Narrative
Learning Socrates’ Way
Mrs. Woodruff’s students are part of a Gifted and Talented/High Achieving Magnet, so she is constantly looking for methods to take her students to the next level. In this lesson, she wanted to give the students a chance to reflect on their learning from a previous project assignment. In that lesson, the students researched and created presentations on various human body systems.
In this lesson, the students were asked to engage in a structured conversation format, a Socratic Seminar, to reflect on their learning. To help the students get comfortable with the structure of a Socratic Seminar, they practiced the seminar structure four different times before conducting the Seminar that is included as an artifact.
For each round, in each seminar, the student groups were given a series of questions to help begin their conversations. As they became more comfortable with the practice, students were able to direct their conversations on their own without additional questioning or prompting from an adult facilitator.
This particular experience was a first for this class. Mrs. Woodruff expressed her desire to engage the students in strategies that allow them to reflect on and evaluate their own learning, so a Socratic Seminar was a perfect fit for what she wanted to accomplish.
This particular experience created an opportunity for the students to look at their work, evaluate it, and really dig deeply into what their learning afforded them as part of this process. Students began to build on each others’ comments, as well as ask one another clarifying and wondering questions that facilitated a deeper understanding of their previous learning experience.
Some of the initial guiding questions for the students were:
What was your process for preparing and creating your project?
What was one challenge your team faced as you created the project?
How did you overcome challenges as they arose?
What one piece of advice do you have for future students who might work on this project?
What was one challenge your team faced as you created the project?
How did you overcome challenges as they arose?
What one piece of advice do you have for future students who might work on this project?