Socratic Seminar

Warning! Read the following only if you are interested in our Social Studies 6 Socratic Seminar experience.

We just completed a unit on "Players" of the Renaissance. Students chose from four categories of Renaissance personalities (players) and then, by blind draw, selected a player to research. We used a fixed computer lab one day and Jennifer and I split the mobile lab combined with BYOD (bring your own device) the second day to complete research. Next, we had students grouped according to their "category" to expand their notes to include the other players in the category. The next step had students jigsaw grouped so that each represented one of the four categories. The last step was for students to leave their jigsaw groups and complete, solo, the three questions that would be their final preparation for the Socratic Seminar.
The three questions were:
     What category impacted the Renaissance most and why?
     What player made the biggest impact and why?
     What player was the most interesting and why?

All three opinion open ended questions were the basis for our Socratic Seminar discussion as a finale. We used this process to assess students as well. The basic level of our assessment included the initial research on student's Renaissance player. Students that completed basic research earned a basic C. The actual discussion (Socratic Seminar) took place over 1 1/2 class periods in which we used three rotations. One third of students were in the actual discussion and two thirds seated around the outside. Students seated around the outside each had an "observation" sheet of which they had to complete by observing an assigned student from the inside one third. A key to success is to include students that are not directly involved in the discussion. The observation sheets accomplished this very well. Next time we may consider a better accountability tool for the observers as it kept them very involved but students overall did a poor job of noting what they heard. We did not use the outside observation for grades. Students could  earn a B-A+ range grade for their conversation in the seminar about the players of the Renaissance.

This was our first attempt at a major Socratic event. After much discussion and idea sharing with colleagues we built handouts to guide students along the way. This unit took 7 days including the final two days for the actual discussion and exit card reflection.

Socratic Seminar is a CTL technique and you can see a couple video clips from Lavon's class.

Lavon's Socratic Seminar clips

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