Socratic Seminars
An innovative way to discuss literature is popping up more frequently in college classrooms these days and its roots are found in ancient Greece. A Socratic seminar is a technique teachers use to have their students open up and freely discuss a text in class. The idea behind this tool is to get all students’ voices heard in the classroom. Too frequently, only a few students contribute to class discussions. A routine is developed and these students are expected to speak, while the others just sit on the fringe of the discussion. Some professors even fall into a rut and include only the regular contributors in discussion. This is not the way a college classroom should look and sound. Enter the Socratic seminar.
It is really a simple concept, which makes it even more astonishing that it isn’t used on a more universal basis. In a class with 20 students, the teacher would form two circles. The inner circle would have 10 students, as would the outer circle. The teacher is the facilitator of the seminar, which means he or she may supply questions for the inner circle to consider. More advanced groups will not receive these prompts, which makes the professor simply an observer.
The inner circle is responsible for talking about a text or a specific part of a text for a certain amount of time (somewhere between 5-10 minutes). The goal is to have nonstop discussion in the inner circle for the agreed upon amount of time. While the inner circle is discussing the text, the members of the outer circle are taking notes on how often everyone is talking, interesting threads of discussion, body language, and other commentary on the group dynamic. Once time is up, the professor will ask the members of the outer circle to share their observations on how the inner circle interacted with each other.
At this point, the two circles will flip-flop. Typically, the new inner circle will be instructed not to repeat any of the points made by the first group. This can be difficult, but the hope is that there is enough to talk about in reference to the text that the new inner circle isn’t slowed by this restriction. For students that are new to Socratic seminars, it usually takes a couple of classes to get used to the concept. Students typically relay that they enjoy this form of discussion as they feel less pressure than a "normal" class discussion. This fosters confidence and spreads opinions and ideas of students that would not normally participate in class.
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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 26th, 2008 at 11:07 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
