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Socratic Seminars: Building a Culture of Student-Led Discussion | Edutopia

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Socratic Seminars: Building a Culture of Student-Led Discussion | Edutopia

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There is no Socratic seminar without risk. And there is no risk without trust. An effective Socratic seminar occurs because of the thousands of invisible connections already built among students and teacher.

At the beginning of the year, establish classroom procedures, routines, and expectations. At the beginning of every discussion, do the same. Hold students accountable for demonstrating the utmost respect for each other.

2. Let's get academic.

Use anchor charts to teach, model, and reinforce target vocabulary every period. Establish a way for students to recognize each other's academic vocabulary use (snapping, tracking). This ensures that students both identify and apply the target language, while offering ample opportunity for practice (PDF).

Practice gradual release of discussion leadership throughout the year. At the beginning, model strong facilitation skills and verbally label them for students. Collaboratively create anchor charts of what makes strong discussion leaders, participants, and conversations. Reflect on the day's discussion: strengths, weaknesses, modifications. Eventually poll students to see who wants to take a more active role in leading class discussions.

Directly teach, model, practice, and assess analytical and text-based questioning. The top resources for this, in my opinion, are from AVID (PDF). This skill is essential in reading comprehension, high-level discourse, and critical thinking. What I've found works best is delineating (PDF) between right/wrong, yes/no questions and those that produce discussion. Additionally, text-dependent questions ground students in the work.

3. Let's get prepared.

Choose a rich text that offers cross-content and real-world connections. I often use a whole novel as the basis of a Socratic seminar.

Create prep work based on learning objectives and student data. Whether students are in 9th grade Intro to Lit or AP Lit, I have found that prep work allows them to feel confident going into the Socratic seminar.

Repeatedly explain the purpose and expectations of the Socratic seminar. I use a contract clearly outlining expectations.

Implementing Your Seminar

Once the culture and preparations have been established, it's time to set the scene for the actual Socratic seminar.

4. Let's get physical.

A Socratic seminar is best done in a circle, where students are equal and I (as a facilitator and not a participant) am on the outside. There are two ways to do that based on the class size and dynamics: one giant circle for all students, or fishbowl style (where the participants in an inner circle have a discussion and the participants in an outer circle coach the inner circle).

5. Let's get ready.

When students arrive on the Socratic seminar day, I create a five- to 10-minute activity so that I can check for prep completion. I don't allow students to participate if they're not 100 percent complete with the prep. At the beginning of the year, this is harsh. But as the year goes on, students rise to expectations and accept that the rule is designed to ensure a better discussion (and often grade).

The first Socratic seminar of the year begins with a lot of direct instruction going over what makes a good Socratic seminar, what makes a bad one, and how students can get an A (targets). These targets -- which can shift throughout the year -- are based on standards and can include active voice, upgraded verbs, academic vocabulary, transitional phrases, textual evidence, clarifying questions, etc. Every Socratic seminar thereafter, I still spend time at the beginning directly establishing these norms and targets. I also have students set goals.

6. Let's get better.

I practice gradual release of Socratic seminar throughout the year. Early on, I insert myself into the conversation frequently. These interruptions can be feedback about strong performances or ways to improve, lessons about conversation strategies, highlighting impressive questions or insights, muting dominant voices, soliciting reserved voices, and/or pausing the dialogue so that students can self-assess and adjust moving forward. As the year goes on, these interruptions occur less frequently as students internalize expectations and step up as facilitators.

Follow-Up and Assessment

Assess student performance at the conclusion of your Socratic seminar. Clear expectations and guidelines are the key to the assessment.

7. Let's get assessed.

Establish clear metrics for success (e.g., using and explaining quotes, expanding on a peer's idea, asking questions that keep the conversation going) and make sure the class is aware of them. Socratic seminars can move quickly -- to ensure that your grading keeps pace, create a list of codes for successful interactions and use the codes to keep a running tally of student performance as they talk. You'll be confident that you got it right, and you can even show the students your methodology.

8. Let's get reflective.

The final element to any meaningful Socratic seminar is reflection for both students and teacher. Provide prompts for students to use to reflect on and discuss the seminar, and then have them plan adjustments for future seminars.

What I love the most about effective Socratic seminars is that they create the feeling of a college class. And my students deserve this. As do all students.

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Socratic Seminars: Building a Culture of Student-Led Discussion | Edutopia

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There is no Socratic seminar without risk. And there is no risk without trust. An effective Socratic seminar occurs because of the thousands of invisible connections already built among students and teacher. At the beginning of the year, establish classroom procedures, routines, and expectations. At the beginning of every discussion, do the same.

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Mark up and Organize the Web with Scrible | SLJ Review | School Library Journal

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Mark up and Organize the Web with Scrible | SLJ Review | School Library Journal

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This a Chrome extension that allows you to annotate web pages. Might be really useful for research and annotating sources.

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By Wendy Stephens on

A research tool that enables users to annotate, organize, and share web pages, Scrible, combines the push-button sharing of Google Drive with the powerful, dynamic full-text indexing of web content. The new, paid pro version provides advanced analytic capabilities that are more typical in higher education management systems.

Like earlier incarnations of social bookmarking sites, Scrible allows for both simultaneous full-text and controlled vocabulary (arranged by words and phrases used to retrieve and/or index content) organizations. The video below provides a brief overview.

Launching the Chrome browser extension or adding a resource directly from your library provides datawells for comments and tags for each URL, evoking the earlier ne plus ultra of social bookmarking, Delicious, but Scrible actively indexes each web page saved or document uploaded, in addition to annotations and tags, making its search capabilities much more robust.

In default mode, Scrible has its own toolbar uploaded onto each open tab, a setting that must be adjusted if you don't want to have to launch it when you navigate away from the page. The ability to save static versions of web pages and send uploaded files gives the suite real utility. You can share any of these via social media with users or classes via integrated in-app inbox and outbox features. Documents can be sorted by type, as well as by owner and date saved, and those facets can be combined in an intuitive way. Unlike other web annotation platforms, you can add multiple formats-for example, italics as well as underlining or highlighting-to a document.

Edu Pro: the latest in academic applications

The Edu Pro version of Scrible, which must be verified via email, is a bells and whistles option in which academic applications come into play when you assign your resources to a classroom-cost is customized, but starts at $1,000 for an entire school, including educators. Class sections can be added from Gmail, making it easy for Google Apps for Education school users, but unpaid subscribers will be limited to a single class. Scrible can create a bibliography from website metadata in three formats-Modern Language Association, Chicago, and Associated Press-with any missing data fields highlighted. Perhaps its most stellar feature is the automatic adjustments of any citations generated from your library of saved resources, making bibliographic updates to multiple files or libraries easy to accomplish.

In its social menu, Scrible makes it easy to share permalinks to annotated read-only web pages through shared URLs. The Edu Pro version provides 500 MB of cloud-based storage.

The potential for caching files and gathering analytics associated with sharing digital content in the Edu Pro version make the higher education-specific features of Scrible particularly appealing.

In addition, Edu Pro enables users to maintain multiple classes with easy integration with Google Classroom to import student rolls and to keep them updated. This version offers nuanced progress tracking based on the number of sources and their type-including differentiation between academic and government sites, blogs and news sources-as well as a repository for completed student work. From the students' perspective, the paid version makes it easy to choose which types of annotations to import into a Google doc, a real boon in jump-starting the writing process with selected quotations, annotations, and citations in place. Scrible has recently added a writing tool suite available to paid Edu Pro subscribers as a freemium service.

Verdict

For students looking to manage sources, the free version of Scrible offers an easy way to do that and generate bibliographic citations. Edu Pro might be a good option for academic librarians wanting the tracking capabilities of learning management systems without the loss of intellectual property oversight that campus-based solutions provide.
Wendy Stephens worked as a high school librarian in Alabama for 15 years before becoming library media program chair at Jacksonville (AL) State University. She is a past president of the Alabama Library Association and is AASL Region V director.

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Mark up and Organize the Web with Scrible | SLJ Review

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By Wendy Stephens on A research tool that enables users to annotate, organize, and share web pages, Scrible, combines the push-button sharing of Google Drive with the powerful, dynamic full-text indexing of web content.