Socratic Seminars and Literature Circles for Middle and High School English

Moeller and Moeller have filled a gap in the practice of literature circles by introducing the Socratic method into the mix. As a teacher at a classical school affiliated with ACCS, I use lit circles quite a bit in my Omnibus classes and was hoping to expand the Socratic element this school year (2006-07), so the title of this book reeled me in. Though it has a lot of useful guidelines I can share with my students, I was disappointed at the way the author contrasted two of his own teachers, Prosser and Basil (real names?), painting Prosser as weak because he focused on behavioral objectives (i.e., "passive learning,") rather than using Basil's Socratic questioning (i.e., "active learning"). In the classical trivium, we would say that one teacher focused on the "grammar stage" of learning and the other on the "logic" or "rhetoric" stages. Perhaps both Prosser and Basil could improve by using all three stages of the trivium. Rather than turning education into an either/or proposition (didactic/passive = bad; Socratic/active = good), the authors could improve by pointing out the importance of passing through the grammar stage before moving on to the logic and rhetoric stages. On p. 5, the authors say that reason and evidence are better tests of truth than authority and/or experience. Certainly we want our students to be able to reason from evidence, but why would we throw out authority altogether? Let's say we're discussing a current event such as illegal immigration or the Patriot Act. We can look at evidence and reason all we want, but sooner or later we have to look at what the Constitution (our "authority") allows and does not allow. On the same page, the authors indicate that in the less desirable mode, "evaluation is factual recall of data" while in the more desirable mode, "evaluation is application of undertanding and interpretation of data." Well, actually, evaluation is both: mastery of facts in the grammar mode and logical analysis and evaluation in the logic and rhetoric modes. It doesn't have to be an either/or proposition. The book does include some good models on Socratic questioning, but because of the lack of depth regarding all three stages of the classical model (the trivium), I had to dock it one point.