Analysis 5
AP English Language & Composition
AP English Language & Composition
One of two Socratic seminars held by AP Language​
My completed seminar scoring sheet for the Socratic seminar available above
The Socratic seminar is the final performance task for the dialogism unit: what better than the ostensibly purest dialogic classroom structure to assess students’ culmination of dialogic skills?
Scaffolds Prior
​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
Task
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Engage in a large-group, student-driven dialogue (as opposed to discussion) around our unit text, The Kite Runner
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Come prepared for the dialogue with text observations and higher-order questions (according to Bloom’s taxonomical question stems)
Materials
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Socratic seminar organizers (for students)
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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
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For the purpose of examining students’ capacity to meet the particular expectations of the Socratic seminar, I have decided to focus on students “speculating, imagining, and hypothesizing” and “asking questions.”
The following are highlights from the Socratic seminar, identified using Juzwik et al.’s lenses characterizing “speaking out.”
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“speculating, imagining, and hypothesizing”
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Bulk of where text examination naturally takes place through “speculating, imagining, and hypothesizing,” during which students are “entering imaginatively into a text” and “[evaluating] the choices authors make in crafting a text” such as The Kite Runner.
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[5:48] “He ran, right? And that’s what I would do––but to the extent of going to tell someone to ask them for help”
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A student makes a hypothetical text-to-self connection to challenge the seeming logic that Amir uses to make a critical decision.
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[6:14, in response] “How would [Amir] explain it? My servant is being raped? And if he did, Assef: he has power. He has power with Baba: he has relationships; he has connections. That can affect Hassan’s life––his family life.”
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A student asks questions to speculate consequences for an alternative decision that Amir could have made.
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“asking questions”
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[2:22] “When you say that, I would like to ask a question to that: Why didn’t Amir help Hassan instead of just watching him?”
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A student asks a question in direct response to prior dialogue, complicating subsequent dialogue.
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[2:45] “I wanna hear from you guys over there: what do you guys think about Hassan and Amir’s relationship?”
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A student asks a question to encourage other peers to speak, creating explicit avenues for other students to enter the dialogue.
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[5:16] “What if we took that scenario to our personal life? So let’s say one of our friends is about to be humiliated by someone, and then you’re there, and you can help. [inaudible] Would you go help?”
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A student asks a question to lead students to make additional text-to-self connections to empathize with The Kite Runner’s characters; up until this point, there were few text-to-self connections.
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“Active listening”
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Students are seen demonstrating the facets of active listening described by Juzwik et al.: “making eye contact with the speaker, leaning toward the speaker, nodding in agreement from time to time, and jotting down notes about what is being said.”​
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“Being receptive to multiple alternative viewpoints”
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Instead of deliberately “learning from others through dialogue” despite disagreements, students are still seeing pesrpectives as disparate––instead of investigating meaning behind alternative viewpoints.
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[14:50] “I actually disagree with that.”
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Not to say that agree-disagree language is always non-dialogic, but it less conducive than deliberately “[countenancing] alternative viewpoints.”
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“Thinking about what is heard and giving others time to think”
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[10:13] “Do you guys want to add on?”
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A student asks a question to carve out opportunities for students to think about an answer to the unit’s essential question, which has been complicated by dialogue about a critical scene in The Kite Runner.
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Other than this, students seldom sit with silence.
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Significance to Future Practice
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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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 [6:55–7:10]. 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
Generally meeting the expectations for the Socratic seminar (as described above in “Context”), the class executed our final dialogic performance with success––a thoroughly dialogic activity that the class likely could not have done at the beginning of the unit (given their still-developing skills exhibited in previous dialogic activities). Developing new schemas over the span of four weeks allowed students to construct not only dialogic skills but a generally dialogic, student-driven classroom community. Although I am not sure if developing dialogic skills and community would have taken four weeks if a dialogic unit had come at the beginning of year (closer to norm setting), with my section of AP Language, four weeks sufficed to overturn months’ worth of monologic, teacher-driven classroom talk.
However, the unit did not yet construct a flawless or even consistently reliable dialogic community (which was not the expectation). After all, not every student spoke in the Socratic seminar. And relatively too few comments were rooted in directly quoted evidence. Dialogue is, despite students’ feelings, talking and listening––listening to each other and the text alike. Dialogism is a dialectic between “speaking out” and “taking in”––so I regret deciding to assign full credit to students who took ample, exceptional during-seminar notes but did not “speak out.” Professor of semiotics Gunther Kress (2000) defines "critique" as a derivational approach to answering "questions around the role of the social" (pg. 33). Critique presumes that "the speakers' actions in choosing options are prompted by their assessment of the social situation in which they find themselves" (p. 34). By taking an approach of critique, without empirical evidence, I can only ever wonder why students didn't "speak out"––as much as I would like to explain their reticence as a product of being in a stressful social situation. In the future, I grade not with critique as an approach but with "choice": the Saussurean approach that charges the speaker with their choices and not the environment. Such is, of course, the nature of assessing student performance. This is not to say that students' feelings about and reactions to dialogism should be invalidated. Instead, this is to say that assessing student performance should focus first on choice, and then on choices' derivations as need be.
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Ultimately, select students still feeling so uncomfortable speaking that they did not speak a single time within 18 minutes indicates large areas for dialogic improvement. And those improvements theoretically could be made through further, repeated strengthening and curricular embedding of dialogic schemas throughout the rest of the academic year.
The unit did indeed shift students away from teacher-driven initiate-evaluate-response (IRE) talk, but that shift unsurprisingly takes more than one month––and likely takes place over the course of a whole year, given that ostensibly most of traditional public schooling is monologic and teacher-driven.