Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

turn to a partner and tell them the answer as soon as they think they know. Or else you could get them to work in groups and give them 30 seconds or so to answer your question, something that actively involves the whole class and also gets talking those who would otherwise be loath to talk in front of the whole class.
    Which brings us back to ‘Thunks’.
    Sometimes when you are working with a child in a
P4C
session and especially if they are at the more academically able end of the spectrum of classroom achievement, and you ask them a question like, ‘Is there more future or past?’ their response is, ‘I don’t know.’ And they are quite right. They don’t know. No-one knows. But you are not asking them what they know, you are asking them what they think. And they are separate things. For me, knowing is clever, wanting to know is intelligence. Helping children who know so much (that is to say, have good memories and a subscription to the
Discovery Channel
) and are always first with the ‘right answer’ to be comfortable with not knowing an answer but putting forward a suggestion of their own thinking is a hugely important task for any teacher. Think of it, if you like, from a scientific perspective. Here you start with a thought, a hypothesis, which you then have to try and turn into something that you know. For this reason alone we need to have our academically gifted children comfortable with thinking but not knowing. On top of that, something else I have noticed is that it is the more academically able children (and adults for that matter) who are less able to take on board new information and change their minds. I like
P4C
because it opens up chinks of uncertainty to allow the truth to get in. So, go on, change your mind, prove you’ve got one, as they say.
    I once heard thinking skills advocate of long standing Robert Fisher 15 tell a group of headteachers of the Oxford admissions tutor who was asked the question, ‘With so many A grade students in front of you, now more than ever, how do you separate the intelligent ones from the ones who have been well schooled and who have a good memory?’ The response was that, actually, it was very easy, just as it is for Richard Lambert, Director of the CBI, when he said, ‘For employers, differentiating between pupils who have straight As is not a problem’. How? According to the admissions tutor, ‘I just ask them a question no-one’s asked them before.’ I think Piaget would approve.

Chapter 24
A short word on thinking about thinking
    There are many ways to fail a test.
    You can not know the answer because you forgot to revise. You can not know the answer because you chose not to revise. You can not know the answer because you didn’t get around to revising that particular bit. You can not know the answer because you were away during that particular lesson. You can not know the answer because you just didn’t ‘get’ that particular aspect of the curriculum. You can have got things wrong and revised the wrong thing. You can have revised well but just forgot it in the exam. You can have run out of time to answer the question even though you knew the answer. You can have misread the question and answered it wrong. You can have revised it but that particular bit just didn’t stick. You can have tried to revise it but your notes just didn’t make sense. You can have revised it, memorized it and regurgitated it well but had it down wrong in your book in the first place … .
    And there are as many ways to get ten out of ten as there are to get zero out of ten.
    Lifting the lid on children’s brains, peering in and asking, ‘How did you get what you got?’ is what metacognition is all about and it is a vital cog in the ‘learning school’ machine. What’s more, research has shown a link between metacognition and intelligence. 1 Yet it is often overlooked in the headlong rush towards covering the curriculum (although I once came across a lady from New Zealand who had been a ‘metacognitive teacher’, whose job was to help children genuinely think about what they were seeing when they visited an art gallery).
    Helping children develop effective metacognition can be broken down into two important areas, as identified by the man who coined the word, Stanford psychologist John Flavell. 2 These are ‘metacognitive knowledge’ and ‘metacognitive strategies’. With metacognitive knowledge, students learn about, for example, their preferences in