
“Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.” Noam Chomsky
I think the notion of progress is essential to all forms of dialogic teaching (including Philosophy for Children /P4C), and is easily forgotten. Too often progress towards good dialogue ‘plateaus’ at a relatively superficial level, where conversation is polite and ideas and questions (some of them profound) are shared, but there is no active attempt to seek to deeply understand other points of view, to synthesise them, to challenge and test them or to explore alternatives. In this post I want to discuss one approach to planning for progress with dialogue (or perhaps I should use the term ‘dialogic enquiry’ to refer to practice that uses talk that is recognisably dialogic but is focused on a question or problem), and to share a resource that I hope teachers will find useful (You can download it for free here). Continue Reading »