Discussion practice
For younger, EAL or less confident children, a focus could be planned in for modelling and scaffolding questioning and explanation skills. This could be learning about open and closed questions, leading questions, and maybe some sentence stems to give children a starting point for their responses if they are struggling to express their ideas.
Exercise:
Spend a few minutes writing down some sentence stems that you would like your learners to use during philosophical discussions (eg. “I disagree with that because…”)
Lesson 1 of ‘Arcadian Civil War’ can be re-used for your own Dramatic Enquiry as a way for yourself and students to practice questioning and reasoning skills. It is a lesson with low stakes that is not connected to the DE subject matter and simply allows students to express their opinions.
There are many other philosophical discussion questions (such as ‘would you rather be a pen or a pencil?’) available online. Here is an example:
https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/p4c-thinking-questions-for-discussion-6437746
You now have the basics in place for your Dramatic Enquiry. In the next module you’ll be starting to think of exercises your learners can complete as part of the workshop.
