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.
Well, we can all rely on the cliché of teaching students how to think rather than what to think. The question in my mind is: How do we do that?
How do we facilitate the process of thinking? How do we encourage creative thinking on the one hand, and critical thinking on the other? How do we build daily thinking routines?
These are the questions that currently haunt me...especially in my own classroom. I think we should be asking these questions every class, every day.
Book Excerpt
The Power of the Socratic Classroom
Schools often create a learning environment where a “good” student is defined as someone who follows all of the rules and expectations and a “bad” student is someone who cannot or will not. For the “good” student, this means: listening, taking notes, studying for tests, memorizing information, and reciting back what the teacher wants. In short, it’s doing what you’re told. Or, perhaps simply: “Obey.” By the way, Shepard Fairey’s work is great for Socratic Seminar.
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