Among the many frameworks that have been proposed for assessing students’ performance and skill development as participants in collaborative philosophical enquiry, a particularly comprehensive one is Robert Fisher’s ‘Checklist of discourse skills’. This checklist was published in Fisher’s 2003 book Teaching Thinking (London: Continuum), and is reproduced below with minor amendments:

1. Participation

• number of comments
• response to teacher
• response to another student
• extended utterances
• response to agenda (building on the discussion)
• unclassified response (non-specific response)

2. Organising

• identifying task (e.g. problem/question to be discussed)
• planning (e.g. organising discussion)
• directing (e.g. asking for responses)
• concluding (e.g. summing up, last words)

3. Collaborating

• active listening (giving serious attention, allowing each speaker to finish)
• agreeing (specifying with whom/what view you agree)
• encouraging (showing verbal or non-verbal responsiveness to others)
• turn-taking (yielding turns to others)
• self-correcting (moderating one’s views during discussion)

4. Questioning

• asking initial question (identifing a puzzle or problem for discussion)
• identifying kind of question (factual/philosophical/literary, etc)
• asking follow-up questions (seeking reasons, clarification, etc)
• self-questioning (rhetorical or genuine self-inquiry)

5. Initiating

• making initial statements (within a stage of the discussion)
• setting a new line of inquiry (introducing new problem or issue)
• seeking justification (asking for reasons, proof, evidence)

6. Extending

• developing the discussion (building in ideas, making connections)
• adding detail (giving examples, evidence, instances, etc)
• translating (re-phrasing one’s own or other’s ideas or contributions)

7. Countering

• raising objections (with reason, argument or counter-argument)
• qualifying (clarifying, drawing distinctions, amending viewpoint)

8. Reasoning

• explaining (defining, clarifying, illustrating the meaning of…)
• justifying (giving supporting reasons or evidence)
• comparing (comparing or contrasting, drawing an analogy)
• hypothesising (suggesting a theory/explanation/possible consequence, etc)
• generalising (arguing from a particular instance to a general rule)

9. Recounting

• using anecdote (is it relevant? coherent? illustrating a point?)
• paraphrasing (e.g. summarising a text, event or idea)
• describing (giving an account of a situation, experience or idea)

10. Reviewing

• reviewing (analysing progress of discussion or element of discussion)
• monitoring (checking understanding of one’s own or others’ contributions)
• evaluating (assessing quality of contributions to discussion)
• judging (critical judgement of discussion or element of discussion)
• commenting (giving opinion on relevant features of context of discussion)

 

The reasoning skills outlined in Fisher’s point 8 (above) may be usefully supplemented by the following list of skills involved in analysis, inference and evaluation, written by Christina Slade and published in ‘Critical and Creative Thinking: An evaluation of philosophy for children’ (Analytic Teaching, 13 (4), Nov. 1992):

Analysis involves

• identifying what is being said
• distinguishing what is relevant from what is not
• seeing connections between different strands of thought
• recognising vagueness and ambiguity, then clarifying terms
• identifying members of a class, in terms of likeness
• identifying counterinstances, as different in some respect
• identifying analogies

Inferring involves

• drawing out the consequences [i.e. implications] of what is said
• identifying underlying assumptions
• generalising from particular instances – i.e. abstracting
• applying analogies to reach new conclusions
• recognising cause/effect relationships

Evaluation involves

• giving reasons for beliefs and decisions and then choosing how to act
• criticising ideas constructively
• modifying ideas in response to criticism