Science 8 – Today I tried to conduct a Socratic Seminar based on the above reading. This is taken from the Science Times website, which has a good selection of thought provoking science articles that written for different reading levels. In this article I expected a flow of ideas from “this is great, now everyone gets a vaccine” which eventually drives towards more critical thinking and ideas such as “what if you can’t eat yogurt” or “how do you know if you’ve had the right amount of yogurt?”.
The really hard part is trying to get 29 kids to have the discussion. The conversation gets dominated by 1/2 dozen kids, with about 1/2 the class doing everything they can to not participate.
One thing I would do differently next time is to assign the reading the day before, and maybe even administer a “Reading Quiz” to check for some basic understanding of the article before the Socratic Seminar.
