Socratic Seminar students at Truman High School participate in Socratic Seminar 3 days a week.  It is through seminar that students explore issues in History, Social Studies, Science, Poetry, Art and other disciplines.  The reason students participate in this practice regularly is to learn and hone the skills of inquiry as they apply to a variety of disciplines. Inquiry should become a habit of the mind.  The outcome of this work is the independent application of this habit on the internship.  It should act as a framework for students as they create essential questions about their internships and embark on project work for the internship.

The skill of creating a hypothesis and using Bloom’s Taxonomy (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, & evaluation) are learned and practiced in the friendly setting of the Socratic Seminar.  The “debrief” at the end of the seminar helps students study their participation and cognitive process.  They then set goals for their intellectual behavior.  When students are in the field, on internships, they then rely on what they learned in seminar about observation and inference to guide them through their project.

Seminars are also constructed by teachers to guide students through a study of a particular subject with varying points of view.  A teacher may set up a number of seminars on the Civil War using poetry, speeches, economic, data, letters, etc. and then expect students to pull the learning from all these seminars into a persuasive paper to meet their history and persuasive writing requirements.   The paper should reflect a growth in understanding and growth in vocabulary acquisition. Students create word walls during seminar to understand usage and context.  There should be evidence of transfer of new words to the conversation and writing involved in seminar.

In contrast to the use of a Socratic method in some universities and law schools, the goal of the Socratic seminar in secondary schools is not to arrive at a “correct” interpretation of a text via the seminar teacher’s skillful questioning.  Instead, it is the assumption of this method that knowledge and understanding are constructed by learners themselves rather than discovered or received.  In other words, understanding is emergent, uncertain, and subject to revision; it is connected to what learners already know; and it is a new creation by cooperative action rather than a product solely of the author’s or teacher’s effort.

What this means in practical terms is that it is the foremost responsibility of the seminar leader to draw out multiple perspectives on texts to insist that all interpretations be supported by textual evidence and clear reasoning, to force consideration of alternative views, and to help participants identify and think about substantive agreements and disagreements.  In short, the seminar leader’s main purpose is to assist participants in the making of justifiable meaning using high standards of thought and discussion.  It is through this approach that participants are given practice in critical thinking and are encouraged to pursue their curiosity about the context of the ideas in question:  the author, the historical period, [the mathematical or scientific hypothesis], the piece of art, possible connections to their own lives, connections to other “texts,” etc.   In this way, the method of seminars (rather than debate, direct instruction, or lecture) promotes a balanced and open-minded consideration of ideas, values, and issues.

Another goal of Socratic Seminars is to expand participants’ familiarity with works drawn from many sources, including those from non-western traditions and from a variety of groups within American society.
- Rocky Mountain Socratic Seminars, Klien and Wilensky, Boulder, CO, 1994