This week’s bulletin features a “Staff Soap Opera’” dialogue about jobs and responsibilities. It came about through a Philosophic Topic Workshop, for a Year 2 unit on ‘Jobs’ during a recent INSET.
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One of the concepts we thought we could focus on was Responsibility. That led to the question, “In a job, who is your first responsibility to?”
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This could be tackled as a straightforward “Vote With Your Feet” Thinkers Game, with options of Customers, Boss, Yourself, and Family placed on mini-whiteboards in four corners of the room and pupils standing by the one they agree with. However, to make it more engaging, those four points of view have been put in the mouths of four teachers in the attached dialogue. Download it here.
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Four pupils could perform the dialogue, script in hand, or if you’ve got four teachers who are game, film them performing it and project the video. The children will delight in thinking this kind of conversation happens!
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You can then divide the class in four, assign each group a character, and ask each group to come up with further reasons to support that perspective. Once each point of view has been given a fair hearing, ask children to show which character they agree with the most (and perhaps the least!) by the Vote with Your Feet method. When you switch from artificial to sincere speaking like this, other points of view can also emerge when people refuse to stand by existing options.
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Best wishes,
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Jason and Tom