There are moments when a facilitator might need to pause the discussion, encourage the use of a particular strategy, or highlight positive examples of desired behaviors. Socrates generally applied his method of examination to concepts that seem to lack any concrete definition; e.g., the key moral concepts at the time, the virtues of piety, wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice. Another challenge facilitators may encounter shows up in more lively classes, where students often compete to talk over one another.
The structure of the discussion depends on the length of your class period. [15] There is no designated first speaker; as individuals participate in Socratic dialogue, they gain experience that enables them to be effective in this role of initial questioner. photographs, sculptures, and maps); and. As students gain more experience with this kind of collaborative discussion strategy, the facilitator can focus more energy on observation, assessment, and feedback. Diogenes Lartius, however, wrote that Protagoras invented the "Socratic" method.[1][2]. Sixteen faces appear on Zoom as Upper School English teacher Lauren Drake begins her Western and Global Literature course. Students can even keep a reference guide of stems with them while theyre engaged in discussion. For example, a student might use the following symbols: Other teachers might deploy a brief formative assessment to check that students have read the text before they launch into a discussion centered on topics that come from the text. The text ought to be appropriate for the participants' current level of intellectual and social development. Students will first read a shared text of any length, from a haiku, photograph, painting, or song to an article, essay, short story, or novel. An alternate method utilizes FlipGrid students can share a 1-minute video reflecting on their experience and comment on their peers videos.
Boghossian mentions that even though the questions may be perplexing, they are not originally meant for it, in fact such questions provoke the students and can be countered by employing counterexamples. 
[14] For example, Simon Bolivars Jamaica Letter is part of our unit on Latin American history in tenth grade world history. [7], W. K. C. Guthrie in The Greek Philosophers sees it as an error to regard the Socratic method as a means by which one seeks the answer to a problem, or knowledge. Teachers have shared that students feel more confident going into a Socratic seminar if they know what it looks and sounds like. Here are several scenarios for determining the questions that will guide a Socratic seminar: When considering the questions that will guide a seminar, facilitators and students should strive to write questions at higher-order levels of thinking; meaning, they should be using faculties at Levels 2-3 of Costas levels of thinking, and levels 3-6 of Blooms taxonomy. The first photo is from a Socratic Seminar in 2019. As part of their study of the YA novel The Hate U Give, students learn about the Black Lives Matter movement and in small groups conduct/share research about social issues key to the plot, characters, and themes of the book. Rather, the interlocutors have reached aporia, an improved state of still not knowing what to say about the subject under discussion. Different schools have their own unique way of engaging students in learning through classroom discussion. It is up to the facilitator to decide how feedback will be shared. Closing questions lead participants to summarize their thoughts and learning. Instead of arriving at answers, the method was used to break down the theories we hold, to go "beyond" the axioms and postulates we take for granted. A Socratic seminar (also known as a Socratic circle) is a pedagogical approach based on the Socratic method and uses a dialogic approach to understand information in a text. My Socratic Seminars start with a complex reading of a primary source. 3.4 Planning step 3: Select text", "Facing History and Ourselves: Socratic Seminar", "Socratic Method as an Approach to Teaching", "Distinction between Dialectical methods of Socrates and Plato", On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, Faceted Application of Subject Terminology, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Socratic_method&oldid=1091097307, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles containing Ancient Greek (to 1453)-language text, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. Socrates then claims he has shown his interlocutor's thesis is false and its negation is true. Scholars such as Peter Boghossian suggest that although the method improves creative and critical thinking, there is a flip side to the method. Thoughtful Threads: Sparking Rich Online Discussions, No Teachers Allowed: Student-Led Book Clubs Using QAR, Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges: Critical Discussion of Social Issues, Facilitating Student-Led Seminar Discussions with, Developing Critical Consciousness through Angie Thomas, Talking in Class: Using Discussion to Enhance Teaching and Learning. For some, theres the Harkness Table, for others, the Fishbowl Model, and still others use the Jigsaw Method. Weve seen Socratic seminars assessed in a variety of ways. Students use a Discussion Web to engage in meaningful discussion of the question, "Are people equal?".
Socratic questioning is used to help students apply the activity to their learning. This can be accomplished in various ways, with some mentioned here: After reading and interacting with a text, it is then time to define essential question(s), which will serve as guideposts for the discussion. Whatever we call it, a seminar is different from a talk/recitation/ lecture-with-discussion. Teachers use Socratic seminar in different ways. Students are introduced to the Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) strategy through a read-aloud and question sort. Will students share their feedback with each other one-on-one? Its helpful to conceive of a Socratic seminar in considering what students are doing before, during, and after it all of the activities prompt students to use and practice desired critical thinking, discussion, listening, and reflection skills. Elfie Israel succinctly defines Socratic seminars and implies their rich benefits for students: The Socratic seminar is a formal discussion, based on a text, in which the leader asks open-ended questions. Areeda, Philip E. (1996). Such an examination challenged the implicit moral beliefs of the interlocutors, bringing out inadequacies and inconsistencies in their beliefs, and usually resulting in aporia. For example, a peer coach might notice an opportunity for the speaker to relate one of their connections to the current discussion. Socratic seminars are appropriate for any age group and any content area. We do two types of whole class discussions. We have launched the new ReadWriteThink.org and we would love to get your feedback: Today's students love chatting online with friends. The facilitator will want to have set up the desks prior to students entering the classroom so that when they do, they can immediately get their materials out and prepare for the discussion with their peer coaches. This could be considered a, Instead of co-creating shared questions, each student comes prepared for a discussion with their own questions, resulting in an, Be structured as open-ended vs. yes-or-no, Encourage critical thinking skills and growth, Analyze multiple meanings and perspectives, Examine biases, blind spots, and assumptions, Discover universal themes and connections, Express ideas clearly and with confidence, Only members of the inner circle may speak, Be respectful of different perspectives (no put-downs), 00-05 minutes Speaker 1 prepare with peer coach, 20-25 minutes Break/Speaker 2 prepare with peer coach, 40-50 minutes Self-evaluation and peer evaluation, 00-10 minutes Review rules and Speaker 1 prepares with peer coach, 25-30 minutes Peer coach gives feedback to Speaker 1, 40-45 minutes Speaker 2 prepares with peer coach, 60-65 minutes Peer coach gives feedback to Speaker 2, Supporting responses with textual evidence. Drake explains the grading rubric, recaps the seminars norms, and reminds students to think about the space they inhabit in group discussions. The pedagogy of Socratic questions is open-ended, focusing on broad, general ideas rather than specific, factual information.
At times, our discussions take the form of full class Socratic Seminars, and at other times, students discuss in small groups. He states that the teachers who use this method wait for the students to make mistakes, thus creating negative feelings in the class, exposing the student to possible ridicule and humiliation. I track follow-up questions to see who is moving our conversation deeper. The students then respond in writing to those questions. Through a series of picture book read-alouds, students engage in critical discussion of complex issues of race, class, and gender. Perhaps one unexpected challenge that other facilitators notice part-way through a seminar is watching more introverted, reserved students struggle with nervous feelings around public speaking. Then its go time and students jump right in, starting with an examination of prompt one, a comparison of the uses of light and dark imagery in Allegory of the Caveand Frankenstein. The teacher may decide to alternate groups within one meeting, or they may alternate at each separate meeting.
What critical thinking skills did I perform well? The leader guides participants to deepen, clarify, and paraphrase, and to synthesize a variety of different views. This page was last edited on 2 June 2022, at 05:29. Opening questions generate discussion at the beginning of the seminar in order to elicit dominant themes. [9] A Socratic seminar is not a debate.
On most occasions, Socratic seminars are appropriate as formative assessments. 
James Holden and John S. Schmit, eds. Hear from three faculty members, Lauren Drake (English), Sarah Mohn (English), and Summer McCall (Social Studies), as they share how Socratic Seminars happen in their classrooms. A facilitator in this type of class might schedule the seminar in the following way: During the Socratic seminar, the speakers sit in the inner circle, while their peer coaches set directly behind them in an outer circle. We tend to have warm discussions that are full of heart, the polar opposite of sterile. The Socratic method has also recently inspired a new form of applied philosophy: Socratic dialogue, also called philosophical counseling.
Weve even seen teachers use it as a final exam. Therefore, myth and the Socratic method are not meant by Plato to be incompatible; they have different purposes, and are often described as the "left hand" and "right hand" paths to good and wisdom. Socratic seminars generally start with an open-ended question proposed either by the leader or by another participant. Socrates secures his interlocutor's agreement to further premises, for example "Courage is a fine thing" and "Ignorant endurance is not a fine thing". This could be considered a, After reading a shared text, each student submits a question in writing. Many teachers we know have remarked that individual and collective insights and experiences from Socratic seminars are the moments that most impact students, the moments they remember most poignantly. What was an opportunity I missed out on in this seminar, and how can I become more aware of it in the next discussion? I have 14 students in the class, and they speak without stopping for 60 minutes. This claim was based on a reported Delphic oracular pronouncement that no man was wiser than Socrates. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2002. If correctly prepared for, a Socratic seminar can be a powerful catalyst for social learning. Especially for beginner participants, Socratic seminars may have awkward moments students interrupting each other, inappropriate comments, statements made just to get credit for contributing, and long stretches of awkward silence.
[15] It provides the anchor for dialogue whereby the facilitator can bring the participants back to the text if they begin to digress. In Europe Gerd B. Achenbach is probably the best known practitioner, and Michel Weber has also proposed another variant of the practice. 
