My philosophy of teaching has grown out of a variety of different experiences and influences.
I’ve worked with young offenders in Hackney and teenagers in New York, trained postgraduates in Edinburgh, tutored dozens of students of all abilities, and facilitated philosophical discussions with primary school children as far afield as Denmark and the Isle of Wight.
In that time I’ve come across a number of approaches to teaching that have shaped my work:
- Philosophical Enquiry or PhIE- This is my main method for doing philosophy with children, developed by Peter Worley at the Philosophy Foundation
- Socratic dialogue
- David Birch’s enquiries in Provocations and Thinking Beans
- Andy Day’s work on the foundations of mathematics
- Robert Fisher’s games for thinking
- Philosophy Circles by Jason Buckley
- The Socratic lectures of Michael Sandel
- The university seminar style of Debate Chamber
- Approaches to improving children’s metacognition, with Kings’ College London and The Philosophy Foundation
- The knowledge-rich and memory focused pedagogy of the curriculum centre at Future Academies
- Parker J. Palmer’s identity based approach in The Courage to Teach
A few key principles I try to keep in mind every day:
- Need before feed (Andy Day)- don’t give students answers to questions that they haven’t yet asked or experienced
- An abundance of information creates a poverty of attention (Herbert A. Simon)- limit the number of things you ask students to focus on at any given time
- Only connect! (E. M. Forster)- learning is a process of moving from the known to the unknown. ‘Good teachers…weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves.’ (The Courage to Teach, Parker J. Palmer)
