A Question of 3 Apples

Ian McKenzie has been helping his students at Viscount School in Auckland develop their questioning skills using a really interesting experiment. He gave them 3 apples to consider: one fresh, one plastic and one... not there. The students were asked to try to explain how and when they know for sure that something is real.

As Ian explains, "These 12/13yr olds have been working with me for about two terms now and have been learning to use a range of questioning techniques in order to facilitate deeper thinking skills. They know to use questions to gain clarification and to garner reasons / evidence from each other. They then ask each other to consider their own assumptions, before hopefully testing out some alternative ideas."

This group were also given some images to consider and to use their questioning techniques to think about whether what they were seeing was 'real' or 'not real'. It's a question which intrugued them because they all considered themselves to be deeper thinkers, but found it very difficult to question their own religious beliefs in the same manner (The Polynesian community being committed Christians). However, some brave souls found a way to make alternative suggestions and this lead to a deeper level conversation about some beliefs not having the same reasons and evidence behind them.

What I find particularly fascinating about this experiment is that the 3 apples idea is something I've often used with nursery/reception children to begin to explore whether something has to be seen to be real. And yet here is Ian using ostensibly the same task to push for a far greater depth of reasoning, questioning and understanding. Which just goes to show that Bananarama were right - it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it (and that's what get results).