Book Review
Copeland, Matt. Socratic Circles: Fostering Critical and Creative Thinking in Middle and High School. Portland, Maine: Stenhouse, 2005, 163 pp, ISBN 1-57110-394-5 [Paper] ($17.50)
Books on teaching ideas come and go, but truths are eternal. Socrates discovered an approach to epistemology a long time ago that works, and Matt Copeland has taken this idea and made it his own. He has discovered a way of using Socratic circles to successfully engage middle and high school English students with texts they are reading.
Socratic dialogues are an integral part of the Great Books
programs at places like the University of Chicago and St. John’s College in
Annapolis, Maryland, and they have been in Mortimer Adler’s book The Paidea
Proposal. Regardless of origin, Copeland has put all of this together out of
personal necessity—he was driven by his need to find a way to get his
unmotivated students actively involved with the content of his classes. After
describing in Chapter 1 what led him on his search for an alternative method to
what he was doing with his students, he then describes the history of the
concept and what is at its foundation:
Socratic questioning is a systematic
process for examining the ideas, questions, and answers that
form the basis of human belief. It involves recognizing that all new
understanding is linked to prior understanding, that thought itself is a
continuous thread woven throughout our lives rather than isolated sets of
questions and answers. (pp. 7-8)
Copeland then proceeds to explain that Socratic circles are made up of students
grouped into two concentric circles. The inner circle focuses on determining the
meaning of the text using Socratic dialogues, while the second, outer circle
observes that dynamics of the first groups’ discussion, and then provides the
first group with an evaluation of their meaning-constructing behavior.
In Chapter 2, Copeland describes how teachers can get
these kinds of discussions started in their classrooms, and in Chapter 3 he
focuses on how to prepare students for this kind of discourse. Each chapter has
several tables and illustrations the include forms that teachers can give to
their students to help guide and organize their thinking and performance. For
instance, I particularly like the table on p. 47 that the carefully describes
the dichotomy between the concepts of dialogue and debate. I also like the
format (pp. 52-53) Copeland provides in Chapter 4 to help students annotate the
written texts the night before they are going to be discussed in class. This
initial preparatory analysis is accomplished through a written analysis that
operates at different levels of thought from literal to metaphorical and insures
students’ preparation for the discussion the next day.
I also like the feedback form in Chapter 5 (p. 79) that Copeland provides to
help students assess their own performance. Self-assessment is important
because, as Vygotsky points out in Mind and Thought, self-assessment is
the key to the mastery of any task. To the degree that students use this form to
evaluate the behavior of their peers—when they are observing those who are
discussing the meaning of a text---they learn a process of analysis that allows
them to step out from the experience and evaluate their own performance. They
internalize a template that can guide their self-reflection and then provide
direction when it is their turn to discuss the meaning of texts. Further, as
students assess their own thinking, they can affect their own future behavior by
planning and establishing goals on how they can improve their performance in
future discussions.
In Chapter 6, Copeland shares an edited transcript of a Socratic circle the
occurred in one of his classes that focused on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their
Eyes Were Watching God. In Copeland’s estimation, this was one of the best
Socratic discussions that occurred in one of his classes because it “stimulated
the greatest amount of student participation and the greatest variety of
viewpoints” (p. 93). He also provides annotations that discuss how he
facilitated the behavior of both groups during the discussion, which gives
teachers an idea of how they can maximize their efforts to guide students in the
proper use of this approach.
In Chapter 7, Copeland then explicates how such discussions can be linked with
the existing curriculum and how teachers can deal with a political climate that
advocates the so-called right answers to questions. In chapter 8 he describes
how socio-grams of one kind or another can be used by students to help them
analyze the back-and-forth interactive dynamics of what is happening in the
circles they observe. He also includes a detailed rubric in Chapter 8 on p. 132
that describes the different levels of behavior that are possible, and a
scorecard is provided to help students and teachers document that they are
seeing for further analysis. This whole approach involves students not only in
preparing for the discussion and engaging in it but also in evaluating their
performance and evaluating how knowledge is constructed in this dynamic format.
Finally, the Appendices are excellent. The first one provides a list of several
books Copeland has found that work well using this kind of discussion. The
second one contains copies of all the forms and handouts used in the book that
can be copied by teachers for use in class.
Most teachers sooner or later figure out through some means that what Copeland
describes and advocates has to be done to insure that students actually engage
deeply with a text they are asked to read. Quizzes and similar activities
reinforce a knowledge of trivia in my opinion, whereas Socratic circles or
dialogues, and the writing that goes along with them, can actually insure
sophisticated knowledge acquisition and can sharpen the analytical skills, both
oral and written, of everyone involved.
This book can help teachers at any point in their career take a more proactive,
systematic approach to expanding their students’ depth of knowledge about
themselves, about their thinking, about the literature they have read, and about
the world around them. Needless to say, I highly recommend this book to you.
Edgar H. Thompson
Emory & Henry College
P.O. Box 34
Emory, VA 24327
1-276-944-6215
ehthomps@ehc.edu