Readings: Week 6

I have to say book clubs are one of those things I've never thought about much, because they're largely the domain of public libraries, which are outside my area of interest. So it was nice to read a couple articles on where book clubs are at these days and how they've changed. Nothing in Dempsey's or Hoffert's articles really surprised me; I'd fully expect that today's libraries are the source of the latest and greatest innovation in the book club world. It particularly struck me personally that public libraries are using book clubs geared toward young childless adults as an attempt to draw in patrons who don't interact much with them, because that's a demographic that includes me. As someone who doesn't do much recreational reading, especially not of fiction, but would like to do more, a book club geared toward things I'm interested in would probably be quite a good way to draw me into a public library.

What really intrigued me, though, were the Socratic seminar articles. I was really interested to see what exactly these articles said a Socratic seminar was and how to do them, because my standing impression of "Socratic" was just "learning by asking questions," which isn't very helpful in terms of actual implementation. What I kept thinking in reading Tredway's article, though, was, "This is just using fancy language to describe good group discussion!" The classes I have enjoyed the most as undergraduate and a graduate student are those that are based heavily on intentional, focused, well-facilitated group discussion that analyzes a text everyone in the group has read beforehand. As a history major/English minor, I just really loved being in classes like this and felt like I always learned so much more than I did from lectures or other activities. To me, this "Socratic seminar" method wasn't any new or crazy idea, then, it was just an explication of how to do good group discussion, which I thought was a pretty basic educational tool. But the ubiquity of such a teaching method is probably something that's been skewed by my liberal-arts background.

Metzger's article threw me for a bit of a loop. I mean, she does a really job laying out how she implemented this teaching method and made it really successful her context. I appreciated how she showed the ways it could be used to teach the specific learning objectives related to reading comprehension that she wanted to get across. But... I kept thinking it all sounded a little too good to be true. I've never taught high school freshman, so I guess I really can't judge, but I felt like I've been in groups of undergraduates who would not show anything near the results that Metzger describes her class showing after two months of using this approach.

I think the solution here is that Metzger is probably a really, really good teacher, and she (obviously, who would?) doesn't give herself enough credit for how much of a role she played a role in making this a successful teaching practice. At one point, she even makes it sound easy, implying that once you get started, the students will just take over and the learning will happen. But clearly this isn't what she was doing at all. You can see throughout the whole article how Metzger was guiding the process, checking to see what students were learning, making adjustments when things didn't go well, and overall being very aware of how things were going. (She videotaped the first class period and re-watched it so she could see what she was doing well! How many teachers would do that? Clearly she really cared about making this work.) We've all been in classes where group discussion just didn't work and just didn't go well. My contention is that this usually happens because the teacher doesn't really know how to facilitate discussion, which includes doing all the things, on both a micro- and macro-level, that Metzger did here. In general, there probably needs to be more emphasis on the really important role the teacher plays in making Socratic seminars work as a teaching tool.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the high school where Metzger taught as noted at the end of the article. It's in suburban Boston and is consistently ranked as one of the best public high schools in the state of Massachusetts. (It's also the alma mater of Michael Dukakis, Conan O'Brien, and Mike Wallace. Thank you, Wikipedia.) It's obviously the sort of place where students are used to high standards and high-quality critical thinking. In a different school, with different students and different expectations, this teaching method would probably be considerably more complicated to implement. I'd be curious to see how implementing this would go for someone who teaching in a rather different environment.

The other overall observation I have is that Socratic seminars are really conducive to the type of learning that's about building really complex skills that can transfer to lots of other environments. It's really not as helpful when the focus is on covering as much content as possible, because that's what students are going to be tested on. Unfortunately, this might be the biggest hindrance to wider implementation in today's public-school settings.

ETA: Not saying anything here about the Prensky article because I assume the whole point is to have a rather detailed discussion of it in class.