Below, excerpted from the current issue of Saint David's Magazine is Assistant Upper School Head Dr. Evan Morse's article on the Socratic seminar experience in eighth grade:
Grade Eight - Delving into Complex Questions
The eighth-grade history program emphasizes the development of analytical thinking and engagement with primary sources. Socratic seminars combine these two skills; as a result, these seminars are a key component of the eighth-grade experience. For each seminar, the students are assigned a complex question to investigate… What were the causes of Savonarola’s dramatic rise in Florence and was his downfall inevitable? To what extent did Luther’s religious reforms cause the German Peasants’ Revolt? What were the most important factors in the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan? In the week leading up to a seminar, boys are responsible for annotating a substantial collection of primary sources devoted to the topic and then preparing a preliminary answer, with their own questions to move the discussion forward. During the seminar itself, students are entirely responsible for working together to resolve the question before them without teacher intervention. Seated together around the seminar table in the Hume Library, they are required to not only work to settle the question at hand through debate and analysis of the sources, but to set the structure of the seminar itself.
In requiring boys to partake in productive debate and to reflect explicitly on the conditions of such debate, these Socratic seminars cultivate boys’ ability to articulate a reasoned point of view by respectfully engaging with differing perspectives and ideas. Over the course of the year, individual classes will typically cycle through a variety of strategies for managing a complex discussion—appointing a student moderator, calling on the next speaker, rotating through a slate of student voices, or simply trying to speak over each other—and in so doing take note of what helps them advance their collective thinking.
As they debate and discuss with their classmates, each student is empowered to make use of the discussion “moves” he has learned in his time at Saint David’s, especially in Socratic seminars in Grades Six and Seven, making them his own without teacher support. Ultimately, the complexity of the questions and the difficulty of the primary sources demand that boys find ways to listen to multiple points of view. In this way, the seminars function as laboratories of civil discourse. For this reason, the seminar questions are carefully structured to resist easy answers that would push the students into opposing teams in a debate.The preparatory work for each seminar is just as important in encouraging students to develop critical thinking skills. Developmentally, eighth-grade students may still want to quickly find the “right” answer to a question, but they are now also capable of holding complex answers in balance and analyzing bias and motivation across perspectives. For this reason, each source packet contains eight-to-twelve different primary source accounts of the same topic. Grappling with the complexities of each source deepens the students’ understanding, and the answers that their class arrives at inevitably involve a great deal of nuance as a result of this work. Ultimately, this work is the strongest preparation not only for reasoned debate but for analytical writing in which evidence clearly supports a thesis.
