P4C in September: the challenge of the new

There’s been no young folk at all for me for the past week, not even mine. Instead its been schools full of teachers getting back into work - cutting, sticking, opening, planning - readying their resources, filling their walls, shifting their tables. In anticipation of the arrival of their fresh new students, teachers busy themselves by preparing their classes, classrooms and in this case, happily, themselves.

And that’s why I’m here, in a small JMI in rural Berkshire. I’m here to lead a SAPERE P4C Level 1 so that this year there’ll be more questions, better questions, higher quality dialogue, teaching through communities of enquiry, better thinking, in the classroom and beyond. But at 8am on a Monday in late September it feels, well, a bit unreal.

Outside, blackberries are bramble jelly ripe and end of season funghi poke orange umbrella heads through wisened leaves. Inside everything is car wash clean, green shoots fresh. There really is new paint not to be scuffed and we really are wondering out loud whether we should walk around the
new circular rug to preserve its beautiful eco-globular centre and its fluffy outer ring of happily
custodial children.

The day before yesterday I was lazily whalespotting off Oban - and like Alice I don’t feel I’m quite out of the dream. Unreal is my best shot - like the playground bark chippings sitting improbably neatly within their boundary walls, like the bespectacled lion deep staring down at me from his summer long cogitation.

Then suddenly its 9.30 - and we’re off.  We introduce ourselves, relax, get to know one another, speak of summer, begin to form some community relations. Over the next two days, the enquiries enquire, the workshops work, the questions spark, the themes emerge. ‘How do we deal with a couple of unattentive pupils?’, ‘Can this work for lower ability pupils?’, ‘Can a group of 5 year olds really think about rules for their own community?’, ‘In a primary school with all female staff, how can we understand the behaviour of boys?’, ‘Where does school end and community begin?’

2 days of p4c training - the skills, the resources, the understanding needed to get started in classroom practice, and to keep going - are over in a trice. I can feel that the coming year of teaching, should we say ‘facilitating’, is already changed.

On that second evening, back in the office, I take out the first first piece of feedback. ‘… the whole group had space to challenge each other.’

And when I think back, they did challenge one another, in the training, in the staffroom, in one to one meetings, informally, about the nature of schooling, about the basis of differentiation, about the meaning of community. They challenged one another seriously, light heartedly and happily - and they enjoyed it.

Suddenly it doesn’t seem so unreal after all.

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