Usually I will post helpful articles on teaching middle school, but if you have followed me since before I lost my other site (this one had to start all over from scratch) you will know that I love Socratic Circles/ Seminars for so many reasons. The largest reasons are that it teaches students the critical thinking skills that they need and teaches them collaborative discussion skills they require for later in life. I have been so blessed this school year to have a team that supports my ideas. When I asked if I could use our collaborative space (a large open area outside our classrooms) to hold a Socratic circle, they suggested I use one of the empty collab rooms that we have in our community. Our school is large, but we only have 3 teachers on our team, so we have several empty rooms that are not being used in our community. To make it more appealing, my team members set up and decorated my seminar room. It went from a storage space to a Socratic Circle space. Table in the middle. Room to place 30 chairs around the outer edge with 6 students in the middle.
Our 2nd time using the room for this purpose, my team lead invited our principal to come observe. He did, and he brought the Instructional Coach with him. My students read Anna Quindlen’s Newsweek article, “A Quilt of a Country” for this seminar and signed up for specific topics. They knocked it out of the park. I gave them a list of starting questions to guide them, and they created more questions on their own. If someone entered the circle to ask a question that they had not prepared an answer for, they were able to sufficiently answer it and provide supporting evidence for their answer.
This week, my honors students will be teaching our entire community how Socratic Seminars work by giving an actual demonstration. It won’t be through the ELA/English 1 class. Instead, we will be using Social Studies topics that we have been learning since the beginning of the school year to show that Socratic Seminars can work for any subject (and honestly, you could probably find a way to utilize it in a math class if needed). I plan to use this as my students test grade for their upcoming Unit test. They will have earned it. The topics we will cover include Native Americans, Colonization, and Slavery. My hope is to have another update for you next Sunday.
Subscribe to our newsletter and get a free download of 25 AI prompts for teachers.
