ABSTRACT
My all time favourite educational quote is from the great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Apart from putting forward a view on children’s development (‘sensorimotor’ stage from birth to two; ‘preoperational’ stage from two to seven; ‘concrete operational’ stage from seven to twelve and ‘formal operational’ stage from twelve upwards) that the neuroscience has finally caught up with, he is also quoted as saying:
Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget)
Yet this seems the complete reverse of what we are expected to do in the classroom. The way we are taught to teach is to introduce a topic in such a way that everyone knows exactly what to do, check with them that they are clear about what they are supposed to do and then give them a worksheet with 30 questions on it for them to prove that they know what to do, the unspoken implication being that the quickest one to finish is the cleverest. And if they do get stuck, they are to put up their hand and suspend all effort until you are able to come round and unstick them. In other words, in the classroom, intelligence is what you use when
you know exactly what to do. If so, do you really know how clever your intelligent students are? I’m not sure about you, but I think I prefer Piaget’s model. Sometimes, then, we need to say, ‘Everybody clear? No? Fantastic! You
have seven minutes, in pairs. See if you can work out for yourselves what this poem is about or what this equation means or what this experiment will prove or what this French text is all about … ’. (By the way, giving such a task a deadline is a self-esteem thing. If they
don’t finish it’s not because they weren’t clever enough but because they ran out of time.)
To what extent do the children in your care have the opportunity to develop the Piagetian definition of intelligence? How do you set things up in such a way that they are learning to think for themselves? Because I so like the Piaget quote, this is why I so enjoy doing Philosophy
for Children with young people and, in particular, ‘Thunks’. ‘Thunks’ are deceptively tricky little questions that ‘make your brain go ouch!’ and came about through my work trying to launch P4C in a number of schools across the UK in a way that was quick and effective. The right and proper way of ‘doing P4C’ with children as put forward
by Matthew Lipman whom we met in chapter 15 and drilled into you by SAPERE in the UK is essentially:
1 Sit them in a circle, the ‘community of enquiry’ 2 Give them a stimulus such as a picture or a text that you had sourced,
photocopied and distributed 3 Spend time reading the text around the circle 4 Giving the group time in silence to come up with questions about the
stimulus 5 Elicit their questions about the stimulus which you record on the
board with their name next to it 6 Decide as a group how you are going to decide as a group which
question to start with 7 Decide which question to start with 8 Bounce that question back to the child who asked it 9 Start.
