My first semester in this program, I enrolled in Content Area Literacy and discovered the world of Paideia and Socratic seminars. I was immediately intrigued by the idea of letting my students talk to engage them in deep analytical reading and thinking. I began to realize that as students question a text, they dig more deeply into the themes and assertions of the author and therefore become more engaged and purposeful readers. I decided to put this into practice with the fifth graders I was teaching at the time. In September, I introduced several articles and books about Christopher Columbus in our social studies lessons over a few days. We read these articles looking for differences of opinion about Columbus, whether he was a hero or a villain for his actions in "discovering" America. Then one day my students came into a classroom that had been reorganized with our desks in a huge circle that filled the room. I presented three rules for our discussion - 1) You must listen when others are speaking. 2) You may share your opinion respectfully to build off of your classmates' thoughts or bring up a new point of your own. 3) You may NOT raise your hand. I posed the question "Was Christopher Columbus a hero or a villain?" and sat back and watched the magic happen. My students spoke up. They shared their opinions and backed them up with text evidence from the books and articles we had read. They disagreed respectfully and intelligently with one another. They drew conclusions about their own actions being heroic or villainous. And I said very little at all. I knew then that my classroom would never be the same.
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As Roberts and Billings (2008) write, “it’s not enough just to read about an interesting idea, or to discuss it informally, or to write about it without preparation. Rather, to teach students to think in a consistent and deliberate way, we have to practice thinking in concert with the full range of literacy skills” (p. 36). Paideia seminars make this kind of teaching possible. |
the_benefits_of_paideia_seminar_in_the_literacy_classroom.doc | |
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