Socratic Seminar and John Hattie

Teachers are the ones that can take staff development to the next level. These teachers took two different sessions and combined them into resources for the classroom. I am so impressed with the way they have applied their learning - both theoretically and practically.

Good morning Shona,

I am  submitting my lesson for our Socratic Seminar. 

I believe you met my colleague, Ross Perschbacher. I shared with him what I had learned from our PD and he shared some comments you had made at a different PD session. We decided to come together and revamp our Socratic Circle. 

This is the model I learned about when Jane and I
visited a school in New Zealand.

We have decided to break it up and reteach three parts: Building Knowledge, Making Meaning, and Applying Understanding. We feel as though this will help the kids better understand what they are to get out of Socratic Circles. 

We then created a flip book that the kids will add too as we present/teach each new concept. We just got done with Building Knowledge and the improvement in discussion was just awesome!!! 

I am going to attach our teaching page as well as the student flip book. 

Next week we move on to Making Meaning. 

Before I forget, we are anchoring the process as well so that the kids can see it on the wall and refer to it. We discussed annotating again and made a few changes. 

The biggest change/improvement is that any underlined or highlighted sentence MUST have a connection or question next to it. We will add to this as we go along. 

Please let me know if you need any more information or have any other questions. 

I look forward to hearing your comments.

Danna Trujillo