Doing without Socrates
The Socratic method, when used correctly, is an ingenious and dependable way of fostering collaborative dialogic argument in the classroom. Yet the Victorian Department of Education and Training (DET) presents […]
Tag Archives: collaborative learning
Straighten up and fly right: Making dialogue work
Does dialogue work to harmonise conflicting views, or does it simply entrench differences? According to extensive research in the psychology of polarised opinion, the answer is discouraging: when people of […]
Beyond parallel play: Three keys to dialogic argument
In honour of World Philosophy Day, I’m capping off my series on relativism and evaluativism today. If you haven’t read my previous posts in the series – Epistemology Needs to […]
Friendly excursions into disequilibrium
I’ve been progressively building the argument that we educators need to help our students move beyond relativism, and towards an evaluativist level of understanding. But how can we achieve this? […]
A peak experience
“This was the best morning of my life!”, a Year 9 student enthused, following our recent philosophy workshops at Albert Park College’s Liberal Arts Festival. Students in Years 9 – […]
Starting them young
Our early experiments in preschool philosophy have been embraced by a local kindergarten. In weekly philosophy sessions, four- and five-year-olds are learning how to think deeply about big questions, how […]
Questioning debate
The recent podcast episode ‘Debatable‘ from WNYC’s Radiolab got me thinking about formal debating and its relationship to the sort of collaborative enquiry we foster at The Philosophy Club. The podcast […]
We lit a fire…
We’re overjoyed that a culture of ‘thinking about thinking’ has taken root at Heatherhill Primary School as a direct result of our Big Questions philosophy program. We’d expected that our […]
Can critical thinking change the world?
Guest post by Christina Majoinen. I first learned the basics of critical thinking in a class called ‘Analysing Arguments’ as a fresh first-year university student. Every class was a revelation. […]
Dear Young Philosophers…
… a big part of being good philosophers is being able to hold two or more different understandings in our head at once, and seeing the strengths (and possible weaknesses) […]
