U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan listens Wednesday as eighth-graders from the Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences have a "Socratic seminar" discussion of a blog post Duncan wrote. The students visited the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Education during a field trip to Washington, D.C.Of the 102 seniors who graduated last year from the Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences, all but three went on to college, and the three who weren't college-bound enlisted in the military.
Officials at the magnet school credit their students' success partly to the "Socratic seminar," a teaching method that traces its roots to Socrates, a blind, bald, bearded Greek philosopher who taught by asking questions.
On Wednesday morning, some 75 CSAS eighth-graders who were in Washington, D.C., on an annual school field trip visited the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Education and demonstrated the Socratic seminar. They sat in circles and discussed a blog post about "overtesting" in public schools written by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan -- who stopped by briefly to observe.
"We didn't put on a dog-and-pony show," CSAS Principal Jim Boles said by telephone from Washington. "We do [Socratic seminars] every single day."
Students use seminars about three times a week, he said, to learn reading, writing, listening and math.
"Even with math classes you have seminars," Boles said. "Typically, we're learning classics: 'The Odyssey,' an artwork or a poem."
CSAS, a kindergarten-through 12th-grade school housed in the old Chattanooga High School building on Third Street, has used Socratic seminars since it opened in 1986, Boles said. CSAS is a Paideia school, a designation derived from the Greek words for the upbringing of a child, according to the National Paideia Center in Asheville, N.C. The Socratic seminar is now used to some extent in all Hamilton County magnet schools, Boles said.
The Chattanooga students' demonstration in Washington was partly the idea of Jill Levine, who's taken a year off as principal of the Normal Park Museum Magnet School in North Chattanooga, where she worked for 12 years, to a be "resident principal" at the U.S. Department of Education.
"They use seminar as a way to really delve deep into texts," Levine said. "Seminar is an example of really good teaching."
It also aligns with the Common Core educational standards, she said.
Boles said, "It is the epitome of Common Core."
He said he heard Duncan liked what he saw.
"He stopped [Levine] in the hall and said he was impressed," Boles said.
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