Using Socratic Seminars to Amplify Teacher Voice in Staff Meetings

It’s Thursday afternoon, school is out, and you walk into the library for a staff meeting after a long day of managing behaviors, grading, and handling frustrated students. If you’re lucky, there are doughnuts or coffee. After some mingling and an icebreaker (that no one wants to do), the meeting begins. An administrator talks about new initiatives or the staff completes an “engaging” activity on Post-it Notes. Meanwhile, most people are tired, stressed, and trying to finish other work on their phones or laptops—wishing they could just go home.

How do you transform a school where teachers are the changemakers? How does a school go from being compliance-driven to equity-driven? How do we truly help our staff maintain engagement when their responsibilities increase each year? These are questions that every leader in education faces in today’s educational climate. We know that it’s not because they don’t care. It’s because there are too many priorities and the demands are persistent.

Increasing student achievement isn’t about teaching to the test. Instead, schools can focus on creating a classroom culture that values learning and student voice. To achieve this, teachers are expected to use best practices that amplify student voice. However, when it comes to amplifying teacher voice, leaders aren’t always teaching what they preach.

This article will discuss how we, a principal and a teacher leader, supported the needs of our building by using Socratic seminar on a Teacher Institute Day to learn about teachers’ perspectives on the growth of the school. The feedback was collected to create the school improvement plan. We will give a step-by-step explanation to show how this work can be replicated in other schools.

Our School History With Socratic Seminars

Last school year, our district tasked the school improvement team to complete a needs assessment. Our team’s goal was to identify our school’s biggest needs. We racked our brains to figure out the best way to do this. After observing the English teachers using Socratic seminars in their classrooms with students’ full participation, teacher leaders and admin thought it would be a great idea to implement that same practice in staff meetings.

Shortly after the year that students came back from the pandemic, our entire school was very concerned about students having the ability to engage with each other. Our school district began a partnership with an outside consulting company to equip teachers with tools for student-centered learning. The priority was to decrease teacher-led classrooms and build capacity for student-led classrooms throughout the district. The English department was compelled to implement Socratic seminars in their classroom because they believed it was a seamless way to support student learning. It allowed teachers to observe, monitor, and provide immediate feedback to each student.

We quickly saw increased student engagement as students shifted from passive listening to actively sharing ideas, agreeing, disagreeing, and building on academic conversations. After seeing positive results, we expanded the practice schoolwide, inviting teachers, administrators, and support staff to join seminars. Students enjoyed seeing adults participate, and it became clear that students were taking ownership of their learning.

Infusing Socratic Seminars Into our School Improvement Days

Last year, our school completed a needs assessment focused on literacy, numeracy, and conditions for learning to identify priority goals for improving student achievement. During a school improvement day, the leadership team created a process that ensured that all staff voices, especially quieter staff members, were heard. The experience provided valuable insight from stakeholders across departments and highlighted why previous action steps had seen limited success.

Our leadership team developed a structured seminar process informed by the district’s school improvement rubric. We provided an agenda, guiding questions, and seminar norms in advance to facilitate meaningful and productive discussion. The team made sure to divide up the group to have equal department representation in preparation for the event.

Here is a sample of the guiding questions we used:

1. How is collaborative problem-solving embedded into school practice?
2. How is planning for continuous improvement embedded into school practice?
3. How does the school support a continuous improvement model that provides equitable opportunities for all to learn?
4. What are the monitoring, accountability, and follow-up measures established to address the opportunity gaps and achievement gaps that exist?

The morning of the seminar, we shared the previously mentioned documents in a single email. Each assigned group was split up into different locations, reviewed the standard, and gathered evidence. We directed groups to save all evidence into the corresponding folder and prepared to discuss their ratings in the all-staff Socratic seminar.

Facilitating the Discussion

Once the entire school staff returned to the seminar, the teacher leader played the role of facilitator. Things started off funny and a bit awkward, just like it does in the classroom, but evolved into a really fruitful conversation. The staff debated the standards and provided ample evidence to determine different ratings for each one in the rubric.

We formed a fishbowl structure to hold the discussions. New members on the outside of the circle tapped in to add to the seminar, and we included a slide deck to guide the process. We had a designated note-taker whose sole purpose was to take notes of the details of the discussion.

Less than a week later, a follow-up meeting was held with the school improvement team to review the standards and evidence. The team organized all of the information and made sure that the rating was accurately aligned with the evidence.

When we created our school values, we used Socratic seminars, and the staff instantly knew what to do with the practice. Using this structure in staff meetings led to positive results in our teachers’ classroom practices. More teachers beyond the English department attempted Socratic seminars in their classrooms with success. This method ultimately supports the amplification of teacher voice and student learning.