How many students arrive to school on Monday and leave on Friday without having said a word in any of their classes? As a high school English teacher, I wonder whether this is true of many of my students: some of my quieter students who do well on assignments but never share their thoughts, my English language learners who rarely volunteer answers, the students who do everything they can to avoid eye contact when I ask a question. More students than I probably realize sit through their classes without uttering a word, sharing a thought, or asking a question.
The quality of classroom discussion is closely connected to the quality of student problem solving, comprehension, and performance on academic tasks (Mercer, 1995; Nystrand, Gamoran, Kachur, & Prendergast, 1997; Wegerif, Mercer, & Dawes, 1999). Discussion helps students engage with material, and students who are actively engaged in their own learning do better in all aspects of school (Tredway, 1995). How do we engage all students in meaningful discussion, especially when our classrooms are bursting at the seams with 40 or more students?
The Power of Socratic Seminars
When I started teaching, I knew about Socratic seminars but shied away from them because they seemed too complicated. I would need to put students in circles within circles and create laminated sentence starter cards—I just didn't have time. Then I discovered the simple and effective method being used at the Urban Academy in New York. I began using their practice as a model.
I teach at Canyon High School in Santa Clarita, California, just north of Los Angeles. Canyon High is a comprehensive high school with 2,500 students. We are a fairly diverse campus, with 43 percent of our student population categorized as white and 42 percent categorized as Latino. Twenty-six percent of our students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, and 13 percent are English language learners.
For years, I have taught a unit focused on the essential question, What is the value of life? We read Hamlet's "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy; an excerpt from It's Not About the Bike, Lance Armstrong's book about surviving cancer; an online article from the nonprofit group Life Happens that includes an interactive calculator to determine the value of a human life; and a February 2002 article from Time magazine by Amanda Ripley titled "What Is a Life Worth?" about how money from the 9/11 fund was distributed to victims' families.
Previous students completed numerous assignments connected to each article, created a thinking map bringing their thoughts together, and then wrote an argumentative essay answering the essential question. Every year, the essays were, for lack of a nicer term, horrible. The papers showed little synthesis, the sources were sparingly used, and students' thesis statements were superficial and thus difficult to support. My students were frustrated, and so was I.
But one year, I tried a Socratic seminar. Students spent two class periods discussing the value of life as explored in the assigned texts. The results were astounding. I watched students search through texts for evidence, discuss the language and structure, and connect the material to their own lives.
One student discussed her mother's experience with breast cancer, and she connected her situation with a quote from the Lance Armstrong (2000) excerpt: "One minute you're pedaling along a highway, and the next minute, boom, you're face-down in the dirt … Cancer was like that." She read the quote and then addressed the essential question, stating that a crisis like cancer increases the value of life. She and her mom had grown closer, and she placed more value on the time they spent together. Every student in the room listened to her comments, and many took notes in their notebooks. Everyone was engaged.
Another student asserted that his life encompassed more than just himself—that to give value to his life he must also include his parents, his brother, his grandparents, and even his friends and his teachers. This was when I saw the true power of this method. There were audible exclamations. Students were nodding their heads as they listened. They suddenly realized that they agreed and that their own lives encompassed much more than just themselves. It completely changed their view on life and its value. In isolation, maybe one or two students would have come to this conclusion, but in the seminar, they all shared the insight.
Socratic seminars are essentially scaffolded critical-thinking sessions that enable the entire class to engage in critical thinking at their own level. By the end of the seminar, all students in the room have raised their thinking to the level of the collective group. As Linda Elder and Richard Paul (1998) point out,
The goal of critical thinking is to establish a disciplined "executive" level of thinking, a powerful inner voice of reason, to monitor, assess, and reconstitute—in a more rational direction—our thinking, feeling, and action. Socratic discussion cultivates that inner voice by providing a public model for it. (p. 299)
The seminar provides an environment for addressing the essential question with real depth. One student spoke about surviving childhood cancer and the effect the trauma had on her value of life. Another student cited a powerful passage in the Time article in which a widower from 9/11 discussed a note his wife had slipped under the door of his home office before she left for work at the World Trade Center. The man read the note at her memorial, and her words gave him the fortitude to carry on. The student observed that the value of life goes beyond money. The next student who spoke contrasted the 9/11 example with another of our sources, the human life calculator.
The student engagement in those moments was inspiring. Students flipped through their articles, annotating and highlighting, and took notes on their peers' comments. As students gave examples, they cited page numbers and paragraphs so other students could find the evidence as well. There was engagement, participation, and genuine interest in one another, the material, and the essential question.
Four Easy Steps to a Socratic Seminar
1. Create a list of prior questions.
Elder and Paul (1998) describe prior questions as "questions presupposed by another question" (p. 298). To create your list of prior questions, start with the "big" question or essential question for the unit or text. Then backtrack and brainstorm a list of questions that you need to answer before you can answer the essential question. Then decide what questions you need to answer before addressing those questions, and so on. This list of questions becomes the blueprint for the discussion.
These are a few of the prior questions I came up with for the discussion on the value of life: What gives something value? How does the concept of scarcity relate to life? If a whole item is made up of parts, what is one's life made up of? Who or what are part of your life? How can the value of life be determined?
2. Explain the basic guidelines.
Before we begin a seminar, I make sure students understand these guidelines:
- All students must answer each question in their notes.
- Students raise their hand to be added to the speaking list.
- Students must wait until their turn before speaking.
- Students must take notes on their peers' responses.
- Everyone must be respectful and tolerant.
- Everyone must use evidence from texts to support their claims and preface comments with the title of the text and page number so that everyone can follow along.
I typically post the first question on a PowerPoint slide and give students several minutes to answer the question in their notes. Then I ask for volunteers. Hands go up, and I jot down the names on my speaking list. Students answer the question in the order they are listed. If, during the discussion, other students want to speak or add something, they just raise their hand, and I give them a nod and add them to the bottom of the running list. After we have exhausted a question, or I feel it is time to move on, I post the second question, and the process repeats.
Students must listen to all their peers' responses and summarize each response in their notes. I model the process in the beginning by reading back the notes I wrote for the first few people. For many students, note taking has meant copying down the text of PowerPoint slides, and it's challenging to take notes in this new way.
Having every student answer each question ensures engagement, and having them take notes gives them a transcript of the discussion to use later. After the discussion, rather than sitting down to a blank computer screen to compose a difficult essay, students will have several pages of notes filled with excellent commentary and numerous examples of evidence from the text to guide them.
3. Guide the discussion.
It is imperative that the teacher sits at the students' level and takes notes just as the students do while also acting as the leader, clarifier, summarizer, and moderator. During the discussion, I remind students to provide evidence for their comments or ask follow-up questions to help them articulate their point. I sometimes repeat the gist of students' statements back to them in the form of a question: "So, you are saying that tragedy, like the example in the 9/11 article, can teach us the true value of life?" To help students with note taking, I often take a moment and read back over some of the answers and ideas we have heard. As moderator, I decide when to move on to the next question or when to ask an improvised question to move our thinking deeper or toward a related idea.
For each class, this role will be different. Some classes move quickly through the questions and have an amazing discussion. Other classes labor through the first question, and I may need to ask supplemental questions to help students along.
4. Let go.
Part of the challenge of running a Socratic seminar is letting go of control. But this doesn't need to be scary. I am always a little nervous before starting a Socratic seminar, but I am surprised and delighted by the end. Time and time again, students surprise me. They are full of ideas and bring unique perspectives to each discussion.
I may know more than my students about the meaning of Hamlet's soliloquy, but I will never forget when one of my students related Hamlet's dilemma to his own when he first immigrated to the United States and felt so incredibly alone and isolated. The bravery of that student in sharing his perspective was contagious, and the insights that poured forth from the students that day trumped any lecture or activity I could have designed. We all learned something about the value of life.
Try It Yourself
Socratic seminars work in any class. The physical education department at my school ran a Socratic seminar asking students whether pain was necessary for gain. My history department ran a session asking the essential question, "Why did Lincoln fight the war?" They used multiple primary source documents and the textbook as sources. Studies have found that discussion increases comprehension and critical thinking in all subjects (Murphy, Wilkinson, Soter, Hennessey, & Alexander, 2009).
Although these discussions don't have to be complicated to set up, running them can be a challenge for teachers who are new to the process. The suggestions in "" can help you get through the rough parts.
In the spirit of the Socratic seminar, I would like to give my students the final word. Following our rich discussion, they wrote essays answering the essential question, What is the value of life? Here are several thesis statements:
The value of life can be measured through knowledge, experiences, and memories with one's friends, family, and loved ones.Life is valuable if one gains wisdom through experiences, uses that wisdom to inspire the world, and ultimately makes the world a better place with a brighter future.No matter what ails you, if you fight hard enough and believe in yourself strongly enough, life will open its doors to you and shine a light you may have never seen before.
Would they have written these statements without our discussions?
