Friday, July 24, 2009

Can a Socratic Seminar be used in a mathematics classroom?

I think that the idea of a Socratic seminar is powerful.  It gives license to students to create knowledge and understanding.   It also contradicts the notion of a teacher as sole knowledge giver.  Several readings have demonstrated the effectiveness of the Socratic seminar in non-science classrooms.  However, can we really use this with math?  I think the answer to this question is YES.  Think of the book Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching by Magdalene Lampert.  Her method of teaching allows students to present different points about math problems like a Socratic seminar.  The moral of the story is: We should not underestimate the applicability of great teaching techniques to mathematics.
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2 comments:

  1. Jeff StanzlerJuly 26, 2009 at 2:51 PM

    Kya, I'd love to read a few more of your thoughts about how you might imagine using this model in your math classroom. Maybe a future post?

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  2. Sarah PrinceJuly 30, 2009 at 9:05 PM

    Kya, I really like the Socratic seminar, too. Even though it probably is more easily translatable to an English classroom, my prior experience with it was in philosophy, which is really where it originated. Anyway, I hope I'll be able to pull one off one day. :)
    Just now as I was thinking about philosophy, which was pretty difficult for me, as math became as I approached calculus (scary! I never got past pre-calc.), got me to thinking that using the method in math might not be so foreign a concept as one might originally think, since philosophy is so rooted in strict rules of logic, and math probably is, too, right? :-D

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