The latter half of one of English 2's Socratic seminars
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My completed seminar scoring sheet for the Socratic seminar available above
The Socratic seminar is the final performance task for the Hard-Won Liberty unit. Like AP, English 2 held two Socratic seminars. But unlike AP's Socratic seminar, students were assigned partners to observe while they participated in their respective seminar. Subsequently, in the middle of the each Socratic seminar, observers served as peer coaches: they shared with their partners their recorded praise, constructive feedback, and new insights.
The recording above is of the higher-performing Socratic seminar, post peer coaching.
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Task
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Engage in a large-group, student-driven dialogue (as opposed to discussion) around three texts exploring intersectionality:
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Janelle Monae's "Q.U.E.E.N."​
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Sandra Cisneros' "My Name"
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"R.O. Kwon's "Stop Calling Asian Women Adorable"
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Come prepared for the dialogue with text observations and higher-order questions (according to Bloom’s taxonomical question stems)
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Share with their observation partner the praise, constructive feedback, and new insights that they observed mid-seminar (for 3 minutes)
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Scaffolds Prior
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The scaffolds prior had solidified reliable class-wide schemas for conducting rhetorical and literary analysis dialogically.
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Chalk Talk, introducing students the concept and practice of dialogue
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Literature Circles, verbally training the concept and practice of dialogue
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Fishbowl debate and dialogues, exchanging students’ feedback to distinguish dialogue from discussion
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Pass-toy discussions and dialogues, interspersing student-driven classroom talk throughout class time
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Materials
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Socratic seminar organizer (upgraded from the organizer used by AP)
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Three central texts
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Socratic seminar scoring sheet (for teacher)
Expectations
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Display at least 7 instances of the following:
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General decorum
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Text connections
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Higher-order questions
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Peer constructions
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During-seminar notes
For the purpose of examining students’ capacity to meet the particular expectations of the literature circle, I have decided to focus on students:
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"speculating, imagining, and hypothesizing";
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"narrating";
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"arguing, reasoning, and justifying";
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"explaining";
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"asking questions";
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"analyzing and solving problems"; and
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"instructing."
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The following are highlights from the literature circles, identified using Juzwik et al.’s lenses characterizing “speaking out.”
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0:00–3:22
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Students were given 3 minutes to instruct their respective partners in improving their performance for the latter half of the Socratic seminar.
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Notably, this is the only dialogic performance task in either English 2 or AP that tasks students with instructing.
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3:45–6:15
​The following exchange illustrates students explicitly and deliberately building off each other's ideas to provide a through and complex answer to a student's challenging question.
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A student asks if “society should stop judging other people? If yes, then how can we stop people from judging others? How can we bring change?”
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The student demands application of concepts explored in class, introducing a sense of collective agency in terms of the class’ potential effect on society.
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In order to propose that society cannot stop judging other people and that we instead should not take other people’s judgement to heart, a student imagines that that another student “says something about [them],” but ultimately, “a joke’s a joke.”
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Another student introduces their idea by saying, “I agree with you: let me add on to that”––clear use of dialogue stems. The student adds on that “we cannot control society” as evidenced by phenomena like sexism and racism.
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The student who first answered the question continues to add onto the idea that society cannot be controlled: they narrate a time when his friends were teasing him, but he “wasn’t mad” because, presumably, “a joke’s a joke”: perhaps sometimes judgement truly is meant to be harmless.
6:25–7:40
The following exchange illustrates a student rooting a question in text evidence, demanding peers to explore the meaning and implications of one of the central texts.
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A student asks, “What could you infer about lines 62 and 63 from Janelle Monae’s ‘Q.U.E.E.N,’” rooting his question in one of the three central texts.
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Lines 62 and 63: “They keep us underground working hard for the greedy / but when it’s time to pay they turn around and call us needy”
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A student speculates that the lines refer historically to the United States’ institution of slavery, when work was unpaid.
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The student who asks the question builds on that idea, explaining that unjust payment (or lack thereof) for labor is evident still today in societies’ stark and divided social classes.
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Another student attempt to explain why poorer classes are called “needy”: they speculate that those who are “born being rich” “don’t see how someone who lives under poverty can think about this stuff.”
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Evidence of taking in is inherent, both implicitly and explicitly, to the moments of speaking out noted above. I struggle to identify isolated moments of taking in––which is a healthy indication that the dialectic of taking in and speaking out was largely achieved in the Socratic seminar. However, the following are some unique and notable moments of taking in.
6:15–6:20
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A student asks the group, “Can I ask my question?” before asking his recorded question, respecting the shared dialogic space.
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9:07–9:20
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The group notices that a student hasn’t said anything for the entire seminar.
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“I got a question for you,” a student asks, to ensure that the taciturn student speaks before the seminar ends: “What do you think ‘I’m cutting up / don’t cut me down” means in Janelle Monae’s song?”
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Significance to Future Practice
Several of the affordances and challenges are the same as the affordances and challenges reported for AP’s literature circles, given the nature of the dialogic task.
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Affordances and challenges that were identical across AP and English 2’s literature circle are highlighted in yellow.
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Language highlighted in blue indicates an affordance or challenge that was present in AP but not present in English 2.
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Language that is not highlighted indicates an affordance or challenge unique to English 2.
Affordances
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The Socratic seminar enjoys simultaneously several of the affordances enjoyed by previous dialogic activities:
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Students examine a text and its relevance to self and society through student-generated inquiry.
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Student-generated and student-selected inquiry predicates dialogue on students’ interests.
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Ideas are collaboratively co-constructed to arrive at new, higher conclusions at which students could not arrived alone.
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The Socratic seminar imposes less social pressure compared to the prerequisite fishbowl dialogues.
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Thoughtful completion of the Socratic seminar preparation organizer ensures that all students have more than enough meaningful thoughts about the text to share with their peers.
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- Tasking students with grounding their questions in the text (e.g. "What could you infer about lines 62 and 63 from Janelle Monae's 'Q.U.E.E.N'?") naturally positions literature at the center of students' dialogue.
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(This was less the case with AP, where students centered dialogue around the text's themes and felt less inclined to make text-to-text, text-to-self, and/or text-to-world connections.)​
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Similar to the fishbowl debates and dialogues, the Socratic seminar allows a less contested space for students to speak, providing less talkative students more access to sharing ideas in front of the whole class.
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Additionally like the fishbowls, the Socratic seminar charges with being wholly responsible over their own dialogue and engagement––illustrating clear insight into students' capacity to synthesize the literary and dialogic skills that they had trained throughout the entire unit prior.
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(And according to the evidence of "speaking out" and "taking in" provided above, students were largely and ultimately able to apply the constructive feedback received ​throughout all the dialogic tasks leading up to the Socratic seminar.)
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Challenges​​
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(My classroom mentor requested that half the class participate in the seminar while the other half of class completed a practice AP Language multiple choice practice exam. This structure prevented peer-to-peer feedback and coaching and generated management problems. This structure was modified accordingly for English 2's Socratic seminar.)
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​I did not make explicitly clear that students should have entered the Socratic seminar with their copies of The Kite Runner, a mistake which inhibited specific quotations from the text––despite there being a space in their seminar organizers to identify specific quotations.
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As with past highly student-driven dialogic activities, when the teacher thoroughly commits to allowing students to have uninterrupted autonomy over their dialogue, the responsibility of addressing problems falls completely unto the students. Although students will ultimately receive feedback from the teacher in retrospect, in the moment of the seminar:
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students dominating space can only be stopped by other students;
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students must encourage each other to make references to the text;
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students must self-check themselves to determine if their questions are higher-order; etc.
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Contributions to Inquiry
English 2 met the expectations of the Socratic seminar with undeniable success. The vast majority of students, regardless of how talkative/dialogic they are in other contexts, were: asking higher-order questions that demanded applications of text to text, self, and society; receiving others' viewpoints to complicate or strengthen their own; and collaboratively building ideas to arrive at higher places of understanding.
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English 2's success with the Socratic seminar perhaps has more significant implications about the implementation of dialogism in the classroom than those generated by AP's success. Unlike AP, English 2 is: a smaller, less intimate community; less academically motivated; more prone to behavior management problems; and generally more dependent on stricter and more baseline scaffolds and routines. But ultimately (with the help of more polished structures and scaffolds as a result of my first dialogic unit with AP) English 2 met expectations better than AP did.
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There are (understandable) anxieties, hesitations, and fears that teachers have about the idea of constructing a dialogic classroom, and perhaps those anxieties, hesitations, and fears are magnified at schools, like mine, that teach underrepresented, less collegiately motivated students. Asking students to meet tested standards is already a particular challenge; adding untested dialogic expectations on top of those standards seems like an unnecessary––if not impossible––feat.
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But the questions that generate anxiety for teachers considering the idea of implementing classroom dialogism should instead be what the University of Wisconsin's Martin Nystrand et al. (1997) "key questions" about how to construct "public classroom space for student voices and how various teacher roles and moves enhance, constrain, and otherwise affect the interpretive roles and therefore the learning of students" (p. 15). In short, these question should empower educators instead of stop educators from working towards dialogism as an additional teaching and learning paradigm:
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"How does classroom discourse define what counts as knowledge in a given class?
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What characterizes the chains of understanding that teachers initiate and sustain with students?
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How can teachers organize classroom discourse to enhance their students' learning?" (p.15)
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English 2 displayed that, despite the odds and circumstances, implementing dialogism for a community of students that is generally less intimate, less academically motivated, more prone to behavior issues, and more dependent on scaffolds is, indeed, necessary for a more rigorous and humanist education––and possible despite the ostensible odds.
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