Trying Socratic Circles

A couple blog posts ago I talked about Socratic circles, and I gave them a shot this week. On the whole, it was a great experience, and I’m looking forward to trying them again. But of course, there are things that I will modify for next time, and I thought it might be useful to reflect on what I liked and what I would change.

To start with, the kids need to be discussing a text they are somewhat familiar with, and we used Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” which I had assigned as their fluency reading for the week. Theoretically, all of them had read it at least five times, and I had asked them to underline words they didn’t know, and to write down three questions they could ask, so we had some questions ready to go. This was a good idea, and I think I would do something like this again, until we get better at generating questions more easily. The poem was challenging for fourth graders, and I am fine with that, although I don’t think anyone loved it just because it is quite a bit more difficult than other, more kid-friendly poems they’ve read. But they do need to grapple with challenging text, and this gave them that opportunity.

I had thought a bit about how to divide the kids into two groups, and when I saw how many kids had brought back their homework (not many), that solved the problem for me. I sorted the returned homework into two stacks, making sure that each group had some strong students in it (hoping that they would be leaders, and they were), and then I put all the other kids without homework into the groups, assuming they would sit next to someone with the text.

The inner circle sat on the floor, and I had the outer circle sit around them on chairs with clipboards for their response sheet. (See a copy of the outer circle response sheet below.) That worked out well, but all groups said they had difficulty hearing the students speaking, so by the last group I used our class microphone, which slowed the conversation down a bit but did make it much easier to hear. 

I felt that all groups really worked to do their roles. The outer circles concentrated on what people were saying, and how they were saying it, and the inner circles tried to ask and respond to questions. I think that was the hardest part, as many students wanted to ask their questions but weren’t always interested in thinking about other people’s questions. I’m hoping that changes as we get better at the discussion part. Many in the outer circle commented that all students did not participate, and I think that is a more powerful observation when it comes from one’s peers. It will be interesting to see if there is more participation the next time we try this. I know there are some very quiet students, and this is pushing them out of their comfort zone, so I need to do more thinking about how to encourage them to contribute.

Finally, my last observation would be that you need time to do this. The first group I allotted about thirty minutes, and this wasn’t quite enough for the first experience with the activity. The second group always has a shorter class time anyway, and we ended up breaking our discussion time into two days.  That worked better only because both groups had more time without feeling rushed, but I liked having both groups go on the same day to keep the discussion more fluid. 

Allotting forty-five minutes would have been the smart thing, which I’ll keep in mind for the next time.

Perhaps the best indicator of the success of my first Socratic circles would be the student responses. I had a number of students ask if we were going to do them again, and I was happy to tell them we would. I highly recommend you give Socratic circles a try!