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Classroom dialogue can be democratic and evidence critical and creative thinking, yet lose momentum and direction without a plan for systematic inquiry. This article presents a six-stage framework for facilitating philosophical dialogue in pre-college and college classrooms, drawn from John Dewey and Matthew Lipman. Each stage involves particular kinds of thinking and aims at a specific product or task. The role of the facilitator—illustrated with suggestive scripts—is to help the participants move their dialogue through the stages of the framework and to model and prompt good social and cognitive dialogue moves within each stage, until the participants learn to become self-managed.

In this article I present a framework I have used for facilitating philosophical dialogue with children, schoolteachers and graduate students, in my work for the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC). Within the eastern and western philosophical traditions there are a variety of purposes and corresponding methods for dialogue. 1 Philosophy for Children, as it is promulgated by the IAPC and especially as a world movement, is catholic in its recognition of multiple uses and methods of philosophical dialogue. Nevertheless, notions of inquiry and of the community of inquiry from Peirce, Mead and Dewey inform the practice of dialogue recommended in the IAPC curriculum2 and in theoretical works by certain scholars affiliated with the Institute. 3 In line with this program, the framework I present is meant to be an aid for conducting dialogue construed as systematic, collaborative inquiry. I think of such inquiry as having a trajectory in the shape of an …