Thinking Moves - A Conversation with Roger Sutcliffe

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

If metacognition is thinking about your thought processes, well, it's jolly hard to do that if you can't label the thought processes. And this is precisely what we really mean by self-regulation. A student can say, right, well, I've encountered this situation before and I've got a strategy for dealing with it.

Hi everyone, my name is Tim Logan and it's a great pleasure to bring you the podcast in partnership with Notosh. This week's episode is with the wonderful Roger Sutcliffe, who is one of the world's leading authorities on philosophy for children and philosophical education. It's hard to disagree that critical thinking is one of the key skills that we want for our children. And yet everyone seems to be doing it, whatever type of pedagogy or curriculum they're using. Over the last 10 years, Roger has been distilling his wealth of knowledge and experience of doing philosophy with children to develop the Thinking Moves A to Z, which is a scheme to provide a common language for thinking about thinking for teachers and students. Roger himself trained under Professor Matthew Lipman, the pioneer of philosophy for children. He is also the founder and president of Sapere, the UK charity promoting P4C, as well as the president of the International Council for philosophical inquiry with children. Welcome, Roger. Thank you so much for joining. It's, um, a real pleasure to be able to meet you and chat to you. I've been aware of the amazing work you've been doing, Philosophy for Children and all sorts, for a long time, and it's a great privilege to be able to dig into some of it with you today. So thank you.

I'm equally excited.

Great. So If we just think, just in terms of setting the context, we're going to talk about your current work with DialogueWorks and the Thinking Moves. But before we do that, I just want to set the history in terms of the Philosophy for Children work you've been doing for a long time. And one of the things I heard you say was over time, the case for doing philosophy for children grows and grows even more urgent. That definitely resonated with me, especially now, given everything that's going on in the world and the horrendous things happening in, in Gaza right now. And there's many reasons why Philosophy for Children is quite urgent. So yeah, perhaps you could just start by saying a little bit more about what it is firstly, and why you feel it's a particularly urgent need.

Yeah. Okay. Well, an important starter is that it isn't teaching philosophical texts to children. It's teaching the process of philosophizing. I think of it as an everyday process. I reckon everybody does a little bit of philosophizing probably every day. But obviously there's a difference between like normal routine philosophizing and deliberate intentional attempts to, as I put it, to understand and appreciate the world and others better. That's very broad, of course, but essentially the process, you can think of it as love of wisdom. That's of course its original meaning. It's a dialogical process that we engage children with, firstly something to think about, hopefully something that matters to them, and then they identify identify what they want to talk about. We help them frame a philosophical question. Won't go into too much detail there, but essentially there has to be some sort of big idea and one that relates to the children. So I often reel off a few Fs: fun, family, friends. Those are big ideas and children are very engaged with them. But because they're big, they're not straightforward. You know, what is friendship? What is family? I mean, even in the modern world, or especially in the modern world, That's a big question and an important one. So that's what the process is. And why is it important? Well, firstly, I'd say it's as important, if not more important, than the current thrust for oracy. Now, oracy is very important. In the modern world, if you can't communicate effectively in speech and in other ways, then clearly your voice isn't going to be heard so well. Maybe we've got a plethora of voices in the world. I mean, certainly there's some very loud ones. But of course the philosophical approach is to give equal space to voices and to encourage people to think and communicate in a caring and critical way. And if the educators and more particularly the curriculum designers don't see the need for that, then, well, they need a bit more education themselves, I'd say.

Yeah. I think one of the things that also connected with me hearing you talk elsewhere was about the fact that philosophy is a practice. And I, I appreciate what you're saying about it's not about learning philosophical texts or con— you know, content. And I think in education we very frequently do that with things we value. We turn them into content to teach.

Mm-hmm.

Because we think it's important.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and then we go back into the transmission mode of here's something important, I'm gonna tell you about it and you learn.

Yes. Yeah.

And I think that idea of philosophy as a practice for everybody, not just children, as we said off air, for the politicians and for many, for many people, I think. But what is it about the practice idea that, that is important, do you think?

Well, in Philosophy for Children, we especially focus on a form of philosophical practice, which goes back to Socrates. It's centered on dialogue, Socratic dialogue, you're probably familiar with, or at least in, in, in broad terms. And whilst it's clearly possible, and I think sometimes desirable, to philosophize by yourself, in other words, to sort yourself out privately, and personally, I'm very much in favor of the discipline of writing as well as speech. But in terms of inducting children into the practice and enabling them to enjoy it and value it, then it, we talk about the community of philosophical inquiry. Essentially, that's building a group, and clearly that's what a community is, but a community is more than just a group. It's a group that's developed, if you like, understandings as to how to operate. You develop better listening skills, you develop better reasoning skills because you have to explain and justify what you're saying to others and so on. So I think it probably is best to relate the philosophical practice in this context to dialogue, philosophical dialogue, where we're trying to, as I say, understand the world better, mainly through words, of course. But words relate to individual experiences, and part of what children discover— adults as well, for that matter— is that words that they thought they understood perfectly well mean different things to different people because everybody has different experiences and different emphases and so on. And part of what we do is just explore the way that other people think about the world, and that helps us to think better ourselves.

Yeah. I mean, that's so important. I think that kind of multi-perspectival aspect of it as well as the kind of developmental practice. But just as an example, I was, I had the misfortune or pleasure, depending on your position, to sit listening to a certain son-in-law of a presidential candidate on a podcast recently. And the absolute certainty with which he was talking about the world was quite scary actually, this idea that the world is just black and white. And, you know, I, I'm holding these, these ideas which are right and other people's ideas are wrong. And this, it's such a phenomenally simplistic way of viewing the world, it feels. And as you're talking there, that kind of, as you understand how other people perceive and feel and experience the world and think, you understand the, the grayness, right? You, you start to see that the world is just simply not the black and white that other people might make it out to be. There's this— the life happens in the grayness somehow, right? And I think that's so important, going back to my first question, in our current moment.

I was going to make exactly that connection, Tim. And when you think about it, a lot of education— I'm talking conventional education, and I'm not knocking it— it is essentially about getting the right answer. And so we almost habituate students, and perhaps particularly the let's not say the more able students, but the more high-achieving students, to think that they're cleverer, they know better than other people. Edward de Bono had a nice phrase for this. He called it the intelligence trap. And the idea was that we encourage some students, perhaps less now than we used to, to think of themselves as highly intelligent. And of course, the trap then is to think, well, by definition, my ideas must be better than other people's ideas. Now, if you layer that with the notion that I've got a culture that's superior in some way to other cultures, then you begin to build up this sort of arrogant thinking, which actually, as you observe, not just in terms of international relations, but interpersonal relations and intercultural relations, is devastatingly bad for the world. And of course, I know you've got a great interest in the IB, and the IB is very you know, set and rightly set against that sort of monoculturalism and so on. And so, you know, the values, the ethos of Philosophy for Children fits so beautifully with the IB. And if some of your listeners haven't come across it and hear that, I hope they'll explore the interconnections.

Definitely. And what you were— the way you're talking about it actually expands into a much broader idea of philosophical teaching and learning. I mean, this is not just a program that you insert into a school timetable when you can fit it in. It's like there's a, a disposition or a stance towards pedagogy, right? Towards teaching and learning, which I think is interesting as you call it philosophical teaching and learning. But I'd love to just briefly, I mean, you've mentioned dialogue, but I, I wanted to bring up the idea of the community of inquiry, cuz I think hearing the background of Philosophy of Children, Matthew Lipman, and this idea of the community of inquiry was so important to that. Could you just, just say a little bit about why that idea of the community of inquiry is so central?

Yeah, okay, well, look, just a short historical background there. The concept was originated actually, or attributed anyway, to Charles Peirce, an American philosopher, 19th century. And he was one of the last of the philosopher-scientists or scientific philosophers specializing to some extent in both. And he became very aware that science operated in a similar way to philosophy. In a self-critical way, that you actually relied upon other people to test your ideas. And clearly nowadays with scientific review and so on, that, that's very embedded in the scientific process. So his notion of the community of inquiry was actually as much centered or more centered on the community of scientific inquiry. Now, clearly that's a great model for learning of all sorts. You can have a community of historical inquiry. Universities by and large model this. They review each other's ideas and so on and so forth. Now that's a very important concept for children to understand, that knowledge isn't a fixed thing necessarily, or at any rate, that once you get to certain more advanced levels, there are different interpretations, as you say, different perspectives and so on. So that's part of what the community brings. That sense of difference. But, but also importantly, I think it brings a sense of unity, because you're all pursuing a common purpose, which might be scientific advance. But in the case of the classroom community of philosophical inquiry is just an advance in your understanding, as I say, a broad understanding of how the world works and how words work, which is absolutely central to good education.

Yeah. And if I could, It also guards against the kind of slide into relativism, which potentially some people might have heard you or inferred from your earlier description of multi-perspectives. And, you know, well, if everybody's as right as everybody else, then we're just, we slide into relativism. But actually the community of inquiry somehow holds each other to account, as you say, in this common purpose towards better understanding or, you know, truth or these problematic concepts.

But that's absolutely right. And one of the, well, attack lines isn't the right word, but one of the potential criticisms of Philosophy for Children, and maybe philosophy in general, is that it opens the door to, yes, not just disagreement, but your point of view is as valid as your point of view. And sometimes you hear people saying philosophy for children, there are no right or wrong answers. Now, that's absolutely not the line that we hold when we present it. For a start, there are right or wrong answers when it comes to historical facts and so on. And those can be part of a philosophical inquiry. But in addition to that, we want to say there may not be final definitive answers to philosophical questions, but there may be better answers. And you work out what's a better answer by testing it, by applying reasoning, by applying valuation. So yes, we try to avoid subjectivism, but mind you, at the end of the road, everybody makes their own mind up. And sure, We encourage them to do that. We're— part of our slogan is think for yourself by thinking with others. And it's, it's almost paradoxical, but you think better individually if you are exposed to other people's thinking.

Absolutely. And again, it comes back to that, the grayness as well of just the increasing complexity of ideas. That if you are not exposed to those from multiple perspectives, then you don't deepen or, you know, enhance the sophistication of your thinking or your ideas because they, they remain quite simplistic. Yeah. But actually the world is deeply complex and understanding that beautiful complexity is part of the journey somehow. Yeah.

Yeah. Completely agree with that.

No, interesting. And, and I think the other thing that, that also is, I know you feel strongly about, but I think also helps with that idea of of just sliding into relativism is, is the idea of appreciation and value. Because I think there are things we care about, right? As humans, I mean, in relation to AI, a lot of conversations about, you know, we care about the world, we care about staying alive. That's part of what being human is. And I think so that idea of appreciation and virtue valuing is another part of your philosophical teaching and learning. But maybe could you say a bit about why is appreciation so important? And then what, what are the kind of virtues and values that surround that?

Well, look, I, I think it's great that you've made a link directly between caring and appreciation. Caring thinking is a notion that I think is, if not originally attributable to Matthew Lipman, then he wrote more about it than anyone else and introduced it importantly into the educational field of his day, which was basically 1970s, '80s, almost as a counterbalance to an overemphasis on critical thinking. Now, you can be a critical thinker without actually caring. This goes back in philosophy to the days when people were trained to be good orators and just to win cases. And we still talk about that nowadays, you know, but you can be an excellent lawyer but have a rather dubious value base. So Lippmann introduced this idea of caring thinking. And whilst I wouldn't immediately want to say caring thinking is appreciative thinking because there's interesting nuances nuances here. Essentially, if you don't care about anything, then you're not going to appreciate anything either, or at best, you're just going to be self-interested, and none of us would think that's a desirable goal of education. Okay, so as well as caring thinking, the idea of P4C is not just to care about other people, but to care in general about how we speak, how We are ourselves in ourselves to care about the world. I mean, it's almost all-embracing. I sometimes say to care is to value and to value is to care. Okay, so now how does that connect in with appreciation? Well, if you care about something, then you must appreciate its value in some way, either to you or perhaps to the world. The environment would be an important example of that. And there's no doubt that many young people, and happily so, and not just young people, are becoming more caring of the environment because they appreciate more its fragility, its importance, its beauty, and so on and so forth. So there is an, if you like, an inherent appreciative element to our thinking and to our education of young people. However, the curricula themselves And you could— I mean, I've studied not all of them, but many of them, and they talk about often critical thinking, creative thinking. Yes, we want to develop those. Whether they do is a different question, but that's the aspiration. They talk then about developing knowledge, understanding, and skills. And again, I'm not knocking that. I think those are very important, but not one of them is, to my knowledge, talks about developing Appreciation. Now, there's a simple question to ask here. If we think knowledge is important or understanding or skills, then why do we just teach them without teaching why we think they're important? We want, in short, if we've taught someone, as I hope we do well, to be a historian or to be a geographer or to be a scientist or whatever, We want them to love the subject, yes, but not just because of what it gives them. That's like, again, self-interested, but to appreciate that the study of history enhances human life, the study of science enhances human life, the study of geography, and so on and so forth. So now, of course, it's a whole other project to say, how can we make sure that our curricula, our teaching, our everyday teaching enhances student appreciation. I'm not going to go into how we might set about that. What I do want to say though is that if as teachers we're not conscious of the need to persuade, almost to persuade students that this is worth doing, and not for the sake of getting an exam score, but because it is inherently good to do, but also it's good for humanity that we should develop the studies, the disciplines So it's a big drum I bang. Some people will listen to it, some people will take it forward and good for them.

Yeah, no. And the other thing I find interesting about the idea of appreciation is that there is some skill aspect to it. Like you can develop a—

Definitely.

You can hone a sense of appreciation, right? Like in art appreciation or music or whatever, even if you don't love it, right? So, and I think there's something important there about that acknowledging and understanding and feeling empathy for other people's perspectives, even if you don't share them, you can appreciate where they're coming from. So I think that's important.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. It's not— I mean, it may be about developing a passion in students.

Sure.

But you're absolutely right, it's much wider than that. And thank you for mentioning art appreciation and the rest, which relies itself upon developing knowledge and understanding of art, of the artist, of the context, and so on. The more you know, broadly speaking, the more you can appreciate.

Yeah.

But it's bringing that appreciation, if you like, to more conscious and deliberate awareness that I think is important.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I suppose there's the other dimension is that it's difficult, if not impossible, potentially to persuade or as a top-down implementation to cajole people into appreciating. It's something that has to come from within to some extent, I think. But as you say, there's certain dispositions and you talk about being thoughtful, reasonable, considerate, and reflective as, as important outcomes of a philosophical teaching and learning approach.

Yeah.

Yeah. That perhaps would position people if they are thoughtful and reasonable and re— considerate and reflective would position them to appreciate, to take time to appreciate, to pause and think and reflect and share and You know, so the conditions there might be more generative of appreciation because you can't, you know, you can't tell people to appreciate something, right?

No, that's absolutely right. And for me, reflection of the four that you've listed— thoughtful, reasonable, considerate, and reflection— which were Matthew Lipman's own, if you like, prime targets. Reflection, I think, is the most important for a variety of reasons. Again, I won't go into them to elaborate, but I think of inquiry as like the starter and driver of learning and reflection as the consolidator and the enricher of learning. Because basically, if we don't either give time to students or even in our own lives reflect on our experiences, on what we are told, what we see, and so on, well, firstly, we have less chance to be critical about it, and it's important to be critical, to weigh things up appropriately. But you give yourself less chance to appreciate it, to relish it at times, and even to reflect on mistakes that you've made and appreciate that you, you were in error or whatever. So I think of inquiry and reflection as the two linchpins or foundational pillars— the different metaphors— for good education.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I just— there was one other thing I just wanted to say, coming back to your idea about uncaring thinking, because I think the more we learn, so for example, I've spoken with Mary Helen Immordino-Yang on the podcast and then somebody else, Lisa Feldman Barrett, there's, you know, the more the neuroscience develops, the more understanding that the emotion and the cognition are so fundamentally interlinked that actually there is no such thing as uncaring thinking. Not really.

No, no.

They are so intertwined that I think that's an important kind of basis on which to build the rest. Because actually, even these words which sometimes reflection and inquiry and reason, you know, can sound a little cold sometimes that they're just thinking skills, but actually they're feeling skills as well. You know, they are so intertwined with thinking and feeling.

Yeah, no, we'll probably end up completely agreeing about almost everything, Tim Logan. But again, it's a very important point. And you've only got to think about the way in which we think, which is sometimes quite deliberate and careful and sometimes very spontaneous and so on. But you could make a case that whatever we think is itself reflecting what we feel and care about at that moment.

Yeah.

And so even at that very basic level, you can't separate these two things out. But, but part of what I do in my Thinking Moves course is help teachers particularly, but students as well, to reflect, yes, to think about the relationship between thinking, feeling, and doing. The word I use is they're completely intertwined. I mean, it's virtually impossible to separate them out, at least in practical terms.

Absolutely. Yeah. Again, I couldn't agree more. Just, you know, especially all the embodied cognition, understanding how cognition is embodied and embedded and then all of those E's. That I think, I mean, it's just scientific consensus now more and more is that we can't teach from the neck up. We can't teach these disembodied brains in a classroom. The brain isn't a computer. This is fundamentally an embodied experience, a relational experience of learning. And I think communities of inquiry or reflection, all of the things we're talking about have to take that into consideration as we're, as we are kind of thinking about how to improve them.

Yeah.

And, and if, if I could just, then you, you mentioned critical thinking and one of the things that I worry about with that idea of critical thinking is that it, it's become a bit of a truism in education. It's ev— you know, it transcends ideological boundaries. Everybody says that they do critical thinking, whether you're a, you know, a real traditionalist, knowledge rich, or you are out on the, the wacky wing of the progressives and everything in between. Every, everybody says that as a desirable outcome of education is to be a critical thinker, right? Fine. So therefore it's almost become meaningless to a certain extent when, when everybody says they're doing it, but no one really can agree on it. And as you said earlier, are they doing it really? I mean, how intentionally are they thinking about what that really means and then doing things differently in relation to critical thinking? So I wonder, this will bring us hopefully onto your thinking moves ideas, and I heard you draw the analogy with cycling. So maybe this is a good place to start. Why is critical thinking not just pedaling harder?

Well, I suppose I'd have to think even more carefully about the metaphor and where it leads to, the analogy. But I mean, pedaling harder might be going in the wrong direction for a start. And I think we want children to be able to think hard, but thinking hard is not the same as thinking well. And so from way back. I mean, I've been teaching pretty much 50 years now, different subjects and so on, but I was always very keen to help children think certainly carefully. I mean, choosing their words carefully, that's important, that leads to better thinking. But to be able to change their mind, to again listen to other perspectives and so on. So again, we're sort of going back into philosophical territory to some extent. There. I mean, Matthew Lipman himself strongly believed that whilst it was desirable to teach and develop critical thinking, that the best way to do it was actually to get kids doing philosophy. Yeah, you know, you can teach the forms of critical thinking, and that can be of value. Children can become better at formally arguing, but it doesn't follow that they will be self-critical, that they will be better at recognizing their own cognitive bias and so on and so forth. So when I hear that, I don't hear it explicitly, but when implicitly people are saying, well, of course we teach critical thinking in history, we teach critical thinking in even in sports and so on. And yes, of course, I think to some extent you do, but more or less by instruction or by example, it's not particularly a a metacognitive, a self-aware process. And I think real critical thinking needs to be. But I had a classical education. So one of the rationales I remember being told even as a younger student was that Latin trained the mind and that was why we learnt it. Now, I personally think that the learning of any foreign language trains the mind in a very similar way. I don't personally think there's anything too special about Latin. But, you know, most teachers will say the same thing. They will say, well, we teach history, but we're teaching thinking while we're teaching history. Well, as I say, yes, I think that is the case, but it's implicit teaching of thinking. It's not explicit.

Sure.

There's a whole other question as to how valuable the explicit teaching of thinking is. But there is evidence now, I think, that metacognition, which loosely means thinking about your thinking, but more precisely means thinking about your thinking processes, how you're thinking rather than what you're thinking, that actually if we can improve students' metacognition and their self-regulation, which is intimately related with metacognition, then they do become better learners in general, better thinkers and better learners. Now I strongly believe that, and it is why I've developed the Thinking Moves A to Z scheme for explicitly teaching thinking.

Yeah, and I'd love to ask you about that, just, but, but just to give a bit of extra context, the analogy which I just dropped in about the cycling, I do think that's, that's illustrative because you, you know, we do ask students to think in school all the time, right? So the idea that we are developing critical thinking is just getting them to do more of that. Just like riding a bike, you just get them to keep riding it and riding it and riding it. But actually you can through deliberate practice and through some specific, you know, coaching and training. If you were learning how to really ride a bike well, you would understand, as you said, how to take corners and how to, you know, use your weights and how to—

Absolutely.

Apply pressure at certain moments. And there's clearly techniques. And I think I do find that useful as a way to think about it because then as you were talking then with the Thinking Moves scheme, that those become those coaching techniques that teachers might actually look out for, be able to point young people to, and we'll develop the teachers' metacognition as well around what good thinking is and complex thinking is so that they can also support and coach that process.

Yeah.

But just before I ask specifically about those, I wanted to also bring up the knowledge question because it, I mean, clearly there are people listening who will be thinking, yes, but you can't, this is a classic response, you can't think critically if you don't know anything. And that's the revert that many traditional teachers will come back with and say, well, you know, we just need more and more long-term memory of knowledge, understanding, so that you can draw on that as you weave complex ideas together. Because if you're, you know, if you don't know anything, you can't compare and contrast and analyze and, you know, all of those things that you might need to do. So I just wanted to invite you just to say a little bit about where you think that role of knowledge comes from.

Yeah, well, I've got two things to say about it. I mean, firstly, the argument is a straw man argument because nobody has ever seriously proposed that you teach thinking or critical thinking without content. I mean, it is literally impossible. So implicitly you're saying, yes, we need to know stuff. A second thing is that kids do know stuff. They know stuff other than what we know they know, and they know stuff more or less that we know that they know because we've tested them and so on. So they're on a journey. Actually, if teachers were humble enough, they'd realize that they're on a journey of knowledge expansion. And it's even fairly broadly accepted that the sort of knowledge frameworks that are taught at A-level or diploma level are sometimes oversimplistic and themselves are in need of better, if you will, foundations and more self-critical thinking. It may be perfectly okay to teach at that level in some ways, but the message should be that, as you said earlier, life is complex. The things that we're studying are complex, and we're using words which are often fairly blunt tools to explicate and illuminate the world that we live in. So that promotes a sort of attitude to learning which people see, and its pragmatic roots in American philosophy are very keen on, which is fallibilism, the realization that nobody knows everything and probably nobody knows anything as well as they should, not even your best teachers and so on. Okay, so, but that said, they'll still say, yeah, but, you know, I've been to university, I know more than the kids, and it's my job to teach them what I know. Fair enough. But now then, the next question is, if we're going to develop critical thinking in our students, then in a sense we need to problematize what we're learning. I mean, if we teach it as if it's set in stone and perfectly and universally true, then there's nothing to critique. You just absorb it. So if— and surely we should be doing this at advanced level diploma, certainly university level. If we recognize and help the students see that there are problems with the way we're talking and explaining and illuminating, then we open the door to some reasoning about, well, is this a better view, or should we explain it like that, and so on and so forth. What's important then is that the students themselves and the teachers see that as an inquiry process. It's not like we problematize it and then we automatically have the solution because it's inherent. No, you problematize it because there are judgments to be made. There are often value judgments to be made and so on. And that's when you actually get into critical thinking. I would say you get into philosophizing because you're essentially dealing with the way in which our symbols, our language and our visual symbols and so and so on, relate to the world. And this isn't a straightforward one-to-one relationship. And philosophers above all have recognized that language is a slippery thing, as it were. Yeah. And that's where you get into the excitement for students, that they realize, oh, actually, well, there are different ways of looking at this. And now it's for me to decide what's the best way for me to look at it and for me to explain. Absolutely. Okay, well, I probably waxed a bit too lyrical in that.

No, but I would also add that there is the kind of, back to what you were saying earlier about appreciation, when you problematize what you're learning, the knowledge, there is also the problematizing of the fact that we're learning this and not something else. And who has chosen this? Because that is not an insignificant aspect of what is happening now, because, you know, there is a fair questioning of a more kind of colonial curriculum. And actually, what about other voices that have been marginalized and excluded in the past? I mean, that's not wokeism. That is just the fact, right? There is a certain curriculum that has been chosen and why this knowledge and why not something else? And so I think, I think that's also a really important part of the problematising.

Yeah. Yeah. You've, you've brought your own experience and wisdom to that, Tim. And that again is, is something very important to put on the table here when people are saying knowledge is everything. It's what knowledge and why this knowledge rather than that knowledge and so on. And if they can't address that question, and if they get frightened or start using, well, essentially name-calling, wokeism, and that to defend their position, then they're absolutely not thinking critically at all.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So it would be, I think, useful for listeners to just to hear some of the specifics perhaps of the Thinking Moves framework that you've developed, because I think, you know, we've been talking quite philosophically about philosophical teaching and learning, and there is, you know, let's get into some of the concrete aspects of it because you are developing essentially a common language for thinking about thinking, right? And, and in really important ways. And I'd love to ask you about how that compares to other previous attempts to do that. But perhaps you could just say a little bit more about the, the specific aspects of the Thinking Moves framework.

Yes.

Okay.

Well, the first thing is to give it its full title. It, it's Thinking Moves A to Z. People have been using this phrase thinking moves before, certainly in the P4C world, but Ron Ritchat, for example, uses it. And at one level, it was a perfectly ordinary way of talking about it. Although I don't think anyone particularly took the trouble to differentiate between, say, thinking skills and thinking moves and thinking processes. And actually that bears some further thought, which actually I've done, but I won't Boy, anyone with it now? Okay, so I went for the notion of thinking moves, partly because in P4C we talk about facilitator moves. Now that is essentially an intervention by a facilitator to raise a question of some sort. And now I think actually most thinking moves are prompted by a question, if not all, a question from outside or even the question from inside. So in the P4C session, a facilitator might ask a question like, well, what's the evidence for that? Or could you justify that? Or so on. Now, any of those questions, and teachers of other subjects raise them as well, we call them coaching questions, you can call them prompting questions, eliciting questions, to elicit a certain sort of thoughtful response from the students. So I began to systematize this within the context of P4C and correlate the facilitator move with the thinking move that they were trying to elicit. As I did so, I was obviously influenced by other thinkers. So the trigger, in fact, to the Thinking Moves A to Z scheme, which is literally an A to Z, 26 different thinking moves, was a workshop I attended by Art Costa, where he put up on the screen 26 what he called thinking verbs, which is another interesting way of referring to these. And they were in alphabetical order except for the last column, which was out of alphabetical order. And I mean, quite bizarrely, it triggered me to think, well, I wonder if you could just arrange the thinking verbs stroke moves in a literal A to Z and cover the whole lot. Now, to be honest, it was a wacky idea I had 10 years ago. And I thought, well, I'll play with that a little bit, which I did. And then I got increasingly interested and serious about it because I thought actually it could be done. Now, the challenge in a sense wasn't to have just a thinking move or verb per letter because that was reasonably easy to do. There are, oh, I don't know, hundreds of words that we use for thinking moves. Acts, skills, etc. The challenge that I took on, and I think have succeeded in almost to my surprise, was to do a metaphorical A to Z, which is like, this is the complete list, right, of human thought processes. Now, obviously, I did look at Bloom's taxonomy, and as you say, Costa's, and been influenced and admire Ron Richards' work, but when I analyzed it, I realized that there wasn't, if you like, an authoritative or a foundational list. There's only a 50% overlap between Bloom's taxonomy and Art Costa's 26 Thinking Words.

Okay.

So I thought to myself, well, we could and probably should do better than that. Let's try and get a complete list. And that is what I think I've succeeded in doing. I've tested this out with rooms of philosophers and nobody's yet pointed out a move that can't be in some way encompassed by the A-Z. So there's two things that commend it. One is that it uses everyday language which even very young children understand. So we now have early years practitioners using this scheme and we have sixth form teachers using it. And using it to good effect, which speaks, I think, to its sound foundation. So it's simple and using common language, and everybody can access that language. So the teacher can talk about it, the students can talk about it, and they've got a language to talk about their own thinking. They can identify 26 different thinking moves. Now, I better just give examples here. Actually, giving an example is a thinking move, so I've been very metacognitive cognitives there.

Nice. And I think that's your X, right?

It is, it is.

My XYZ is always the hard part, right?

Yeah, well, Z turned out to be easy. It was Zoom, and it's a great move because it's zoom in and zoom out, but that's another thing. And then Y is yield, which is my favorite. It's a bit quaint, but it works beautifully. But anyway, what I was going to do was give examples at the start. So there's think ahead and there's think back. It couldn't be more simple. And all of us are doing it all the time. So I'm not inventing new ways of thinking. I'm just inventing a very simple way of referring to different thought processes, thinking to the future, thinking to the past, thinking in the present. That's listen, look, use your senses in the present. So that's Art Costa's gather data with all your senses. So that's a bit of a flavor of it. I was talking about the completeness of it. And I genuinely say, and with a sort of mixture of humility and pride, if this is, as I claim it, the only complete list of thinking moves, why would you want to use another list? So, you know, check it out, everyone. But as well as the simplicity and the completeness of it, it has this other very singular, beautiful feature, which is it's a mnemonic deliberately. It's an A to Z. And the 26 moves can be learned in an hour. I don't press people to do that, but I can coach people to learn the 26 moves in an hour. And incidentally, they all come with signs, hand signs as well. And those are very useful as cues for the students, but also particularly with special needs and so on. But anyway, going back to the point about the memorability of it, this is absolutely key to developing a scheme that can be properly used for metacognition. Because if metacognition is thinking about your thought processes, well, it's jolly hard to do that if you can't label the thought processes, if you don't have a ready-to-mind, ah yes, this is the sort of thinking I am doing, or this is the sort of thinking I should be doing. Yeah. And if you learn these 26 moves by heart, you've got, if you like, a menu of options that enable you to say metacognitively, well, I'm here, but I need to be there. What move should I make? And one of the most powerful is V for vary. It's similar to de Bono's lateral thinking. And so often it's relevant in mathematics, which I also used to teach at one point. You know, kids get stuck.

Sure.

They are going down a particular line of thinking and they get stuck and they don't know what to do. And it's a very simple self-instruction to say, well, Just try something different. Let's start over. Let's— is there another way that I've learned to do this? In the case of creative writing, is there another word that I could use that might be better than this? So very, very, very— it goes very nicely with that whole idea of different perspectives as well.

Absolutely. So fantastic.

Look, I hope it gives you a flavor.

Yeah, no, that's fantastic. Can I ask you a couple of things? One is As I understand it, you've, you've paired them up to some extent as well. And I think that's quite interesting because there is a, Ian McGilchrist talks about the coincidence of opposites, right? And I think there's something interesting about the idea that people are zooming in, zooming out. I know that's one, I, that's, that's your Z, but connect and divide, for example, C and D. Yeah. And I, yeah, I think there's something interesting there because there is an, one of the things I'm, I've fascinated by is the kind of the holding of tensions, the holding of opposites, the holding of ways, different ways of approaching something. Yeah. That might be two perspectives and you know, you can't, it's not that one is right and one is wrong. It's just there, they are both equally valid at a certain point and they have to be held in tension. I think there's something really powerful and important about that almost. It's almost like a meta meta move, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Well, Aristotle once said, and I'm not quoting him exactly. That the test or mark of a, I don't think he used the word intelligent mind, but a sophisticated mind or something, is the ability to hold two opposite propositions in mind at the same time. And I think that's exactly what you're talking about. And I think it's actually something that is well developed in philosophical inquiry with children, to go back almost to where we started in P4C, because you will get different perspectives and different accounts. And you know, for a time you have to sort of weigh up and say, well, I don't know, I sort of see that, and yes, I see that, so where am I going to go with this? And so you genuinely practice that ability to compromise, if you like, to take the best of different propositions, as it were.

Yeah.

So yes, but to your more general point about the coincidence of opposites, I think that the intention in the A to Z and this pairing is not particularly to push people in that direction and say, you know, you must sort think in opposites all the time. It is, however, to show how moves can be complementary to each other, but also at some points they pull in different directions. So clearly, as you say, zooming in is the opposite from zooming out, but actually they are complementary in the sense that human minds are always doing this. Teachers are always zooming in and zooming out. They look at a topic, that's zooming out, and then they zoom in, and then they say, how does that relate to bigger topic? And that's connecting, of course.

And if you're not aware of Mary Hill and Imodino Yang's work, that's a really key insight from what she has found in her work with young people in LA, that, that the default mode network and the goal-directed network are toggling back and forth in the kind of zooming in and the zooming out. And they've done some longitudinal study that highlights that the life outcomes for those young people who are doing more of that zooming in and zooming out are enhanced. I mean, fascinating work. Fascinating.

Amazing. And I will follow that, that link up, Tim, and I hope some of your listeners might as well, because when you frame it in the simple language of zooming in and zooming out, which even as I say, that the little children can get, you know, that in itself gives them a powerful tool. Now let me just say something about the aspect of this that we call thinking grooves. Now the moves can sometimes be put in pairs. So you're right, ahead and back is opposites, connect and divide is opposites, maintain and negate is opposites, to hold a belief or to deny a belief and so on. But thinking grooves takes this a step further, which is to say that there are if you like, steps, regular steps that you can take to enhance your thinking, to enhance your learning. To give a simple idea here, the EEF, the Educational Endowment Foundation, which in the UK does a lot of research, well, well established, talks about the most common metacognitive strategy is to set goals, to monitor, and to evaluate. And fair enough, that is— it's not highly original, but it's a very strong, powerful, and regular process to go through. You say, so what are we aiming at? How are we doing? How did we do? It's a sort of plan-do-review scheme. Okay, so, and it's a strategy, but it is very generic. Teachers are already doing it. What's the big deal about metacognitive strategies? Well, the point is that actually there aren't very many metacognitive strategies out there apart from that very generic one. To give full credit to Ron Ritchhart, that's exactly what he's pointing to with the thinking routines. See, think, wonder, for example, is probably his most commonly used. And I'm all in favor of it. We use it in P4C and so on. But actually, it's not as precise as it could be or not as guided as it should be. See is just something we do. Look is something we do deliberately. So in the A to Z scheme, C becomes look, or maybe listen, because equally you're attending to something with deliberate intent. Think is like— that's as general as you could possibly be. It's not at all precise. Of course we can say to kids, well, think, but it's better to say to them something like, well, connect. Connect what you're seeing or what you're hearing with an experience that you've had or with an idea or with something you've learned and so on. And then wonder could be, yeah, I'm wondering, I'm wondering. We want it in a more precise form, which is to question. So see, think, wonder in the A to Z language is look, connect, and question.

Yeah, interesting. There's something very analytical about that though. I wonder what's— there's something about wonder and awe And Art Costa talks about awe. I think there's something really important about, and you know, you're talking about this kind of very goal-directed Education Endowment Foundation focus. It's, I think there's something very instrumental about all of that analytical instrumental thinking about goal direction and funnels. I wrote, I've written a piece about funnels and actually what we, what we want is spaces where there's more generative possibility. And I wonder, are there things in the thinking moves which speak to that around that more generative sense of appreciation, actually, coming back to where we were talking about earlier, the awe and the wonder of this incredible thing that we are a part of?

Yeah. Well, there are. First thing to say though is that question itself encompasses wonder. It's not an exact synonym, but it encompasses. And I'm not actually even now suggesting to people that they change See, Think, Wonder into look, connect, and question, because see, think, wonder trips off the tongue. Everybody knows it. It's great. And I'm all in favor of wondering. But what we actually cultivate in P4C, to go back to that yet again, is precisely what I call wonder mode. So we present them with what we call a stimulus, but in IB, of course, it's a provocation, and we want them to wonder about it.

Yeah.

But then for practical purposes, we do want them to translate that wonder into something something more precise, like a question that we can all share and all wonder together about. I suppose you could say wondering is essentially a private activity, whereas questioning— sure, public— but I wouldn't want to push that distinction too far. But the second thing about, you know, giving space— I mentioned look, listen as being the move in the A to Z that is about being in the present, using your senses in the present. But again, that's all-encompassing. So look, listen is a sort of catch-all for all your senses.

Yeah.

And that means that you can apply it inside. Look inside, listen to your inner dialogue, which opens the door to reflection. So there's the space for, oh yes, let me just listen to— now, what might you listen to? Well, R is respond. So let's have a response here, but We cultivate, if you like, a thoughtful response, a reflective response, and then beyond that, we want to have a weighing up. So that's the W in the scheme, to weigh things up. Again, links directly with reflection. So, you know, don't make an instant judgment. As we say, have a think, chew it over, reflect on it, and so on. So it maybe it goes back to your metaphor of, or your analogy of pedaling. We want kids to think better. So each of the moves in itself can be done better. We can think ahead to better effect.

Yeah.

We can think back to better effect. We can weigh up to better effect and so on. So this is a journey. It's perhaps important to emphasize that learning the A to Z is really important for having a common language.. But in itself, it doesn't get you anywhere. You have to start working with the moves.

Sure.

And ultimately the direction of travel is for the students themselves to appropriate and own the moves so that they're genuinely metacognitive and self-regulated.

Yeah. Fantastic. And is there something in the, cuz I really appreciate what the idea of the, the hand gestures and the embodied kind of learning that comes with that. And I, as you heard earlier, I'm, this, it's something I'm quite interested in, care a lot about. Because I think we do often tend to teach disembodied brains, however much we pretend we don't. And how much in there is— is there— is there something in there that speaks to the sensing, the kind of embodied sensing?

Yes. Well, I hope I'm not going to appear just to be repeating for the sake of repeating, but the, the key move there is look-listen or listen-look. We put it both ways. And just a reminder, that is about using all your So when I introduce it in the training, I quote Leonardo da Vinci that seeing is one thing, observing is another, if you like, or seeing like an artist sees or seeing like a scientist sees. Now that's just the sense of sight. Similarly, we all know that listening can be done not just to more or less effect, but more or less intently and intensively. So we would be within the Thinking Moves scheme focusing on the move of listening and saying, well, how can we listen better? And that's partly using our ears to listen literally to what people say or to the world around us, the sounds, the birds, and so on. But then metaphorically is also about listening to the body. Now, my wife does yoga. I've done a little bit. You've almost certainly done it or know about it, of course. And, you know, that's very much about listening to the finer, not just movements, but feelings in the body. Yeah, that is all part of the thing. So at the risk of suggesting that that is like the panacea for everything— look, listen— I do want to emphasize that simple though it is, it's incredibly rich and deep in its potential for development.

Absolutely.

Yeah, we have this wonderful slogan. I think it's Wonderful slogan anyway. Thinking Moves A to Z, stunningly simple but remarkably rich. And the simplicity I've already explained is in the choice of the words and how easy it is to understand and to learn and then to begin to apply. But remarkably rich, both each individual move can be developed. I can be better at testing things, more skeptical, as it were, more ready to question. I can be better at zooming in, more attentive to detail, and so on and so forth. But in addition to that, I can structure my thinking by putting moves together. So even setting goals is more than a single move.

Sure.

I think ahead to aim, and then I need sub-goals. So I have to divide what I'm trying to do into the different steps, if you like, to getting where I want. And then I have to order them. So there's a simple structure, a do we call it, ahead, divide, order, much ado about something. So there's another strategy. And genuinely, with the 26 individual moves, you can put them in pairs, you can put them in threes, you can actually have even longer grooves or strategies, which enable, and this is precisely what we really mean by self-regulation, regulation, a student can say, right, well, I've encountered this situation before and I've got a strategy for dealing with it. Yeah, I agree with you, it's analytical, but I don't think in that process that it's necessarily reductive.

Sure. Yeah, no, absolutely. There's a very important place for that with education as it currently is. There's an N I quite like, I'll just give it to you for free, but noticing, I think, is an interesting N. There's something there that's, that's speaks to multisensorial, but yeah, interesting.

I completely endorse that. In fact, it does enable me to remark that we're not trying to straitjacket teachers or students to use simply and only the A-Z. So for each move, we have two key partner synonyms that enable someone to understand and appreciate the different nuances. So the two synonyms for look, listen are notice and gather.

Oh great.

Notice is in there.

Brilliant.

And again, encouraging children to notice what they haven't noticed before. And the gather is deliberately in there, partly as an echo of Costa's gather data with all your senses, but partly because in the modern day it's so important to help students become researchers, gathering information from whatever source and doing that to really better or well. And then if you like processing or weighing up the information.

So yeah. Brilliant. Thank you, Roger. We could talk a lot longer. I've got a lot more questions about concept construction and all sorts of things. But no, it is fascinating. Thank you so much for taking the time. And it's, I mean, it's a really, as you said, it's kind of a decade worth of work developing this. And you can hear that in the kind of the simplicity and the richness as you've talked about. But yeah, thank you for sharing about it. And I really encourage people have a look. We'll share the links for things in the show notes as well.

So that's great. Okay, well, it's been a real pleasure to you, Tim. As you say, we could have gone on, so maybe we'll resume it more privately another time.

I'd love to. Thanks, Roger. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.