Teacher How To: Scaffolding Socratic Seminar

Socratic Seminars are one of my all- time favorite teaching strategies. I love seeing a group of students engage in a collaborative discussion and think deeply about themes, texts, and ideas under their own guidance. This is a skill that is not natural for students, who are used to teacher- led discussion, so I started scaffolding Socratic Seminar to build the skills necessary to make my Seminars successful for all of my students.

Seminars not only strengthen students’ ability to engage in dialogue with many differing beliefs, it also requires students to think deeply and critically, using evidence and logic to support their claims. While impromptu whole class discussions are wonderful, I have learned that the structure of a Socratic Seminar engages my quieter learners and, when scaffolded appropriately, is accessible to every student in a way that regular class discussions are not. 

As a result of Socratic Seminars, students will have closely read and annotated a focus text, thought deeply and critically about the material, discovered new insights and evidence from their peers, and ( if you desire) prepared themselves for a formal piece of writing on the topic. If you’ve always wanted  to try a Socratic Seminar but didn’t know where to start, or have tried them with any degree of success, this blog post is for you! Read on to find out the answers to the most common questions I get when talking teachers about this strategy.

1. What is a Socratic Seminar?

2. How does it work?

With younger students, students with special needs, or students with learning gaps, I have found it useful to scaffold the Seminar in a way that builds students up to a true Seminar over time. I hold regular seminars starting at the beginning of the year. By the end of the first quarter, I want my students to be completely comfortable with the process so that I can focus on the content, rather than the structure, of the Seminar for the rest of the year. 

Ideally, students come to the discussion prepared ( having read and annotated a text independently) with their own questions written and a response prepared. Students take turns asking and discussing questions naturally, with no facilitation needed. In my experience, however, this is not natural for most of my students. They are used to teacher- led questions, right or wrong answers, and debates. It takes a lot of practice to build independence, accountability, and courage needed to make Socratic Seminars truly meaningful for students.

Steps to Successfully Scaffolding Socratic Seminar

1. Choose a text to use. Whatever you choose should be thought- provoking and offer multiple interpretations.This could be fiction or nonfiction, short or long. I like to start simple, with an article about an issue all students have a stake in – something about school uniforms or technology. Year- round schooling is a topic students usually get a kick out of! Commonlit is a resource I love to mine for texts to use because in addition to being able to search by theme, topic, or paired texts they are Lexile- appropriate and have vocabulary annotations that are helpful for all learners. 
2. We will read the article as a whole group, partners, or independently, modeling annotation based on a basic guiding question (remember that students will craft their own deeper questions after reading).
3. After reading, I’ll introduce the Seminar – what it is, why we do it, and how to develop level 3 open ended questions. I hand out a graphic organizer that helps students gather their questions and thoughts, and give them time to prepare. We also go over the rubric I have on the back of the organizer, so that students know what the expectations are (more on grading below).
4. As students write questions, I will usually copy them down onto notecards so I can screen them before the seminar, or give them to the facilitator. Sometimes I’ll have the facilitator read each question the first few times we do a seminar until students are more comfortable with asking high level questions. This also means I can create “scaffolded” questions that are a little narrower in scope to help more reluctant students join the conversation. 
5. On the day of the seminar, I begin by asking students to set expectations for the group. This can be whatever students need to feel safe. I will write them ( no more than 3-5) on the board. I’ll also designate a facilitator and model how the facilitation should go. After handing the facilitator a facilitation guide and the rest of my students a set of sentence stems, we’re ready to go!
6. After each round, it is important to debrief. Students ( and the teacher) can share what went really well, give shoutouts to specific students, and discuss opportunities for growth next time. This reflection step is important to give the seminar closure and show students how they can continue to support each others’ growth.

You might be saying this sounds like a lot of work, and it definitely is the first few times. Students really need to experience these regularly before growing comfortable with the format, and need explicit directions and expectations each step of the way. Giving students too little instruction for the first Seminar can backfire and destroy students’ comfort with the technique, which will limit its success later on.

3. How many kids can be involved at once?

I have seen Socratic Seminars with all kinds of different setups. The following have been the most successful for me:

1. Fishbowl

A few students ( 4-6) are in the center circle, and the rest of the class sits around them. The “fish” in the middle are the ones participating in that moment, everyone else is a “dead fish” because … dead fish can’t talk! It can be a challenge to keep the outer students focused on what’s going on in the fishbowl, so sometimes I’ll have them play Socratic Seminar Bingo or complete a peer reflection. Once the inner circle is finished, everyone rotates. This is great for middle school to help facilitate movement and brain breaks. In this case, I’ll usually divide up questions beforehand to make sure each group has a different set of questions. With this setup, I allot 10 minutes to each group.

2. Inner circle, outer circle

This is almost the same as fishbowl, except that the class is only in two groups. I let students choose which group they’d like to be in, which helps with engagement if your group is tricky. In this setup, I’ll do two 20 minute rounds OR have each group go simultaneously in different parts of the room (personally, I have never been successful with this, but I have seen it work really well for other teachers).

3. Whole Group Seminar

I don’t recommend this for larger groups, but with a highly practiced group or a small class of students, you can simply arrange all of the chairs in one big circle and allow everyone to participate in the same round.

4. How do I scaffold the Seminar?

Socratic Seminar works better the longer you practice it. Students are not used to being given full control of a discussion environment and may need some support in order to see success, especially at the beginning. There are so many different ways to scaffold the Seminar to baby- step students into conducting deep, meaningful, and productive Socratic discussions.

1. You can use a graphic organizer to help students plan their questions/ answers/ evidence.
2. Incorporate teacher- written questions or screen questions for quality before the seminar.
3. Offer shy students or ELLs other opportunities such as note- taker or allow them to write notes and pass them to another student to verbalize (Once they see what the Seminar is like, they’ll feel more comfortable participating the next time).
4. Incorporate “buddies” or partners where one partner is in the circle and the other finds evidence for them.
5. Use sentence frames for all students, but especially language learners.
6. Serve as facilitator yourself (just for the first round, with the clear expectation that a student will take on the role next time).
7. Train the facilitator to look for cues that a student wants to enter the conversation – maybe even have a nonverbal cue (like turning over a card with a microphone symbol on it).
8. If you have several chatty students – give each student two pennies and a paper cup – once they share, they drop a penny in the cup. Pennies can reset as often as appropriate for your group.
9. If a student is absent, conduct a mini seminar just with you.

5. How do I train my facilitator?

It is incredibly important that the teacher does not step in and undermine the discussion. This may be necessary at first (sparingly!) to help smooth the process, but you really want to limit how much you talk while the students are discussing. The only times I jump in are to encourage the facilitator or if there is a negative or inappropriate comment that is beyond the ability of the facilitator to address. Otherwise, I just want to sit back and watch the conversation unfold.

Some students are fantastic natural leaders. I have had some students who need little instruction before they can not only run the conversation, but make each student feel comfortable participating. Other students need a little help. All that is required is a desire to be the leader. I have found that my class clowns or more outspoken students work really well as facilitators because they usually have buy- in from the class already and they aren’t able to dominate the conversation the way they might in a more casual class discussion. I always give facilitators a guide (It’s included in my Scaffolded Socratic Seminar Bundle!) with the procedure and helpful sentence frames. I also provide them with a list of questions if they are the one who will be asking them. If I’ve added scaffolded questions, I will highlight those in green and direct my facilitator to ask quieter students to answer them. The most important quality in the facilitator is energy and the willingness to hold every student accountable to the expectations set by the group.

6. How do I grade a Seminar?

While students are engaging in Socratic Seminar, I sit back and watch. I make notes of brave, interesting, or exceptional moments in the discussion so that I can provide positive feedback for the whole group. If there are behaviors that need to be managed, I let the facilitator handle it and only step in if it gets to be unmanageable. 

When I first learned how to implement Socratic Seminars, my cooperating teacher would print a class list and would make check marks each time a student spoke, and that’s how she would grade them. I used to use that method too, but quickly realized that I was encouraging quantity over quality – students would speak just to get the points. I was also penalizing introverted students would would contribute one well crafted comment to discussion, but not the 3 I was looking for ( or whatever I was grading at the time). 

Now, I use a rubric to score each student on their part in the Seminar. I suggest that Socratic Seminar should not be a static grade in your grade book, especially not at first when students are still learning the technique and gaining comfort with engaging in discussion with their peers. Using Socratic Seminar as a test grade is also challenging because it is almost impossible to re-create the environment for students who happen to be absent on the day it is conducted. 

 I use a rubric derived from the Common Core Speaking and Listening Standards and after each seminar students score themselves and write a reflection justifying their score. Usually, students are pretty honest and accurate( but of course any obvious discrepancies between what you notice and what students notice should prompt a conversation). If you do mastery and standards- based grading, like I do, you can enter those scores in the grade book under those standards and students will have multiple opportunities to improve throughout the semester. 

In Conclusion

I sincerely hope that this commentary on Socratic Seminar helps you to plan or refine your own Socratic Seminar practice. For every printable I’ve discussed in this post, I created a Scaffolded Socratic Seminar Bundle that includes everything you need – including a graphic organizer, rubric, facilitator guide, sentence stems, student cue markers, and explicit directions for implementation. Find it in my Teachers Pay Teachers Store! 

Questions about Socratic Seminar? Throw them in the comments, or DM me on instagram! I’d be so happy to answer them! Looking for other strategies? Here are all of my favorite Language Arts teaching strategies!