Robert Fisher

Teaching thinking and creativity

Developing creative minds and creative futures

An Interview with Robert Fisher

The following is an interview with Robert Fisher on ways to develop philosophical thinking and dialogue with children.

The interview was undertaken by Calum Campbell in 2006 as part of a Masters Degree research project focusing on Philosophy for Children (P4C).

Can you outline your experience with Philosophy for Children(P4C)?

RF: I believe I was the first to teach P4C in primary schools in this country, using the Lipman model, during the late 1970s. Later I helped found SAPERE and have been teaching and training in P4C since then and have published many books relating to the subject, details of which are on my website.

What experience do you have with formal academic philosophy?

RF: My first degree was in philosophy, as an external student of London University. It took me 7 years, studying part-time as a young teacher. This sparked my interest in P4C, seeing how little critical thinking was valued in schools at the time and how readily children seemed to respond to philosophical themes in stories such as the ‘Frog and Toad’ books by Arnold Lobel and in classics like ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

What is your definition of philosophy in general, and philosophy in a P4C context if different?

RF: Philosophy has two branches. There is an academic branch which is field of study enshrined in the great books of philosophy which are the heart of a received tradition of wisdom by a community of philosophers. This depends primarily upon the printed word, so that when the philosopher GE Moore was asked “What is philosophy?” he pointed to the books in his philosophy library and said it is all of these. That is the academic view of philosophy, a field of study we can call formal philosophy. P4C can be called ‘informal philosophy’ - which is the capacity to philosophise an engage in philosophical discussion, which may include, but doesn’t depend on printed texts, and which is the informal capacity for people to engage their philosophical intelligence with questions of existential interest and importance through dialogic means – something that predates formal philosophy and from which formal philosophy has grown and developed.

So does that apply to children and adults?

RF: What is natural to children is informal philosophy, which is philosophical enquiry through the means of speaking and listening.

How could facilitators encourage and develop the philosophical thinking and dialogue within enquiries?

RF: There are two main ways of doing it – one is through what we may call the Socratic Method – helping children to move from the literal level of comprehension (understanding the words) to the critical level of analysis (analysing the story) and to understanding at the conceptual level (understanding what key concepts mean). What a good facilitator does is to push for depth and higher order thinking by moving through a series of questions and prompts that push children from the concrete through to the abstract and conceptual.

What sort of questions might they be for example, for achieving that?

RF: Well literal questions would be things like - “Who is in the story and what did they do?” “What happened next?” “What did he say?” and “What did she do?” and so on. Critical questions would be “Why did they do that?”, “What might they do next?” and “What else might they have done?” Conceptual questions would be things like – “What is a story?”, “What is love, hope, good or bad?”.

So, would just using those questions mean that children were being philosophical?

RF: I would say philosophy is thinking about thinking and it’s about the reflection on ideas. So children are being philosophical in so far as dialogue encapsulates ideas that relate to any of the branches of formal philosophy, for example logic (“Is it true?” “How is it true?” “What is truth?”; ethics (“Is it good?” “Is it bad?” “Is it evil?”); metaphysics (“What is a person?” “What exists?”) and so on. So the main sorts of philosophical questions that can be linked to formal philosophical positions are all conceptual and all about concepts and ideas. So a discussion is not philosophical if it is merely about verbal comprehension or what happens to people in certain circumstances. A discussion is not philosophical necessarily if it is simply about imagining what might be.

What would that be?

RF: It might not be philosophical if a dialogue is not necessarily to do with ideas or concepts.

So that big focus upon ideas and concepts is how a facilitator could identify if they were moving towards the philosophical or not within an enquiry?

RF: Yes, that’s right. But these of course are fuzzy areas. Teachers are engaged in informal philosophy sometimes in literacy discussions when they don’t realise it and teachers often appeal to philosophical reasons at some point in their discussion with children. The problem is that they don’t always realise that they are ways in which they can challenge children through questioning or facilitate depth of discussions.

Even across the subjects outside of an enquiry?

RF: I wouldn’t want to say that philosophical discussion only happens in a community of enquiry. What I would say is that what a community of enquiry does is to provide a serious, systematic and sustained structure that enables teachers, if they have the insight and/or the training, to push for depth and to push children, as Vygotsky advises we should be doing, into higher and more abstract areas of thinking so that their cognitive development can be accelerated, enhanced or enriched.

You have mentioned the questions and prompts facilitators can use to push for depth. Are there any other factors that might lead to that depth in the thinking towards the philosophical?

RF: There is quite a lot of research into prompts that can help children - one is ‘wait time’, that is giving children more time to think about and mentally rehearse their responses.

Could you use that within enquiries?

RF: Yes, that’s right. And at all stages in the community of enquiry that ‘wait time’, what I call “thinking time”, is very important. There are many other dialogic strategies – playing devil’s advocate, seeking alternative viewpoints, encouraging children to summarise the debate, encouraging them to suggest what an opponent to a view might say and so on. A lot of these have come into the Primary Strategy into what is termed good practice in terms of teaching for thinking and dialogic thinking.

Regardless of whether it is in an enquiry or not?

RF: That’s right. The community of enquiry really was one of the first and most potent forms of dialogic teaching and learning, which has become a growing area of international debate and research.

I wonder what your thoughts were on the level of understanding of formal philosophy that teachers might need to be able to facilitate enquiries effectively.

RF: I don’t think they need teaching in formal philosophy. I think that such training can help, and a general knowledge of it is a useful thing for any educated mind. And for a P4C teacher I think that the informal elements of philosophical enquiry are, if given a good pedagogical basis of training and understanding, sufficient for work with young children. I guess at secondary and with older children (thirteen and upwards) then some background in philosophy could be very helpful.

Why do you feel that would be more helpful with the older ages?

RF: Then you can begin to relate the discussions to the field of formal philosophy. Some of the major abstract philosophical questions which can be grasped by teenagers, younger children would find hard to understand. So if you are looking for progression there ought to be, at the secondary level, progression into the main stream of formal philosophy because there is some lively debate and interesting ideas. Good teachers, and RE teachers (as philosophy is now an A level subject) are ideally placed for introducing philosophical enquiry. It would be good to give to secondary children tasters of what are the interesting philosophical debates of formal philosophy.

Would it be fair to say then that if people have had sound teacher training experience they would be able to engage with P4C as an approach at the primary age?

RF: Yes, but they need training. I had my ‘Stories for Thinking’ programme trialled in Holland but unfortunately they didn’t trial it with the training, and although gains were made in pupils’ comprehension the gains were not as significant as might have been hoped and as would have accrued had the teachers, in addition to having the materials and their own reading, had training to go with it.

One other issue that has cropped up is that of facilitator disposition or personality. So, regardless of the techniques they employ, could the manner in which they employ these have a bearing upon children’s engagement philosophically?

RF: Yes, basically they need to be good teachers. To be a good teacher is necessary but not sufficient to be a good facilitator of P4C.

What do you mean by being a good teacher?

RF: By being a good teacher I mean being an effective teacher using a range of pedagogic methods that motivate and challenge children. There are a range of measures of that, from Ofsted inspection measures, to reports from children and peer review and so on. So, Philosophy for Children is more effective when it is facilitated by teachers who are pedagogically sound, philosophically curious and are able to motivate interest. That can sometimes make the difference between a successful philosophical enquiry and one that is not.

Are there any other factors you can suggest they should do, or actions they could take?

RF: To go on training courses, to sit in on lessons being taken by experienced teachers who are pursuing it and engage actively in researching their own practice.

So, if they were researching their own practice do you think that reflection is quite important for facilitators?

RF: Yes, absolutely. The best teaching is through modelling, so if teachers can model the dispositions, behaviours and habits that they want their students to develop then that can be very powerful in creating a community of shared expectations.

How important do you think that is, facilitators genuinely modelling that philosophical disposition?

RF: I think it is very important because it is what helps to create the ethos and that sense of community that is in successful P4C classrooms. So, which means being curious, asking appropriate questions across the curriculum, engaging children in paired shared and whole class dialogic encounters in all areas of the curriculum.

Are there things above and beyond that experience of dialogic encounters that facilitators could do within enquiries or even just in the school week or term to really encourage that curiosity?

RF: There are various strategies. One is to have a kind of questions board or problem of the week. I have just written a book called ‘Starters for Thinking’ which has got five hundred starters, prompts or challenges that teachers can use as a focus at the beginning of a community of enquiry, or for a day or week, which can be a game or question or problem or picture for thinking. There are all sorts of stimulus that can be used and I identify about thirty different kinds of starters for thinking in my book.

Within enquiries is this?

RF: This is to focus children on thinking for themselves and engaging their creative thinking and focusing them on specific issues. The more that you can focus and sustain children on challenging issues and the more that you can make your classroom an enquiring classroom in which there are daily challenges to thinking the easier it is to focus children on whatever story or poem that you are going to use for a community of enquiry. Meditation is another strategy that I have been researching recently as a means for providing a focus to prepare children for creative and philosophical enquiries.

Would it be fair to say that if you really want to increase the philosophical within enquiries that you have got to go way beyond this and create a whole ethos within your own classroom or school environment of thinking?

RF: Well it helps if you can create a community which is wider merely than the discussion you have once a week or whenever in your class. And it is more powerful because it the habits of the community of enquiry become internalised in ways that you approach anything that you what you want the children to do. The aim is to develop those habits of intelligent behaviour that they internalise from their experience of philosophy for children, that they are able to take it into their own lives and beyond the teaching year into their future.

How important do you think it is that children do actually see that they can apply this to real life in encouraging them to philosophise?

RF: Well, that’s what a good philosophy session does – a good philosophy session makes links, bridges to real life by encouraging children to draw upon examples from their own experience, or that they have read about or heard about, that link into their own concerns. The more successful the enquiry the more it links in to their own concerns and the sorts of things that are not covered by the conventional curriculum. It is one of the great strengths of Philosophy for Children that it allows children to explore things that are not otherwise covered in the conventional curriculum.

You mentioned issues earlier – I wondered if you could elaborate on that – the idea of identifying an issue and I wondered what you may define what you mean by an issue?

RF: One of course is to ask the children about what concerns them, another is to look at newspapers, and Newswise (the internet news and discussion service for children and teachers) is a good resource for that. You only have to look at the headlines of a newspaper and you have an issue there – something to do with love, life, death, truth, or knowledge.

So, something that could be conceptualised, would that be fair?

RF: Yes, you need something which you can be used as a vehicle for exploring issues or concepts behind the words that are used.

I am just thinking how that links in with the idea of making P4C relevant if maybe one of the pieces of advice for facilitators is to actually try to engage with things that are going on.

RF: That’s right. I think it is important to have a variety of forms of stimulus, both to motivate and to interest children, and also to show that philosophical enquiry is about everything – personal concerns, national concerns, stuff that is in fiction books, poetry, pictures, on the computer, on television, in film, in music and song. It enables children to interrogate the world and whatever is important to them and what is important to other people. So they mustn’t think of a community of enquiry as if it’s simply self-referential or a talking shop about children’s own experiences. If it is purely self-directed, then of course as in any education or conversation it becomes narrow. Whilst we want to bridge into children’s lives we want to expand their lives by throwing open a few windows and showing some unexpected distant views.

So in effect, would it be fair to say that facilitators should be actively trying to encourage children to empathise with others and put themselves in other people’s shoes?

RF: That is part of the caring. The five C’s I think are very good – it is about curiosity, collaboration, creative thinking, critical thinking and caring thinking (which is the ability to relate to others and the four elements of emotional intelligence – self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy and social skills).

So, do you think that emotional intelligence feeds directly into the philosophical elements of an enquiry?

RF: Yes, I think it is a foundation for a successful dialogue – one of the foundation stones.

Why would that maybe lead to successful dialogue?

RF: It leads to successful dialogue because without social skills you don’t benefit from speaking or working with others, without empathy you don’t understand others and therefore your knowledge and awareness is limited and if you don’t understand yourself you are then left in a state of confusion or you don’t have much to talk about. And if you cannot control yourself within a group then that group can’t function successfully. So I think those are four important elements of emotional intelligence – they aren’t mystical entities that exist somewhere in the brain – they are necessary conditions for human discussion at its most effective and generative level.

Is that encouragement of the community by the community by a facilitator possibly, from what you are saying, enhance the philosophical, not just this social element?

RF: Not necessarily, I think that you can have all those things in non-philosophical discussion. One can develop them in numeracy hours or in science and so on. One can develop emotional intelligence and discussion skills in non-philosophical settings, it is just that the community of enquiry enhances those and also has the value of developing the higher order thinking skills - and the critical literacy that develops from these.

So, just going back to the stimulus, how may a choice of stimulus influence the potential for philosophy within an enquiry?

RF: Well, if you don’t vary the stimulus the children are going to get bored, which is one of the drawbacks of the Lipman materials, although ‘Pixie’ can be very good to start off with primary children. If you are limited to one set of materials, even my own Stories for Thinking programme, then you are not going to cater for the full range of children’s interest and experience and it is going to seem repetitive. So having fresh kinds of challenge is important...

The most potent kind of stimulus, in my experience, is stories. Stories are powerfully involved in our ways, and children’s, of understanding the world and engaging our imaginative faculties. The use of story I have found to be the most successful and stimulating source, although I have successfully used pictures, poetry, photographs and other means but the primary mode of interest is often through story.

I was just wondering then, would the experience of a community, the length of time they have been engaging with philosophy for children, would that influence the choice of stimulus made by the community or the facilitator?

RF: If you are getting engaging stories, and one of the reasons fairy stories and the great classics are perennially interesting is because they engage and reflect the key binary concepts, such as love and hate, beauty and ugliness, fear and courage, life and death and so on that underpin, fascinate and are relevant to all human lives. And it means that you are using material that is motivating for the facilitator as well as for children.

Why would that be?

RF: Stories that have stood the test of time involve powerful concepts. It is very difficult to work with material that you find dull and boring.

Does that link in with the issue earlier on about modelling and actual genuine curiosity?

RF: Absolutely, that’s quite right. And that is what I found working with the Lipman materials. I wasn’t myself motivated by some off them and I needed to look beyond those to things I found intellectually challenging, stimulating and imaginatively rich. That enthusiasm can often be a good springboard but it doesn’t mean that every source that you like works. But unless you yourself are fascinated by a stimulus and motivated by it and want to communicate through it then it is unlikely that it will motivate children.

Do you think there is a place for the community in some ways at least selecting the stimulus?

RF: Yes I do. I think it is a very good idea, and I often had young children bringing me what they thought were ‘philosophical’ books and stories and I also got older children to try to write them too. Not many of them were worthy of having a community of enquiry but I have had successful communities of enquiry with children discussing their own stories, often most successfully if they write about environmental issues or something the child feels strongly about.

Is there anything else you can think of regarding this extension of the philosophical element within enquiries?

RF: No, I have got some resources on my website that might be of interest and there is plenty that is being published such as picture books, which provide much that is strange and puzzling and worthy of discussion. I have been working with a colleague on Pictures for Thinking, using artworks as a stimulus for enquiry. For older students films, and even TV soaps, adverts and pop songs can provide issues of philosophic interest. Children can be asked to question any topic for research. I have used interesting objects, such as a cabbage and a football for younger children to question and discuss. Cartoons too can be a playful source of enquiry. I think it was Wittgenstein who said he could imagine a philosophical book made up entirely of jokes. Humour is a vital element in creative dialogue ... but without a foundation of respect and discussion skills then all else fails – relationships, dialogue and learning from each other.