Socratic Circles

One of the best things about being a teacher is having other teachers to collaborate with. I’ve had the very great fortune of working with many teachers who have great ideas and are eager to share them and talk about ways to make those ideas even better. When I taught in a triad, I had fewer opportunities to work with someone teaching at my grade level, but for the past two years we’ve had a dyad at fourth grade, and I have my teaching partner who shares the same students as I do, and a teaching partner who teaches the ELA content that I do. It is great to have someone to talk content with, and my partner and I have been eagerly looking for ways to incorporate more reading strategies that match the Common Core Standards.

One strategy we are eager to try is using Socratic circles in the classroom. I ended up buying yet another professional book, Socratic Circles by Matt Copeland (Stenhouse), because I needed more information than I was getting from the various websites I was exploring. Copeland gears the book for middle and high schoolers, but I think with some direction, my fourth graders can benefit from this strategy. Socratic circles are basically a way of discussing text, but with only half the class.  They sit in the “inner circle.” The rest of the class is in the “outer circle”, observing the discussion and noting who is saying what, and thinking about the quality of the discussion. After a set amount of time (Copeland suggests ten minutes, but we think we’ll start with five) the class pauses. The outer circle is then asked for their evaluation of the discussion, and after that the groups switch positions. The new inner circle has their own discussion, with the new outer circle now evaluating the discussion. I’ve oversimplified this for the sake of quickly describing it, but I think it gives a basic idea of the way the circles work.

Why do this? Copeland and other people who have used Socratic circles cite the quality of the discussion. Students need to come to the circle with a text they’ve looked over and possibly annotated, ready to dig deeper into the meaning of that text. In many ways, that’s what close reading is asking students to do as well, but this is in a discussion format, instead of strictly written. Speaking in a group and having a discussion is part of the standards, so this is a good way to meet that standard.  Furthermore, learning to have a good discussion that sticks to the text and ideas, but doesn’t dissolve into name-calling, is a skill many people need to develop.

My partner and I are going to start with Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”, and use that as a fluency reading first. We’ll ask the students to mark words they don’t know, and to write down questions connected to places they are confused. Hopefully this will give them some springboards for discussion in our first Socratic circle. I’ll report back here after we try it, and let you know how it goes.  Our classes are somewhat different in their makeup, and it will be interesting to see what difference that makes in the discussions our students have. Has anyone else tried these? Any suggestions for texts, or strategies for managing the circles? In the meantime, I’ll be reading Copeland’s book closely for his recommendations, and in a week or so, after our break, I’ll be jumping in to Socratic circles!