In order to enhance the professional development of P4C (Philosophy for Children) teachers and improve the quality of teaching, WUIS invited three P4C experts Cindy, Julia and Mr. Nick Chandley to provide on-site support for our teachers. Cindy is the co-director of P4C China, the P4C training instructor and the head of Fortune Sun Kindergarten. Julia is the P4C training instructor from P4C China and Mr. Nick Chandley is from British Dialogue Works. In particular, thanks to Nick for his amazing demo lesson and beneficial support on teaching. The event showed the spirit of exploration and hard practice in our P4C curriculum and was fully affirmed and praised by the experts.
A total of three wonderful P4C lessons were presented throughout the day. In the first lesson, Ms. Carol from Grade 3 brought about a question based on the picture book I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato: Are dreams real or not real？With the help of the continuum line provided by Ms. Carol, all the children participated actively in order to think about reality and unreality throughout the whole lesson. At the end of the lesson, Ms. Carol quoted from The Little Prince to guide everyone to think about how to turn dream into reality: Make your life a dream, and a dream a reality.
Then, Ms. Jessica and her Grade 5 students began their lesson with a warm-up game named ‘exchanging seats’ and started their discussion with the question ‘Why did most of the people refuse the free hugs in the beginning and accept the free hugs later?’ With the help of pair discussion, group discussion and horse shoe voting activity, children developed their thinking step by step. Finally, children learned to relate the discussion topic to their daily life and teacher elicited a question: Will you express your kindness actively? Although the lesson was soon over, Ms. Jessica emphasized that we should continue to think after class and learn to listen carefully and behave wisely in our daily life.
In the last demo lesson, our British P4C expert Nick Chandley started the lesson with the attention game and the discussion on ‘what is your understanding of P4C’ with our Grade 5 children. Then, starting from the question ‘When you choose something, does it mean that you have to give up another thing?’, Nick guided students to modify the question and elicited several questions like ‘Is that really your own choice?’, ‘In your life, what kind of choices are 100% made by yourself?’ to help students think deeply gradually. Meanwhile, the dialogues between them were full of humor and wisdom ‘You make me question myself, you know, in philosophy , questioning ourselves are parts of the questioning, because it will help us develop better understanding.’ We believe that all the children and teachers would benefit a lot through Nick’s demonstration and guidance.
What is P4C?
Philosophy for children, abbreviated to P4C, was started by Professor Matthew Lipman in the 1970s and has now been put into practice in more than 60 countries and areas. It is a teaching strategy that can be applied to all subjects, aiming to develop students’ critical, creative, caring and collaborative thinking skills and it also helps improve students’ cognitive and emotional skills. Just as American Educator John Dewey once said, education that focuses on community, communication, inquiry and attitude refactoring is beneficial to citizens who live in a constantly changing world.
In May 2018, WUIS was authorized by UK Dialogue Works and was awarded 4C’s School Status. As the WUIS P4C teacher team is growing larger, we will continue to strive for wisdom, truth and free-thinking through practice, working hard to help students become more thoughtful, reflective, caring and rational person.
