Filming a Socratic Seminar

As with the Warm-up activity that gets the brain going at the beginning of class, my students end class with an activity that lets them feel closure with the lesson and their work for that day. The activity is almost always an online reflective journal or survey, and the purpose is to have an impact on and inform my planning for the next class. Sometimes we end the period with a whole-class conversation instead, especially after a Socratic Seminar day, because we use the conversation to debrief and think metacognitively about our discussion process as a whole group. Students should develop metacognition skills as a way of understanding how they learn. The debrief looks at the learning process for the day and is that opportunity for me to point out how different students learned well because they have certain strategies they used effectively. In this way, more students can benefit from that reflection. Literacy development requires so many strategies that operate differently given the text. When my students can benefit from understanding how they each learn, a strong sense of community and collaboration develops.

There are an infinite number of digital content providers and tech tools and education programs a blended teacher can choose to use in her classroom. Check out how and why Johanna uses specific digital content and ed tech tools!

The Warm Up is a strategy I use during the first 10 minutes of every class to activate my students' interest and to prepare them individually and collectively to engage in the content of the day's lesson. A Warm Up can be a journal write, a table conversation, a review of a short Gooru Collection (please see the "Gooru Collection" strategy video), or a teacher-generated survey that students take using a Google Form. With the exception of table conversations, my students understand that Warm Ups are silent exercises that allow them to reflect honestly and by themselves without the influence of other's opinions. Responding to a Google Form Warm Up is one of my students' favorite strategies because the common spreadsheet populated by their answers is shared with everyone across multiple sections of English 12, making students who are in different class periods feel more connected. The Google Form Warm Up also allows my students to practice working with data through small-group and whole-class conversations.