Your next question may be, "can I do this with my elementary aged students?"
A Socratic Seminar is a discussion method begun by, guess who? Anyone? Bueller? :)
Socrates. Of course!
His method of creating learners who can think and articulate answers for themselves taught his students to discuss their ideas. In elementary schools, where I have spent most of my teaching career, I began to use the Socratic Seminar Method with third graders. Since then, I've utilized Socratic Seminars for kids as young as first grade with great success. One of the biggest buy-ins for students is understanding that what you are going to have them do is actually on a high school or college level. They love to hear that.
Success breeds success
Just determine you will try it out. Soon, you will have a group of students who can carry on an academic discussion, and all you had to do was find really good literature, choose the best topics/questions for discussion, and teach them the norms. Success at this level is very rewarding for your students. They know they are doing something amazing.
Practice makes better.
You will have to give them practice time to learn the norms and become fearless to express themselves. This means you have to have a safe environment where nobody laughs at anybody because of their opinions or thoughts. You also have to teach elementary students how to accept and welcome answers different from their own and not become offended when someone disagrees. You will need to teach polite sentence stems to begin a differing opinion. Students will learn to use these and they may even spill over into other academic activities. I have definitely noticed this happen in my classes.
What to do
1. Find a couple of great story books that have strong themes (middle school students love story books...they just don't want to check them out from the library. This gives them permission to read great stories.) The books you choose are probably your favorite read-alouds anyway! These will be your "training books." Novels can also be used, but short stories/books are best to start with.
2. Write a few discussion topics. Drag out the list of Bloom's Verbs that is probably in your files. Find verbs from columns four or five that cause students to think critically. You should pre-teach what the verbs mean. You should NEVER front-load ideas about the story prior to reading or conducting a Socratic Seminar. Your topics/questions should not have a correct answer. No literal questions allowed.
3. Tell the students what you are going to do after the book. Go over the norms. Find some videos on YouTube of younger kids having Socratic Seminars.
4. Read the story book. (Remember, no front-loading or pre-teaching outside of going over the norms and the few Bloom's Verbs.)
5. Read the book again the next day if time allows.
6. Conduct your first Socratic Seminar.
This is not hard, friends. It's not a secret, complicated method. It just requires training and celebrating small successes. We are at a place in my classroom where we set goals for our own personal participation and use rubrics to evaluate our participation. My students write their own topics (I choose which ones we use), and they know how to use Bloom's Verbs (I tell them it's a list that only teachers had, and I'm SHARING it with them. So coool.)
If you want support and some question stems to get you started, I do offer that in my TPT store. Or, you can WING IT!
I'm adding my Socratic Norms here for you to use:
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