The article presents the position of ethics in school education programmes in the Netherlands and the goals and the practice of teaching it. The article discusses the results of research conducted in Dutch schools, aimed at examining which teaching methods are best for developing students’ knowledge and skills. It is also important to determine which model of interaction between students and teachers is the most beneficial one? The study used forms of teaching based on the scaffolding technique. It is based (...) on collective development of problems and philosophical discussion by organizing questions, searching for alternative answers and providing diverse examples. Observations gathered in research confirm the good effectiveness of this method, especially when the reasoning process is clearly structured, the structure of wrongly formulated questions is corrected and metaconcepts appear. A comparative analysis of selected lessons allows me to conclude that the choice of teaching form has a decisive impact on the level of students’ involvement and, consequently, on the development of their skills. The active participation of the teacher as a coordinator of the discussion, initiating the dialogue and giving it a logically clear structure is also important. For this reason, it is important that teachers conducting classes have proper philosophical and methodological background. (shrink)

An important aim of teaching philosophy in Dutch secondary schools is to learn about philosophy by doing philosophy. We examined doing philosophy and focused specifically on the relationship between student learning activities and teacher behavior; in doing so, a qualitative cross-case analysis of eight philosophy lessons was performed. The effectiveness of doing philosophy was operationalized into five learning activities comprising rationalizing, analyzing, testing, producing criticism, and reflecting, and scored by means of qualitative graphical time registration. Using CA we find a (...) quantitative one-dimensional scale for the lessons that contrasts lessons that are more and less effective in terms of learning and teaching. A relationship was found between teaching by teachers and doing philosophy by students. In particular we found students to produce a higher level of doing philosophy with teachers who chose to organize a philosophical discussion with shared guidance by the teacher together with the students. (shrink)