Thinking and talking, talking and thinking

One of my hypotheses about the strong oral language production of students at Pequeño Sol, the private school where I observe, is that it is strongly connected to their use of Philosophy for Children. The students take part in a philosophy class as part of their curriculum from their first year of preschool through secondary school. (If you want to see an adorable example of this program and small children in philosophy class, check out the documentary Just a Beginning. It is especially cute because it is French.)

A couple weeks ago, I attended a conference on Philosophy for Children (Filosofía para niños).

The Latin American Center for Philosophy for Children happens to be located right here in San Cristóbal, and this week I had the chance to meet the director, Dr. Eugenio Echeverría.

I had just come from a school where a dynamic teacher was rapid-firing questions at fourth graders, eliciting a few one or two word answers. I was already thinking about how class structures can promote actual discourse and scenarios in which students are the ones who are asking the questions. In Pequeño Sol, children ask a lot of questions - of their teachers and of their peers. In fact, in our conversation, Dr. Echeverría shared a comment made by the high school teacher of one of his children who had attended the school: "You must come from Pequeño Sol because you ask a lot of questions and you talk a lot."

Philosphy for Children follows a format of a community dialogue and has 4 main goals:
* Develop thinking skills.
* Explore values.
* Construct concepts. (e.g. happiness, culture, reality, power, democracy, beauty...)
* Life project (This does not translate particularly well in English, but the idea is that children begin to answer the questions "What kind of person do I want to be? In what kind of world do I want to live?)

Apart from these, Dr. Echeverría spoke of additional goals and constructs of the program: self-esteem, resiliency*, internal locus of control, defense against manipulation by the media, critical consumption, position taking, developing intellectual humility or epistemic uncertainty... Certainly high aims for a program that works with children as young as 3 years old!

The structure of the classes themselves is a wonderful venue for developing oral language. Dialogues are partly student-run and the teacher/facilitator pushes students to use specific vocabulary, probes thinking so that they can express well-formulated opinions, and requires that they respond to each other´s ideas.

Apart from this structure, the Philosophy for Children program interests me in the shared space that thinking and speaking hold in educational discourse. Although both are valued - critical thinking especially is a popular buzz-phrase - they are rarely considered an ends in and of themselves. As educators, we encourage students to use talk in order to develop their writing and comprehend reading, in order to express mathematical reasoning, or in order to describe scientific observations. We encourage them to develop thinking in order to more clearly express ideas about their reading, writing, and arithmetic.
We promote speaking to develop writing, but rarely writing to develop speaking.
And even less speaking to develop thinking (indeed, my preferred approach to formulating a thought!)

A class devoted to thinking? It sounds absurd. The same for a class devoted to speaking.
But that doesn't mean they are not honorable end goals.






*For a reflection on the teaching and testing of skills like resiliency, check out the blog of fellow Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching recipient, Patrick Walsh: https://bigpictureeducation.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/are-21st-century-skills-non-cognitive/ (I highly recommend his blog in general.)