Barbara and Dot had a fascinating evening with a group from TeachFirst in Piccadilly discussing Challenging Issues. Our secondary colleagues were exploring ideas relating to academic argumentation. Katherine Richardson shared some of her recent research with the group. She demonstrated that the method of using clear argumentation in the development of reasoning in the classroom has a strong impact on children’s ability to become engaged with their learning. This is a subject that is dear to the heart of Philosophy4Children. As she spoke the correlation with the work that we do with our primary colleagues was very apparent. The group willingly became involved with an experiential session with us (shortened from two hours to about twenty minutes) and had a very positive discussion about “Willy the Champ” by Anthony Browne.
The discussion was relayed to Twitter users through @Teachfirst.