Teacher Interventions in the Community of Philosophical Inquiry

Abstract

This chapter addresses a lack of confidence in the role of assessment amongst P4wC facilitators in the Community of Inquiry (CoI) context. It is ironic that philosophy is seen as a practice of sustained examination of ideas, claims, reasoning, and values, whilst philosophy teachers will resile from engaging in assessment practices. Our aim is to provide P4wC facilitators with confidence in the process of producing developmental frameworks as pedagogical tools. We propose that the responsibility of the teacher educator is to build facilitators’ capacities to identify student’s “readiness to learn” (Griffin, 2014), also identified as their zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978). This information enables interventions to be designed that build upon students’ current level of learning. This requires identification of skills, knowledge, and understanding underpinning the competencies defining performance in a CoI. These observable behaviours are expressed as sets of indicators and strands, clustered in bands denoting levels of quality. These constructs are used to produce an ordered description of learning outcomes known as a standards-referenced framework. We will discuss how this might be achieved, in the hope of persuading teacher educators to engage teachers in constructing such frameworks as an essential component of training programs.