Demo Lesson

For my Demo Lesson I introduced the practice of Socratic Seminars. I am still fairly new to employing them, but I have been impressed with the results and the participation level from my students. Even shy or unsure students can be prepare with their partners, groups, or teacher to make sure they have a few insightful questions to throw out onto the floor and have a few "deep answers" written out and prepared for the sake of the seminar discussion.

Students are challenged to create open-ended questions through use of Depth of Knowledge (DOK) and Question-Answer-Relationship (QAR) sentence starters. Students use a rubric to self-assess and peer-assess. The goal is to dialogue in a way that fully answers the question(s) with textual evidence and invites other students into the discussion with student-generated questions.

I will very much enjoy guiding students in using this as they strengthen their argument writing and speaking skills. I plan on using many of the approaches discussed in G. HIllocks Teaching Argument Writing book (recommended for this class) in preparing and practicing Socratic Seminars.

PLEASE NOTE: Toward the end of the Demo Lesson can be found various links for examples, rubrics, and additional documents.