The drama of Socratic Seminar

Reed has had some bumps in his Honors English class as school has gotten underway. He was lucky to get a teacher with an amazing reputation....who delivered her baby three weeks into school and then took 12 weeks off. Yay for her, womp womp for her students.

Evidently a big thing in high school English is this "Socratic Seminar." This is certainly not something I ever did in high school, we had no clue what it was all about. Here's a description:

The Socratic seminar is a formal discussion, based on a text, in which the leader asks open-ended questions. Within the context of the discussion, students listen closely to the comments of others, thinking critically for themselves, and articulate their own thoughts and their responses to the thoughts of others.

In a class with 30 kids, Reed found this task impossibly difficult. The first seminar he didn't talk at all. We consulted with the teacher, and coached him some, and thought he was all set for the second go-round. Nope. Not a word. He said he didn't know when/how to jump in, and also that everyone had already said the things he planned to say. 

The substitute teacher was willing to give him the written assignment (the one a student would get if he/she were absent the day of a seminar) for these two sessions, to make sure the issue was social anxiety, not just that he didn't understand the material. The teacher warned him that the written assignment would be graded harder than the verbal one (that seems pretty unfair, but okay). Reed did very well on both, so the sub knew that it really was just social anxiety keeping him from participating, not a lack of knowledge on the subject. 

So we needed a plan. We met together with Reed, his English sub, and the guidance counselor and they came up with a plan. The sub said that some other kids were having the same struggle, so the other English teachers agreed to do a small group version of the seminar, and eventually work up to participation in the regular classroom version. During this meeting, the sub said Reed was "wicked smart" and did a really good job on the written work. 

The small group version worked well for Reed, and he got an A. Hopefully he will gain some confidence participating in these seminars, since evidently they will happen all the way through high school. Ugh. I feel for him...I also wouldn't feel comfortable participating in these.

There was lots more drama on this, with Reed thinking we were hassling him unnecessarily...but we all soldiered on. I hope it'll continue to work out well.