains from influencing philosophical enquiry. While it is expected that the facilitator will and should be present in the discussion, this paper pays special attention to the extent to which a facilitator judges that presence appropriate. I revisit the notion of open and closed questions but, instead of considering the structural aspect, I address the psychological dimension of open and closed questioning, what I have called ‘Open Question Mindset’ and its opposite ‘Closed Question Mindset’. I consider two of the main ways in which teachers commonly demonstrate CQM: ‘Guess-what’s-in-my-head’ questioning and ‘Guess-what’s-in-your-head’ questioning/inferring. OQM, together with the notion of ‘intentional sensitivity’—sensitivity to the student’s intentions rather than only to the surface-meaning or logical implications of their utterances—allows me to suggest ways in which one may practically meet the requirements of presence and absence. One particular aspect of facilitation that I consider, and recommend being mindful of, is paraphrasing or interpreting, especially with regard to hidden premises that might be thought implied by things children say. I recommend consciously refraining from interpreting children’s contributions, and instead working hard to elicit or ‘excavate’ children’s intentions and meanings through careful OQM questioning.