Socrates: an imaginary observation

Dear Socrates,

Thank you for allowing me to observe your class on the nature of reality on Friday.  I very much enjoyed it.

Portrait of Socrates. Marble, Roman artwork (1st century), perhaps a copy of a lost bronze statue made by Lysippos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There was clearly a high level of engagement in your classroom.  (I use this term loosely:  I applaud the choice you and your students have made to meet in open, public spaces and wish such intersections were a larger part of our educational system).  It is clear to me that your students will remember your words;  I was particularly pleased to see that Plato was paying attention.

I also appreciated the complex ideas you are asking your students to consider:  it is clear you have high expectations and are presenting them with cutting edge research rather than a textbook synthesis.  (I think it’s great, by the way, that you are teaching without a textbook.)

I do wonder, though, if Menon felt a bit put on the spot at certain points in the discussion.  Rather than being truly open-ended, it seemed that many of your questions were designed to lead him into a predictable answer, which you then showed to be wrong.  The danger of this approach, in my opinion, is that it can reinforce the idea that the “right” answer is impossible to get to without the teacher’s help and lead students to think less, rather than more.

I see that you write in your teaching philosophy that you make no pretense to knowledge and that the goal of your teaching is to lead students, by inviting them to think deeply, to draw their own conclusions.  I have to question, however, how much that is really happening in your classes.  I notice that, having asked a question, you frequently answer it without giving the students time to fully explore their own answers and that, when they do offer an answer of their own, you often move immediately to your next question or point without truly engaging–or inviting other students to engage–with their answer on its own merits.  I wonder if that approach really facilitates critical thinking or simply moves the vehicle of information delivery from lectures to questions.  A thought to consider!

These are not uncommon problems in classes drawing–as I believe you are here–on the Socratic seminar approach.  This approach can be powerful and electric in the classroom but, if not carefully implemented, questioning can be just as teacher-dominated and productive of passive learning as lectures.  To improve your technique, I suggest you watch some particularly thoughtful discussion leaders in action.  Here are a couple you might start with:  Jodi Rice and Trent Batson.  There are plenty of other great ones out there:  I’m learning a lot from them myself!

Just playing around.  This is what happens when you wake up too early on a Sunday morning and have time to lie around thinking.  What do you think?  Was Socrates a great teacher or not?

 

In the company of teachers

There are lots of good reasons I’m a teacher.  Teaching is fun, and hard, and the only challenge I’ve taken on that seems to me truly inexhaustible.  But the most important reason I’m a teacher is that, after all these years, the people I most want to grow up to be are all teachers too.

When I was younger, I used to wonder how I would be sure my life had a deeper meaning, beyond earning a paycheck and keeping a roof over my head.  I wanted to live a life that was bigger than that, but I wondered how one could know what that really meant.

On Friday, I found myself standing in the school parking lot in the dark after the spring concert with three people I love.  We are all teachers, and all deeply enmeshed in different ways in the life of the school beyond the classroom.  It was 9:30, and we were all getting ready to go home and fall into bed.  We were all a little muted by exhaustion, all a little giddy with pride for the girls, who did a great job, and all a little out of sorts after a week of the inescapable wrangling over details that constitutes the other half of the work of the School. The other three are all older than me–between 10 and 40 years so.  They are, each in her own way, fundamentally and unapologetically themselves, which is harder than it sounds. They are all comfortable with blurry lines and not fazed by tears.

They’re my friends:  I take them for granted most of the time.  But Friday night, I found myself looking at these three strong women again and thinking, ‘I am proud to be in their company.’  If I can stand on an equal footing with women like this, then I have done something in my life.

A silent discussion

Some of my 9th graders' thoughts on Bossuet's Divine Right of Kings

I tried something new with my World History classes today, and I loved it enough I think I’m going to make it a regular thing.  My dilemma for today was that it was National Day of Silence, a day on which students undertake to remain silent all day in sympathy with LGBT students whose voices are silenced every day by the weight of societal disapproval.  Usually, I have only a handful of students observing the day in each class, and we manage in one way or another, but this year I had an entire class of activists, so I had to do something different.  What I did was hold a silent “chalk talk.”

This is an idea that I got from my colleague Heather White (thanks, Heather!);  I think it comes from the Coalition of Essential Schools.  It’s described here:  Chalk Talk Protocol. The basic idea is to capture a discussion, visually, on a chalk board/SmartBoard/very large piece of paper.  One starts with a central question in the middle, and participants write answers/reactions/etc. around it.  The result, when it works right, is a clear representation of an issue in its complexity.  It is, I think, better at capturing complexity than at boiling things down, although patterns do eventually emerge if one sticks with it long enough.

So here’s what I did:

1) I started with the text.  They had read a three-page primary source (a selection from Bossuet about divine right) for homework.  I asked them to spend 10 minutes annotating their copy–with the goal of getting them to look more closely at the language–and then asked them to swap papers with a neighbor and compare each other’s annotations.  This gave them a shared basis in detail to start from.

2) I gave them the question for the day:  “What can we learn from Bossuet?” and briefly explained chalk talks.  I emphasized the fact that I wanted them to connect with each other’s ideas:  not merely to collect a lot of unconnected points side by side but to ask questions, take points further, agree and disagree, or make connections between points.

3) After things had wound down (mostly because they ran out of room on the chalkboard), I asked each student to summarize the discussion in one or two sentences.  I then had them pass these around, adding comments as desired, until each had made its way the whole way around the room.  I thought this last step was particularly important because it forced students to step back from the forest of details and draw some conclusions;  on an ordinary day, I’d probably do that part out loud.

What I loved about this:

• Participation was huge! Something about the silent format drew out some of my usually quiet girls, and I felt that there was a stronger sense of group ownership of the end result.
• The discussion was deeper.  While in oral discussions my girls often spend a lot of time repeating points already made, here they could keep track of what was already established, with the result that they pushed the discussion further.
• The points were better.  Something about the written format drew out some very thoughtful, sophisticated comments from students who sometimes just say “that was weird, man!”

Things I’d do differently next time:

• In one class, students got so interested in their written arguments that things dissolved into three separate, unconnected debates in different corners of the board.  Next time, I think I’d build in ‘pull back and look at the big picture’ time about half way through, or else oblige people to move around.
• The “passing notes” part of the lesson tended to develop bottlenecks, as some students commented much more than others.  Next time, I’d build in a time limit:  one minute, then switch, repeat.

These are minor quibbles:  the bottom line is that I loved the way the chalk talk made my girls’ thinking visible and challenged them to take it further.

What do I mean by a scholarly discussion?

What should the ideal class discussion look like?

I’m thinking about wonderful discussions I’ve had with groups of working academics in the past.  What made them different from the discussions my students have?  The scholars are experts in their fields, of course, but I don’t think that’s the major difference.  In fact, I can think of some great scholarly discussions which had nothing to do with the professional work of any of the participants:  a group of archaeologists talking about how to distribute water rights in the west or a mix of ancient historians, writers and physicists arguing about the origins of the Supreme Court.  What made these discussions so satisfying, I think, was how each person approached the question–habits of thought–and how consciously they participated in the discussion.  (This is very similar to the argument Sam Wineburg makes about the way historians read:  I’m simply extending it to how historians talk).

Discussion leading vs. teaching discussion–what are we doing, anyhow?

We all know what we want a discussion class to look like:  all students should be engaged and active participants, the tone should be one of civil egalitarianism, the points should be on-topic and well grounded in evidence, and the whole should build organically to a satisfying sense that something new has been discovered.  But how does that happen and, in particular, what is the teacher supposed to do while the students are saying all these wonderful things? If class is all about students talking, who needs a teacher anyway?

Talking about things, or why is discussion so hard?

The first year I taught a high school class after years leading college discussion sections, one of my students complained on an end-of-the-year evaluation that “all we do is sit around and talk.”  I was appalled at the difference between her perception of the work of the class and mine, but it was a very useful insight.  Discussion is something we as teachers sometimes take for granted, and we shouldn’t.

“Class Discussion” is a bedrock element of most good classes.  Most teachers are the product of discussion-based learning, in college and grad school if not before, and it seems natural to us. When it works right, discussion lessons are sublime–they produce a feeling of equality, engagement and discovery that is unrivaled in any other sort of lesson.  My favorite teaching memories are nearly all moments from discussion classes–but so are my least favorite memories.  I’ve taught some clunkers, where discussion dragged brutally or where I was uneasily aware of imposing my will on the theoretically free exchange. Of the classes I have observed over the years, many of the least successful have been discussion classes.  Teaching through discussion is hard.

What’s in a classroom?

I had the chance last week to visit the Stanford School of Design.  It is an institution that is much about innovative spaces, and it was fun to walk through them.  I loved the modularity of everything, the odd shapes hanging from the ceiling, and the fact that all the furniture was on wheels.

I wasn’t so crazy about the high ceilings and huge, warehouse-like spaces:  my favorite teaching spaces have always been small, intimate ones that become hideaways within a larger institution.  That’s okay, I think–there is no more one best classroom than there is one best teacher.

What I really came away with, though, was a new idea about what spaces can do.  I have thought before about how spaces shape groupings and encourage engagement or retreat, hierarchy or equality.  The thing I realized at Stanford was the role a space, and its decoration, can play in generating excitement and setting the tone for exploration even before the conversations begin.  Next year, I want to bring a little of that flair home, making my room bolder, quirkier and more colorful, and, I hope, tacitly encouraging my students to be the same.  I’ll let you know how it goes!

A Taxonomy of Lesson Plans

I was talking to a friend about the limitations of lesson plans.  While every once in a while I find someone else’s lesson plan that does exactly what I want to do, it’s rare.  Usually, I end up either cannibalizing them for primary sources or browsing through them for new approaches.  What I really want are not lesson plans but lesson templates:  “here is a way you may not have thought of to teach this kind of thing.”  How great would it be to have a crowd-sourced repository of that sort of lesson starter?

Thinking about that took me one step back, though.  I realized I mean two different things by ‘types of lessons.’  On the one hand, I collect specific activities that can be applied to many topics, such as “create a newspaper page” or  “write a three minute essay,” but, beyond that, it is useful for me to think about whether these approaches fit well into broader categories. Thinking in these categories might offer more precise language for what is likely to make a successful lesson.

I thought I’d try the exercise of grouping the sorts of lessons that have worked well for me at something like a genus, rather than species, level.  Here’s how I define a successful exercise, for the purpose of

Recipe for a debate

My students love debates.  They are great for cranking up the level of enthusiasm in the classroom.  Sometimes, though, they generate more heat than light.  We just had a great debate in my World History class about the Investiture Conflict:  after four years of doing this particular exercise, I feel as though I’ve finally got it just the way I want it. That got me thinking about what makes a debate work or not work as a tool for real learning.  Here’s what’s worked particularly well for me:

A Quiet Class

There is nothing in teaching quite like the feeling of being in a classroom full of students clamoring to make their points (it’s particularly nice, of course, if those points are about the subject I planned for the class to cover).  Coming from a background that prized discussion over all other classroom activities, I have always worked to stoke the level of energy and participation in my classes.

One of my favorite teaching moments was when a colleague complained to me that a bitter argument had broken out in the student Commons over the Investiture Controversy after an in-class debate and the supporters of Henry IV were now not speaking to supporters of the pope.  (Is it bad to confess that I was secretly thrilled?)  A classroom full of students working silently in rows is my idea of Purgatory.

A class I’m teaching this year, however, has made me rethink the value of silence.