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.
There's nothing wrong with opinions... to start. Most classroom discussions are an exchange of opinion without a lot of evidence or logic. Certainly most discussions do not go deep enough for students to work out a logistical system of thought cross-referenced with substantiation.
But that is one of the goals for a good Socratic Seminar group. It's the goal of complete seminar to build a network of thought that holds together deeper ideas, to dig into what a text is really trying to say.
Book Excerpt
The Power of the Socratic Classroom
The goal of a Socratic Seminar is to engage the entire group to explore truth, to pull away from the battle of opinions and rise up above the fog, and see what a text is really trying to say.
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