Fostering Talk Around Literature

M. Copland, Socratic Circles
Styslinger and Pollock, The Chicken and the Egg
Styslinger and Overstreet, Strengthening Argumentative Writing with Speaking and Listening (Socratic) Circles
Dr. Vicki Gibson, The Common Core Standards on Speaking and Listening
Milner and Milner, Developing an Oral Foundation
Various authors: assorted guidelines, rubrics, questions, handouts on Socratic Seminars
Robert Probst, Response and Analysis
Robert Probst, Tom Sawyer, Teaching and Talking


The main focus this week is on talking--how to teach our students to do it, how to assess it, and how to use it to allow students to gain a more critical and sophisticated understanding of texts. Socratic seminars are discussions around text that minimize the influence of direct instruction and lecture and, instead, allow students to form communities of learning that promote individual expressions of engagement and analysis. There are many ways to organize a Socratic Seminar, but the premise is built on at least two groups of students who explore talking and listening in turn, and who are not dependent on a teacher to lead the discussion. Socratic "circles" can be incredibly effective in promoting high level thinking and formal analysis, as well as encouraging all students to respond in some way to a group-read text. The goal of a Socratic seminar is to avoid what some scholars have called "recitation" and instead promote the kinds of "authentic discussion" we would like to be "the common mode of discourse in most classrooms" (McCann, 2006).

The readings raise some interesting possibilities regarding how a teacher might be able to interact with a text in front of her students without being perceived as the authority. A usual Socratic seminar discourages the teacher from intervening in conversation, unless it is to clarify or unpack how the students are discussing. I think it's Probst who says that if a teacher has the kind of relationship with her students where she is able to offer opinions that do not "ring" of authority, she might be able to engage in this kind of talk. The key is classroom community--both for building a positive and supportive atmosphere in which to conduct a Socratic Seminar as well as for being part of such a discussion without students feeling they need to take notes.

I have facilitated many Socratic seminars and I think they're fantastic. I definitely wait until the classroom community is established, explicitly teach them how I want the seminar to run, and then we get started. I have found SS to be especially powerful with certain groups of students; I had an honors class that regularly blew me away with their SS discussions. They were, in fact, able to use a lot of the SS conversations as foundations for their literary analysis papers on Frankenstein. I think SS is worth the time and research to set up and facilitate. Students love it, and authentic learning comes from authentic talking.

Do:
I really like the activity called "Finding the Poem" that Probst suggests using as a beginning-of-the-year ice breaker. You need a few simple poems -- to make the activity with groups of four students, you'll need several poems with four stanzas each. Probst suggests, "print one stanza of each poem in a large, readable font on an index card. Shuffle the cards together and distribute them to students. Then instruct students to move around the classroom, introducing themselves to each other and comparing stanzas until they find another that seems to fit with theirs. When two students have found a match, they continue to roam as a pair until they find the rest of the poem. When the students are satisfied that they have complete poems, ask them to sit together in their group and put their stanzas in what seems to be the right order. Then you might ask each group to read its poem aloud and tell you something about why they settled on that order of stanzas" (49).