Benjamin Karl
Benjamin Karl
English Language Arts
Embedded Files
Leading a Group Discussion
Leading a Group Discussion
For my 12th Grade Lit & Comp students studying Hamlet, we engaged in Socratic seminar once every two weeks at the outset and ramped-up to as much as twice per week by the end of the card marking. Prior to this, these students had had minimal experience with this form of student-led discussion, so I took the opportunity to explore different approaches to it.
Each of these discussion asked students to explore William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and to consider it in relationship to a weekly news article. The particular article under discussion in the attached clip discusses gendered perspectives in historical analysis of George Washington. Over the course of the unit, we talked extensively about gender issues in Hamlet.
I prepared my own questions for this and other discussions. Aside from the launching question for each, I generally avoided interjecting unless I felt it was absolutely necessary to dispel an important misconception or to refocus a wondering discussion. Because most class sizes are too large to have an effective discussion without splitting the class into two parts, I generally formulated a launching question for the second group based on something of special interest that the first group did not have time to explore before the break. In the attached video, I can be seen doing all of these things.
The goal of Socratic seminar is for students to generate their own learning with minimal interjection by the teacher and to come away with a usable record. The attached video excerpt demonstrates such a conversation. Extensive pre-discussion work generating advanced questions about the material encouraged smooth and logical flow of the conversation while I helped steer the students through unexpected turns such as David’s defense of Claudius and Gertrude’s “o’er hasty marriage.”
MATERIALS
Student Annotated Article of the Week
Student Generated Discussion Notes
Time-indexed Video Annotations (below)
In order to encourage student participation and to discourage discussion domination, I created a “talk ticket” system. Each student had two tickets and one must be “spent” to comment unless addressed directly. Once all tickets are spent, they then reset. Though the system may seem simple enough, it ultimately seemed to create too much pressure to spend the tickets on a really insightful comment and thus it became a distraction. In the video linked here, an early discussion covering Acts 1 and 2 of Hamlet, the students are instead partnered and the pair receives a single grade. Students can be heard directly addressing each other to draw their partners into the conversation. Eventually, as students acclimated to the seminar format, all of these encouragement mechanisms became largely unnecessary and I instead focused on those few students who don’t talk regardless of the incentive.
For these non-participating students, I found that they often felt as though the conversation simply moved too quickly—that the topic always seemed to change before they could both form and voice their ideas. As a pre-discussion strategy, I began having all students prepare a minimum of five questions that they could ask given the opportunity. Still, there were times that even directly speaking to some students in discussion yielded no results. To earn credit, such students needed to either write a one-page paper on what they would have commented on had their particular barrier not been present, or—in later sessions—participate significantly in the backchannel chat.
The backchannel chat was originally a solution to creating a usable record of the discussion which had proven a challenge in the beginning. I started with the traditional method of having students create discussion webs and take notes while in the outer circle. The disadvantage of this method is that many outer circle students are left somewhat disengaged, merely “observing” the inner circle’s discussion. I later switched to the backchannel system where outer-circle students participated in a live typed discussion concurrent with and in response to the inner circle’s verbal discussion. At the midpoint of each period, when the inner and outer circles switched places, the new outer circle participants picked up that same shared discussion creating a single usable record.
Time-indexed Annotions for Video Excerpt
Time-indexed Annotions for Video Excerpt
00:21 Launching Question: Being that this was the second group, I generally prefer to pick where the first group was inevitably cut off. This creates a more cohesive class-wide conversation and honors the work the first group started.
01:13 Throughout the unit and leading up to this discussion, the importance of connecting our work with the play to our modern experiences has been emphasized. This is evident in this student’s comments.
01:35 Here, another student picks up that connection, discussing it from a historical perspective. He suggests that Gertrude should have chosen marriage with Norway to achieve peace. This connects to our work at the beginning of the unit when we discussed Queen Elizabeth I’s plight as a queen with no heir and a looming war with Spain.
01:59 I very rarely step into the conversation, but in this case I felt it was valuable to reinforce the above connection and historical precedent—to see whether any other students would take up the implicit connections between the play and the world in which Shakespeare was living.
02:10 Here, two students begin to make important connections between plot points and major theme we’ve been discussing (family vs self-interest). Students tend confuse plot and theme, so this is very exciting. An odd exchange with a student returning from outside the classroom threatens to shake the other students’ focus; I can be seen maintaining very deliberate eye-contact with the speaker in order to hold the conversation together.
03:03 Here, my interjection is needed to quickly dispel a misconception about the plot. Ordinarily, I would allow the other students to work through the veracity of this misconception, but there was already a growing contingent of students who erroneously believed that Hamlet’s frustrations were being driven by his not having been invited to his father’s funeral.
03:30 Here, students begin to make explicit connections between our current events article of the week and the events in the play. Also, one student can be heard specifically inviting a response from a David, someone whom the group has not heard from yet and is in danger of not receiving credit for the discussion.
04:05 Additional connections being made between the article, the play, and in a meta-sense, their interpretation of the events in the play. This student also connects it to our year-long theme of “the danger of a single story.”
04:50 A student returns to the idea of incest which some students had begun to move away from as they increasingly favor the new historicism perspective that, because Gertrude and Claudius are not blood relatives, their marriage is an acceptable political move. This return to the incest case causes quite a stir and several students begin to excitedly voice their opinions.
05:22 At this point, several students are making arguments that they cannot support and the focus is wandering away from analysis of the play. I interject, pick up one student’s earlier argument—as an authority in the room, this essentially validates that argument—and I refocus the students on analysis of the play.
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