Training Courses

DialogueWorks provides professional development, including a fast-track pathway to becoming a Thinking Moves trainer within a single year.

We offer a full range of training and support, through our own team of accredited trainers and via our international partner organisations.

All our training courses are available online or in-person. Their modular structure maximises our flexibility in tailoring our offer to your needs.

We offer foundation training to get you started, advanced training to deepen your competence and trainer training so you can pass the approach on to others, as follows:

  • P4C Plus Foundation (12 hour) and Advanced (12 hour) courses, the latter being subtitled Philosophical Teaching and Learning, focussing on each of the 6 strands
  • P4C Leadership course (18 hours) a minds-on as well as hands-on course for School and P4C Leaders
  • P4C Educator (18 hours) course, the final course in a pathway to P4C Plus trainer validation
  • Thinking Moves Foundation (6 hours) and Advanced (6 hours) courses.

 

Whilst we recommend any school to start their P4C Plus journey with the Foundation course in either P4C or Thinking Moves course, we do offer 6-hour courses in each of the 6 Strands which schools might wish to start with if they have identified a particular area for their next focus. The Strand courses are headlined as follows:

  • Inquiry: the Love of Learning (nurturing curiosity in a crowded curriculum)
  • Concepts: the Levers of Learning (a new concept of concepts and how to build them in the classroom)
  • Dialogic Education: ‘Oracy Plus’ (enriching lives as well as engaging learners)
  • Right Reasoning: Reasonableness (on being open to reason as well as able to reason)
  • Reflection: Metacognition and More (developing self-awareness and self-management)
  • Whole School Values: Whole Person Virtues (our unique approach to revising and refining your school values.
 

Anyone who has completed our three levels of P4C training (Foundation, Advanced and Educator) may be accredited as a P4C Plus trainer, provided that they have also completed the Foundation and Advanced Thinking Moves courses. In some cases the pathways will include a mentoring scheme. If you have been accredited as a P4C trainer by another national P4C organisation, you can add the ‘Plus’ to your accreditation in the same way, but would also need to attend a DW Philosophical Teaching-and-Learning. The pathway to being an accredited Thinking Moves trainer is simpler and shorter – in some cases as short as 1 year. There are two sorts of such trainers: School-based trainers and Freelance trainers. 

The former category is designed especially to enable experienced teachers, or those designated as Thinking Moves leads, to induct new colleagues into use of the scheme, without their colleagues having to go elsewhere for training. They will be accredited to run TM training for colleagues in their own building/campus in their first year, and may, in succeeding years, extend that to colleagues in their network (e.g. in neighbouring schools in their city or county, or in schools that are partners in trusts, etc.).