This week, a real ethical conundrum that puzzled Jason at a conference last week. Below is the full backstory. We’ll leave it up to your students to decide what details are relevant before delivering their verdict.
It’s just after lunch at a big meeting for headteachers. I’d made one of the speeches in the morning, so I’d worked up a bit of an appetite. But I’d had work to do so I scoffed a bit of curry and missed out on pudding.
My colleague Tom has just started his afternoon workshop with a small group of Headteachers. Catering staff have come in to clear out the plates from those who brought their food in here. I noticed they’ve left behind a pudding that nobody has started, with a spoon and napkin next to it. Someone had brought it in but hadn’t eaten it. This photo shows exactly how I found it.
The catering staff must have thought someone might be coming back to eat it. But it’s thirty minutes since lunch finished. The only people left in the room are those who’ve come to our workshop. Maybe the person whose pudding it was has forgotten about it. Or decided they didn’t want it after all. Maybe it’s nobody’s pudding now. And if it’s nobody’s, can I make it mine?
Is it OK for me to eat the pudding?
There’s a few ways you can facilitate this discussion.
You could try a Dividing Line – asking students to on one side of the room if they think Yes, and on the other if they think No.
Or you might want to do a “Vote With Your Feet” activity: retell the story, from the moment the pudding was picked up by it’s original owner, to the moment Jason asked himself the final question, with the following four options in different corners of the room:
• It’s the original owner’s pudding
• It’s my pudding
• It’s nobody’s pudding
• Other
Ask students to move to stand next the one they most agree with at each stage of the story.
Bigger questions:
A good move is going from a particular example to a more general question, and then sometimes back to the particular example. So you could move to one of these questions:
How does something go from belonging to nobody to belonging to somebody?
How long after somebody was using something does it go back to being nobody’s?
What’s new in the Philosoverse?
A big thanks to Carole Herman for inviting us back to work with the Association of Secondary Headteachers in Essex. It was a pleasure to share a stage with Geoff Barton, David Cameron (the real one!) and many others. It was also a chance to launch our new Essex Oracy Network Competition, part-subsidised by the Essex Year of Opportunity, open to all primaries and secondaries across the county. We’ll be sending a separate email to bulletin subscribers in Essex next week, and a nationwide competition will be announced soon.
We’ve had a busy couple of weeks besides this. Jason has been on his third visit to the Czech Republic, working with teachers and teacher trainers at the “People in Need” network. They’ve trained over 700 teachers using our work and translations of our minibooks!
He’s also been up in Derbyshire delivering workshops and training at Cavendish Junior School (best bookshelves ever) and working with a familiar face in their brilliant headteacher Nicola Marlow. It’s always lovely to hear from teachers who worked with us years ago, who’ve now become Heads and ask us to come in!
On Monday, Tom returned to Saint Christina’s School in North London to deliver workshops and training on metacognition. On Wednesday he made his annual pilgrimage to Stamford School to run a series of problem-solving workshops with scholars from Years 8-12, wearing his other hat as Director of Hidden Leaders. We’ll be running a special bulletin in the near future about how problem-solving tasks are great for philosophy and oracy skills.