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TEACHING STRATEGIES
How to Use Socratic Seminar
Last Updated 12 January 2024/ By Zineb DJOUB
Are you wondering how to stimulate your students’ interest in discussions and help them voice out their ideas and interact more in your classes? Use Socratic Seminar; a teaching strategy that will not only make students actively involved in discussions but also develop their critical thinking skills.
In this post, you’ll learn about the meaning of Socratic Seminar, the teacher’s role, and the steps you need to follow to use it more effectively with your students.
What is Socratic Seminar?
This is a teaching strategy where students are encouraged to engage in dialogue, discussing a text or exploring a concept and collaborating to find a solution. Every individual, within the seminar, feels propelled either to give a supposition or to ask about something.
Socratic Seminar can help stimulate students to think more critically. This is because it involves a progression of addressing a series of questions with answers to build a contention and conclusion.
Indeed, students are expected to think, make meaning, discuss, use evidence, and build on one another’s thinking. They’re then more active: exploring, perusing, thinking, and giving contentions that can prompt responses to the inquiries.
This is the AIM of Socratic seminar!
So, Socratic Seminar is not a debate to “win the argument” or answer questions, rather it’s about helping students think and work together to construct meaning.
This is by engaging them in a dialogic learning culture where they learn: to collaborate with others, share their ideas and understanding, discuss to sort out issues, be open-minded and rational to an opinion, and achieve progress and understanding in favour of all parties.
What is the teacher’s role?
Your role in Socratic Seminar is to facilitate, not to direct.
What does this mean?
In Socratic Seminar, students need to feel free to voice their ideas and learn from each other. So, it’s necessary not to interfere, respond to students’ discussions, or impose your views or ‘right answers.
Your sole responsibility is to pose provocative, open-ended questions and help students understand them, think, and involve them all in the discussion.
But, how can teachers draw all students into the discussion?
You should first clarify to your students what they’re expected to do in such a seminar and the learning objectives you intend to get.
You can model thoughtful behaviours and provide the necessary guidelines to make it successful.
So, you need to emphasize the importance of mutual respect for all participants. This does not only include respecting others’ opinions, but also not interrupting them, listening, and taking turns to speak at a time.
Making eye contact with each other is also a sign of respect. It shows the participants’ concern and interest in the expressed opinions.
In addition, students should understand that this is a self-directed learning experience. They’re accountable for their opinions and attitudes. And they’re free to voice their ideas, disagree (in a respectful way), raise questions, make mistakes, and learn.
To encourage students’ participation, your thought-provoking questions should be worded to elicit differing perspectives and complex thinking.
Don’t forget that students need time to think and process information and ideas. So, allow for wait time. This can help those who resist participating to check more their ideas.
Another way to get all students drawn into the discussion is by posing follow-up questions and inviting them to generate questions to discuss.
Also, to allow opportunities for all participants to speak in Socratic Seminars, distribute an equal number of tokens or “talking chips” to all of them. They should use them before the end of the discussion
Steps for effective use
1. Identify the learning goals and purpose for the seminar
Besides understanding the nature of the Socratic Seminar, it’s important to determine why you should use it in your class. This teaching strategy can help students develop higher-order thinking skills as well as social-emotional skills.
But, higher-order thinking skills require different levels of cognitive processes. For instance, evaluating information is more complex than analysing it.
The same is true for social-emotional skills. Students may learn easily how to take turns but need more help with learning how to cooperate more effectively with their peers.
Therefore, you should specify the learning goals and purpose for each seminar you intend to use. Focus then on particular skills your students should develop. Ask yourself :
• What skills do my students need more NOW?
• How can this Socratic Seminar help?
• When should I use it?
• How much time should I devote to it?
2. Select an appropriate text
Taking into account your students’ level, select a challenging text (not too complex), rich with ideas that promote thinking and discussion.
Your selected text should stimulate students to raise questions for which there are no right or wrong answers. Indeed, participants, at the end of the seminar, are expected to leave with more questions than they brought with them.
You can opt for literature texts, history, science, math, health, and philosophy or works of art or music.
To captivate students’ interest vary your selection from one seminar to another.
Also, choose interesting topics that can stimulate students’ thinking and involve them in the discussion. So, you can hand a list of topics to students and ask for their opinions before making your text selection.
3. Prepare your questions
A Socratic Seminar opens with a question. An effective opening question has no single “right” answer, is framed to generate dialogue leading to a greater understanding of the ideas in the text, and can best be answered by reference to the text.
This means that after such a question participants/students will go back to the text to speculate, evaluate, define, and clarify the issues involved.
An opening question can be raised either by the teacher or solicited from participants as they acquire more experience in seminars.
So, prepare your opening question (in case you’ll address it) along with a subsequent list of questions to use in case the initial question won’t generate interest among students and lead to discussion.
4. Establish norms
For effective management, it’s important to set norms for your seminars and remind students of them at the start of every seminar (See the example below)
5. Arrange students’ siting
Students should be arranged into two circles: an inner circle and an outer circle. (But, use just an inner circle in case your class is less than fifteen students).
Students sitting in the inner circle are supposed to speak to each other (not the teacher) in the inside circle. They should respond to the original question and each other, and ask the group additional questions to promote a deeper understanding or conversation. So, this is the group that discusses the text.
Whereas those sitting in the outer circle are not supposed to speak; but rather observe and actively listen (or take notes for peer assessment, if desired).
Yet, you need to set ahead criteria or a rubric for the observations and share them with these participants.
So, the outer circle group provides feedback on content and the group’s skills or contributions.
Deciding on who sits in the inner and outer circle depends on your knowledge of your students (their learning styles and skills).
6. Introduce the text
All students are supposed to read the text before the discussion. They need to read it actively so that they can build background knowledge for participation in the discussion.
You can ask them to underline important information, put question marks by segments they wonder about, and exclamation points next to parts that surprise them.
To help them work out the meaning of the text, you can share all possible discussion questions with students before the seminar or share only one question.
Deciding on the time devoted to reading depends on the length of the text, the complexity of the ideas presented in it, and the time allotted for the discussion.
Still, be sure participants have enough time to interact with the text before the discussion.
7. Pose the opening question
Ask an open-ended or driving question related to the text’s topic. Students respond to the question orally or in writing.
Still, it’s necessary to provide adequate time for all students to record the essential question, develop their answers, and identify support for it.
Also, you may need to ask follow-up questions to lead the participants to a greater understanding of the text.
8. Prompt your students to discuss
Try to encourage your students to engage in the discussion even when silence seems to dominate or when they are off-topic or not focused.
You can use prompts like ‘What do you think about, Do you think that…’, Do you agree with…Why ?’ ‘Many people believe that….In your opinion what…..? Remember that students should support their opinions with evidence from the text.
Avoid giving your answer or opinion and let students express themselves. You can only interfere to stop the discussion in case of negative arguments and/behaviours.
To allow the discussion to proceed, you can either ask follow-up questions or invite inner circle participants to pose a different question if the group agrees,
Take notes on the quality of students’ participation and contribution to the discussion. You can use a checklist or a rubric to evaluate their work.
9. Pair-Share
Once the text has been explored thoroughly ask a closing question that relates to the text but seeks to have students apply the topic to their own lives or the world.
Students work in pairs (inner circle and outer circle) to share ideas. Then, ask some students to share their pair’s ideas with the class.
Wrap up the discussion, thanking students for their participation and summarizing the main ideas examined during the discussion.
10. Debrief and assess
This is an important step to improve the quality of dialogue in future sessions. You can provide students with self-assessment sheets to reflect on this learning experience.
You can, for instance, ask them about what they’ve learned from the Socratic Seminar, what they found interesting/boring/difficult, how they would have learned better from it, etc.
Socratic Seminars are also an opportunity for students to assess their peers. Students will silently complete peer-assessment sheets and then provide feedback to their peers.
Besides, students need to get feedback about the seminar. So, share with them your observations, remarks, and all what they need to do to improve their discussion skills.
To learn more about how to scaffold students’ discussion in Socratic Seminars, watch this video.
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