Do You Have 21st-Century Skills to Help Your Students Succeed? Do Your Students Have 21st-Century Skills to Think for Themselves? The Power of the Socratic Classroom has the answers you are looking for—answers that will supply the strategies to show students how to succeed into the future. A future that has unknown products, unidentified jobs, and unanticipated challenges. In Socratic Seminar, teachers shift to the role of facilitator, where they help their students develop the collaborative interpersonal skills, the critical and creative thinking skills, and the speaking and listening skills to face the upcoming challenges of the 21st century.
Charles Fischer has taught in public and private schools in a variety of settings, from rural Maine to inner city Atlanta. In the past 20 years, he has worked with a wide range of students from 4th grade to AP English and has been nominated for Teacher of the Year four times. He has his Master’s degree in Teaching & Learning from the University of Southern Maine, and received his B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Binghamton University. His latest book, The Power of the Socratic Classroom, has won four awards, including the NIEA Best Education Book. His first novel, Beyond Infinity, won a 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award bronze medal (YA fiction). His areas of expertise are Socratic Seminar, Active Listening, Inquiry, Teaching & Learning, and Critical & Creative Thinking. He is currently working on a book of poetry, a short story collection, and several novels.
After facilitating a few seminars, make a list of the actions you took: asking questions, redirecting students, suggesting a turn-and-talk, and so on. Begin handing those tasks over to the students so that you can move on to more complex tasks, such as paraphrasing or adding academic language..
Book Excerpt
The Power of the Socratic Classroom
One way to help is giving students specific jobs, individually, in small groups, or as a class. This will allow them to focus on a single aspect of the text, both for annotating and/or for participating in the seminar itself. With the gradual release of responsibility idea in mind, you will be able to introduce and assign individualized jobs, and the students will be able to focus on more specific aspects of the text (product-based jobs) or the seminar (process-based jobs) or both.
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