You ever try to have a conversation with a painting? No?
Happens to me almost every day. Seriously! It’s frustrating.
In fact, I’m not the only one with this experience. Most high school teachers share this frustration in common with me.
By now most of you realize that I’m not really talking about conversing with the Mona Lisa or anything like that. Rather, I’m talking about every teacher’s nightmare: trying to lead a group of teenagers in discussion who are obstinate, bored, and who won’t engage. Even almost every Teacher of the Year has had this experience at least a few times. We all search to and fro searching for a strategy or two that will wake our students out of their slumber. The one strategy that keep hearing again and again in this regard is called “Socratic Circles.” Those who effectively utilize this strategy report that students are incredibly engaged in deep and enriching discussion. Learning actually happens, and students buy into it!
I’m all for that. I’ve researched S.C’s a bit and tried my hand at them a few times, but I can always improve on how I implement them, so I recently picked up a book titled Socratic Circles: Fostering Critical and Creative Thinking in Middle and High School, by Matt Copeland.
Copeland notes that teachers who utilize S.C’s lead the discussion by asking pointed and well-placed questions, just like the strategy’s namesake did. Questions, rather than spoon-fed answers, are a more effective way to get students to really dig deeper into meaning. The author also hammers home that S.C’s are meant to be student-centered. That is, the teacher hands the reigns of the discussion over to the students, letting them choose the direction the discussion takes. So far, so good, for the most part.
He covers more details about the nuts and bolts of the strategy, such as how to select a text to discuss, how to place the desks, and so on, but it’s the “big ideas” behind the strategy that have captured my interest so far.
There’s a lot to like about Socratic Circles, at least the way Copeland defines it. Letting students take ownership of a conversation, for example, can instill lots of really great things in students. Working cooperatively, not being dependent upon a teacher for thinking (can’t take me with you in your backpack when you graduate, after all!), and how to handle disagreement–it’s all there.
But there are some things about Copeland’s “big ideas” that trouble me. There are some things about his way of defining the strategy that instills potentially harmful ways of thinking in the students.
For instance, take his bare bones definition of S.C’s:
In the simplest terms, Socratic circles are an in-class discussion that is focused upon a particular piece of text that students have spent time reading and analyzing. However, the nature and process of that discussion differs radically from the typical teacher-led, question-and-answer discussion. In a Socratic circle, students work cooperatively to construct meaning from what they have read and avoid focusing on a ‘correct’ meaning interpretation of the text. Student understanding emerges as the discussion progresses and is always open to revision. Students base their construction of meaning upon the connections they can make to what they already know and the ideas and opinions that are shared within their group. This cooperative creation then stands as meaning over which students have almost complete ownership. The input and suggestions of the teachers are simply promptings to continue the process of discourse and the search for meaning. (emphasis mine)
As he says elsewhere:
Socratic dialogue is not about answers and solutions; it is about accepting multiple perspectives on a certain topic and reexamining our own experiences and opinions in light of those perspectives…Socratic circles offer a controlled, pedagogical strategy that can bring dialogue into our classrooms, a type of real-world, student-centered learning where the teacher acts only to keep the discussion moving forward, regardless of its direction. (emphasis mine)
There’s lots to cheer here, but there are some troubling ideas brewing as well. First, I’ve written before on how the whole “constructing meaning” way of teaching reflects a constructivist view of the world (and here) that is at odds with how communication actually is done in the real world and is horribly contradictory.
I doubt Copeland would want his own text to be treated that way. That is, if his students were reading his own text and discussing it, would he be kosher with them interpreting it in a way that radically departs from his intentions? We can easily imagine a scenario in which the group agrees on an interpretation that is a) consistent with their own background knowledge, b) consistent with the opinions of all in the group, and c) quite contradictory from what Copeland, the author of the text, actually meant. According to the paragraph above, such a scenario is entirely in line with his vision of Socratic circles, but I’d go to Vegas on the bet that he’d ask a few questions to get them to focus not just on the topic of discussion, but on the correct interpretation of the text.
All I’m pointing at here is that Copeland needs to add an ingredient: students should *discover* meaning not just via their own background knowledge and opinions of the group, but via reason, logic, ethics, and the authorial intent that can be deciphered in the text itself.
That’s a mouthful, and sometimes it’s a tricky enterprise, but it’s possible to make some real ground on that basis. In fact, without those things, communication wouldn’t be possible at all.
I can understand the notion that, as a leader of S.C’s, you don’t want to just focus on interpreting things the right way, and I understand that some texts have a range of interpretations and applications that are valid and consistent with it. I can recognize this without going to the extreme and saying that you shouldn’t focus on right interpretation at all, which is what Copeland suggests.
Secondly and relatedly, we can also imagine scenarios in which the students “clarify” values that are quite immoral. What if the discussion goes in that direction?
For instance, say students in an English classroom are discussing a clip of the movie Milk, about gay activist Harvey Milk. Most of the students, all homophobes, confidently declare that saying sexual slurs towards gay students and shunning them is perfectly ok. A few students object, but in the course of conversation are convinced to join the crowd. They use their (very limited) background knowledge to come to this conclusion, and it is quite consistent with the opinions of every group member. What now?
You might balk and say this scenario is unrealistic and that it would never happen. Not so–there are corners of the world that are incredibly intolerant of homosexuality, in both the new and classic sense of the term. It is a capital crime in some countries. Even if this specific scenario is far fetched, the main point still stands, for it has happened in other instances…in a certain school a few years back, for example, a group of students engaged in a Socratic-like discussion suddenly “clarified” their values that cheating should be ok!
What did the teacher do? She could have talked about how cheating is actually wrong, but instead she pulled rank: if you cheat in my class, I will dock your grade. Where I come from, that is a logical fallacy: persuasion from the stick.
I could go on: there are other scenarios that are more realistic than the first, yet show the same weakness of Copeland’s definition. The segregated, very racist classroom in a 1958 Little Rock, Arkansas high school is one. You get the point.
What is ironic is that this differs significantly from Socrates’ own vision. Sure, he used a questioning style of teaching rather than lecture, but he was concerned with guiding his students to actual truth. He was concerned with helping them discover “what is justice?” “what is virtue?” etc, etc. That is, though he realized that often the person who boasts of knowledge is incredibly ignorant, he was trying to help his students reexamine reality so that they could arrive at some sort of answer at the end of the day!
Am I attacking a straw man (if I am, that would certainly make my point about authorial intent being important, contra to the lit mantra today)? I sincerely hope so. If I am, I hope Copeland shows up and….corrects my interpretation of his text.
To his credit, he doesn’t advocate the teacher totally giving the reigns 100% over to students regardless of direction. Later in the book he gives suggestions for how to steer discussion. However, virtually every suggestion he gives is centered around getting discussion going in the first place, keeping it going, keeping it civil, and keeping it on topic.
He gives very little indication that teachers are supposed to guide discussion if they think students are on the wrong track. In fact, when it comes to interpretation and application, he gives very little indication that there is such a thing as “the wrong track” in the first place! At one point, he mentions stepping in when a student takes things in an “absurd” direction, but he doesn’t clarify what he means. Thus, the sentence is quite vague and is overshadowed by his many other radical constructivist utterances.
So, what’s a guy like me to do? Spit out the bones and swallow the meat, I guess. I’m still going to utilize the strategy in my classroom, but there’s no need to adopt the radical constructivist underpinnings and practices that pop up here and there.
