OER Socratic Circles to Engage in Relevant and Meaningful Civil Discourse in the Classroom

Today’s student body is more politically-engaged than previous generations. Teachers need support to effectively integrate civil discourse into teaching and learning to connect with this increasingly active student body and engage all students in building community awareness. Educational institutions need the skills to ensure the needs of all students are accounted for in teaching and learning. The Reynoldsburg City Schools (RCS) district team saw an opportunity to support their teachers and students and was selected to lead a project to build Open Educational Resources (OER) to support teachers in discussing issues relevant to students’ lives in the classroom. The district had many initiatives in place focusing on increasing student belonging in the district. The RCS team wanted to scale the work by building a district-wide approach to addressing issues relevant to the community in the classroom.

• Mission: Empowering leaders who impact the NOW and innovate the FUTURE.
• Location: Reynoldsburg, OH
• Size: 7,238 students

Inclusive Innovation resulted in eighth grade students collaborating with teachers to facilitate a community Socratic Circle to discuss disparities in district leadership positions.

Reynoldsburg educators reflect on the Inclusive Innovation process

Connect and Commit

Reynoldsburg City Schools recruited a core team to lead the work which included an Assistant Principal, Instructional Coach, a City Council member as community co-lead, two teachers, four students, one parent, and two community members. During the first phase of the Inclusive Innovation process, Connect and Commit, the team focused on building relationships and trust. Teams evaluated the community cultural wealth they could draw upon in addressing their challenges and developed a community charter in which they agreed upon a common set of values, goals, and agreements for communication and collaboration. Some of their visions included:

• Students who struggle in school will be able to get support they need
• All students will have a voice in our community and give our community ideas on how to make change
• All students will be able to make people feel included
• Secondary students will be able to understand their role in history in order to teach the next generation

In the process, the team also learned more about the history of education in their community and how to address power dynamics within the team. This exploration was foundational to the trust building and highlighting of everyone’s voice in the research and development of the solution. Bringing the voices of the team, from middle school students to a police officer to a council woman, into the room to build a commitment for improving conditions for all students in the district changed the ways in which the team was able to design a solution by expanding the view of what is needed and prioritizing student agency and parent experience. The team focused on the topic of civil discourse in the classroom, which they defined as intentional conversations about issues facing the community designed to increase understanding of various concerns at the interpersonal, institutional, and/or systemic levels.

Inquire and Investigate

In order to deeply explore the challenge, the core team, including students, teachers, community members, and district leaders, analyzed focus group data to identify themes and root causes.

Based on the team’s research, they identified three outcomes for the project:

• Teachers and students will facilitate discussions supported by community, families, and district administration.
• Teachers will know how to understand students’ perspectives on racial equity and navigate conversations on different points of view.
• Teachers will develop classroom cultures that support conversations about equity.

“The process was empowering. It was really amazing to develop the ideas together and see our ideas come to light.” – RCS Student

Design and Development

Students, teachers, community members, and staff members ideated and created three different solution ideas that addressed their priority problem. Their ideas included:

• Make a Difference Project: Students would research and design a community-based project that would create change.
• Student Curriculum Advisory: Student curriculum advisory that would work with the district and teachers to incorporate ways for students to learn about each other and their cultures and experiences.
• Community and Cultural Events: Students would lead community events that support community members and district staff in discussing issues of racial equity.
• Developing a Tool for Discussions in the Classroom: The team would create a tool and professional development that teachers could use to support conversations in their classroom.

After coming up with these ideas, the team hosted focus groups with students, teachers, and district leaders. These participants informed their top solution which is the Community Socratic Circle, which combined the Community Events solution idea with the classroom tool solution.

“When we started this project, we wanted to incorporate classwide discussions… so everyone would have an understanding. The biggest solution was making teachers feel comfortable. It is about the students, but it is about the teachers knowing the topics, feeling comfortable working with students, and accepting feedback.” – RCS Student

Reynoldsburg educators describe the solutions created by the Inclusive Innovation team

Classroom Socratic Circles

Socratic Circles are learner-centered group discussions in which participants learn from each other with discussion centered around a text or essential questions. Teachers are often the facilitators in socratic seminars, but as teachers introduce seminars to students and practice this activity, students can be scaffolded into the role of co-facilitator and eventually facilitator with time.

The team chose Socratic Circles as a solution because they allow students to participate at their levels of comfort. At times in the conversation they may be in an observer role, a facilitator role, or a speaking role. Students can freely move between these roles as they feel comfortable throughout the discussion. Specifically, the team wanted teachers to have the necessary training, knowledge, and skills to implement structured conversations around issues facing the community in a way that was safe for students. Leveraging the Socratic Circle model in the classroom supported their goals.

Community Socratic Circles

A community Socratic circle on community issues is a helpful way to hear various perspectives from the community. The team built this solution with the hope that by engaging community members, students, and school staff in Socratic Circles they would build broader support for discourse about community and culture in the district. Various community members are included to build the connection from school to home and increase a broader range of support for students and educators. The goal of the Reynoldsburg team was to have these conversations facilitated by students and teachers. Before students moved into the facilitator role in a community seminar, it was crucial that they participated in at least three classroom Socratic Circles. By having them take the facilitator role and engage in much of the preparation process for facilitating difficult discussions, students increased their self-awareness around their own identities, stretched their discussion and facilitation skills, grew in their knowledge of their community , and built their criticality in regards to promoting civil discourse. The team utilized graphs as the central point of the community Socratic Circle to ensure that the conversation was accessible to all participants. Another strategy they used is an article or video depending on the goals of the facilitators.