Many teachers who work with gifted students incorporate Socratic Dialogue, Socratic Seminar, Shared Inquiry, Philosophical Chairs, or other methods of facilitating scholarly discourse and discussion. The methods and goals vary depending on the objectives. Some begin with reading a specific text or quote (see Philosophy for Kids), and some lean more towards debate, but all include questioning designed to further students’ thinking. If you are interested in learning more, here is one explanation of the difference between Socratic Seminar and Philosophical Chairs.
In all classroom dialogues and discussions, we hope to engage students in critical thinking, meaningful articulation of ideas, and civil discourse. Some key skills include: (1) clearly stating your ideas, (2) learning how to respectfully disagree (we could certainly use more of this in our world today!), and (3) listening carefully to others’ ideas. I found that my students had to be directly instructed in these skills. For example, I challenged them to rephrase what they heard someone say before adding to it, and also to eliminate the word “but” in their responses, and instead to use the word “and.” So, for example, in replying to one another, it sounded more like this: “I think your concern about ____ is interesting and very different from the way I am thinking about this.” Granted, using the word “but” in a reply is in no way disrespectful. However, this challenged my students to think of ways to state their ideas that would not discount others’ thoughts. It was NOT EASY for them, BUT it did drive home the idea of respectfully disagreeing!
Sometimes for a change of pace, it can be refreshing to spark dialogue with a video prompt. In an earlier post, I described an activity called Invention Impact; I found that this activity is easily adapted to engage students in dialogue, especially when discussing emerging technologies and future possibilities.
My students were familiar with CoRT Thinking, and we often used the CoRT 1 strategies to guide our discussions. Among other things, the strategies prompted students to consider pros and cons, multiple perspectives, and possibilities. Here are a few questions that could be used in lieu of those strategies to get students thinking and conversing!
| Can you identify positive aspects and outcomes? |
| Can you identify problems or concerns? |
| Are there other possibilities not shown? |
| Who might view this from another perspective? |
| Who or what might be impacted by this? |
The following videos illustrate kid-friendly topics your students might enjoy discussing. (Note: you may want to clip them if you don’t want the YouTube ads.)
The Future of Shopping
Self-Driving Cars
There are many videos and articles written about the pros and cons of self-driving cars, but it would be interesting to see what students have to say before doing any research at all.
Future Cities
You might also want to check out this lesson plan “booster” on the topic of Predicting the Future and how often humans have accurately predicted the impact of new inventions. Also, this is a fun 8-minute documentary about the futuristic cartoon The Jetsons you could share during a rainy-day recess! It would be fun to discuss how accurately the creators predicted many inventions of the future.
How do you use videos to initiate classroom conversations? If you have resources to share, we can all benefit from your comments below!