Why You Should Use the Socratic Seminar in the Classroom

Last year was the first year I truly used the Socratic Seminar in the classroom with my 7th and 8th grade students.  I found it to be one of the most meaningful instructional strategies I have ever used.

What is the Socratic Seminar?

It is a method of discussion that enables students to take ownership and construct meaning. Students are required to have all read the same text.  They show up for discussion ready to ask questions, respond, and participate.  The responsibility is on the students and not the teacher to construct meaning around the text. However, the first couple times you conduct a seminar you may want to be prepared to step in and guide the conversation a little until students get used to taking more active roles.  Assigning  discussion leaders can also be helpful.

There are many different approaches to setting up and managing socratic seminars.  You can read a blog post HERE where I described last year how I got started with socratic seminars and what I learned from the process.

Why Should You Use the Socratic Seminar?

Why wouldn't you want your students to be deep thinkers who are responsible, can think critically, articulate their thoughts, and conduct civilized discussions with their peers?  Socratic seminars can be conducted in any subject or on any topic.

Resources to get started:

Below are some other articles and posts I found on getting started with planning a socratic seminar.  There are many helpful strategies:

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/top-teaching/2010/11/higher-order-comprehension-power-socratic-seminar

http://www.middleweb.com/8989/socratic-seminars-in-middle-school/

https://simplynovelteachers.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/socratic-seminar/

Ultimately, you should make a plan and set goals with your students.  Conduct some seminars and always reflect after each one. Help your students have input on went well and what could have gone better. Here is a helpful video I found where a teacher is showing what a socratic seminar looks like in her classroom, gives helpful suggestions on how to prepare students for this type of discussion, and how it can help students meet the Common Core Standards:

https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/bring-socratic-seminars-to-the-classroom

Have you used the socratic seminar in your classroom? What strategies did you find helpful? I am teaching 5th and 6th grade this year, so I am looking forward to learning how to best implement this strategy with younger students.

Teaching Inductive and Deductive Reasoning

Once a week I teach Speech and Debate.  Last semester we focused on Speech.  This semester I am going to introduce Debate.  I was the president of my Debate team in High School.  To this day, I still believe it was one of my most valuable experiences in school.  I learned so many thinking and speaking skills that translated to real life and other experiences.

This is my first time to teach Debate myself, so we are going to figure it out as we go (like so many other things in teaching).  I went ahead and registered my classroom with the National Forensic League.  We are a long way from competing, but if I am going to teach it I want to teach with the goal of eventually building a team that could compete.  The National Forensic League has a lot of great resources, so I am excited to check it all out.

Another resource I purchased this summer was the book Make Up Your Mind: A Classroom Guide to 10 Age Old Debates.

The book is broken into 10 chapters with each chapter focusing on a different topic.  It deals with philosophy, science, history, etc. and all of the topics require students to think critically about an issue and consider two sides of the issue.  There are topics such as nature versus nurture and discussions of American identity. I will definitely incorporate some of the other chapters into language arts because many of the chapters include writing tasks; however, you could easily incorporate a lot of the chapters into other subjects based on the topics. It actually would also make a good resource for taking discussions of point of view to the next level.

One of the chapters was on inductive and deductive reasoning, which turned out to be a perfect introduction to debate (in my opinion). We read about different types of inductive and deductive fallacies that are used in argumentation. We  then read an article about Bigfoot, claiming its legitimacy as a field of study.  They had to read through the article to find evidence of the different types of fallacy arguments.  It made for great discussion.

We easily could have followed up by looking for articles from current magazines and online sources to examine for the arguments.  As our closing activity, they had to write a letter to an editor of a newspaper making their own "ridiculous" claim and convince the editor why it is valid using the different inductive and deductive arguments. Here are a couple of the examples they did:

How do you teaching critical thinking and different types of reasoning in your classroom?  Do you incorporate debate or public speaking into your curriculum?