The Socratic Experience: An Overview | Michael Strong

Now I'd like to go through key elements in our program so you understand concretely what we do. I'll focus on a middle school example. For younger children, a little bit different. High school, a little bit different. Again, we personalize things so much that, um, you have to get into the nitty-gritty to understand exactly how we will work with your child. At middle school, we start the day in— everything's in cohorts of 15 to 1 or smaller. We start the day with community. That's a period where the guide— we call them guides rather than teachers— but where the guide allows the children to talk about things they want to talk about. Think of it as the beginning of the school day when they're hanging out with their friends outside on the playground or lunchroom or the parking lot, talking about books, games, movies, projects, current events, laughing, joking around, being kids together. We found that a virtual program works much better when you let the kids connect. We believe the social part is really important, and so we allow them to be kids together. The next component of our program is personal growth. And after years of experience, I realized that it never helps to preach at kids. You know, everyone wants their children to have better habits and so forth, and telling them what to do just typically doesn't work. So what we do instead is our guide opens up the conversation each day with a question: How do you learn from your mistakes? What do you do When you're angry at somebody, how do you deal with it? When you're not getting along with your friends, how do you figure out what you want to do in life? What do you do when you're angry at somebody? What's relationship between freedom and discipline? Why do we want to write? What am I going to do when I grow up? We open these questions up and get kids to reflect in a safe, respectful environment on the challenges of becoming an adult. We believe it's really complicated to become an adult human being, and we work together as a learning community to talk about the various internal and external challenges with developing the purpose, discipline, and focus to become our very best self, to manifest our individual genius so that we can have the impact on the world that we should have in order to feel really valuable as a human being. In the 21st century. The next part of our program is Socratic. That's my expertise. I literally wrote the book on it, The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice. And there we read a short article together— philosophy, literature, poetry, psychology, anthropology, all sorts of things— and we read it and discuss the ideas involved. It is challenging reading. We always pick challenging readings. They're short, so we don't expect children to read a lot outside of class. But kids love to argue, and we use that desire to argue and discuss and think about things to motivate the reading and engagement with more difficult texts. This engagement with difficult texts gradually can help even non-readers become more of a reader, and it also improves verbal SAT performance. Because if you look at the SAT exam, it consists lists of complex passages with nuanced questions about the meaning of those passages. Many people think of the SAT exam as memorize lots of vocabulary. Well, of course, if you're not reading and you get to be your senior year, you're gonna have to memorize a bunch of vocabulary. But it makes a lot more sense to begin reading serious material, thinking about it, discussing it, internalizing it, being part of this world from the time you're young. When these words become part of your active vocabulary— I had a conversation with 8-year-olds today about perception— then one no longer needs to memorize words. One becomes a thoughtful young human being engaged in sophisticated intellectual dialogue. This is a win because kids love it. It gets them reading, and it gets them reading and understanding much more difficult material.