We are preparing for midterms, and for my Algebra 2 class, I decided to do a Socratic Seminar to review the all of the material. Instead of giving my students a list of topics that would be on the midterm, they created their own list by looking through their notes and tests and discussing the past semester. 

My students were set up into two circles. Students on the inside circle had to discuss the questions prompted on the board. All students on the inside circle had to talk once before anyone else in the circle could speak again. This had all students looking through their notes and past test and participating in the review. They were coming up with what was important and narrowed down the topics that they struggled with the most. I added in a few questions in verbally when I felt they got stuck or could push the topic further.

Being able to verbalize the concepts they needed to know and the concepts they needed to work was extremely helpful for my students.

While the inside circle was discussing the prompted questions, the outside circle was discussing the questions on a back channel chat. They were writing down the topics that they needed to know/work-on and went into more detail about the concepts than the inner circle.

For backchanneling, I have used

• Todays Meet
• Backchannel Chat 

They both work really well and are extremely teacher/student friendly.

For this seminar, I used Today’s Meet. If you would like to embed your backchannel into your class page, it is extremely easy. By clicking class tools at the bottom of your chat, it allows you embed the live stream or transcript to your page.

This back channel chat was embedded “live stream” into their Haiku page, so it was easy to get to and they can refer back to it to study.

For this seminar, I had students switch circles for every chapter. I asked the same questions for each chapter. I had questions appear one at a time.

I love doing Socratic seminars in my classes.  Talking about concepts and explaining them to their peers really helps students truly understand the concept. This activity also had them reflect on everything they learned this year. I think reflecting on their past test, instead of just looking at them, was also really beneficial.

A video of my seminar can be found here. 

I would love to hear if you have any suggestions or ways to improve and use Socratic Seminars. I also love trying new back channeling sites, if you have tried one that works well I would love to hear about it!

I just finished my first week of teaching Algebra 2 ever. On one of the first days, I wanted to dive in and do math, but I didn’t want to intimidate my students so early in the year. Julie Reulbach gave me the great idea of reviewing percents by looking at Apple Computers. 

I handed out the sheet I created with no other instructions or introduction than they could work with a partner to figure out the answers.

The worksheet I created explored the 13-inch MacBook Pro. First, I had students find the tax  on the computer and then justify how they found it.

Next, we looked at the price of the 13-inch MacBook Pro compared to the price of the same computer from the Apple Education Store. Students had to find the percent discount.

Third, students had to apply that percent discount to the cost of the 15 inch Macbook Pro to figure out what education price would be.

This is where the conversation became interesting. After everyone was finished, I revealed the actual education price of the Macbook. They were outraged!!! The price was about $100 more than they calculated it should be!!!

This then prompted the question “Do you think this happens for every Apple Product?”

Each group then picked an Apple product. We looked at Macbook Air, Ipads,  and Imacs (I have a class of 8 students).

Students picked what size they first wanted to look at and then found the percent discount from the original price to the education price. Once they found the percent decrease they wrote their percent on the board. They then looked up a different size of the same product to see if they discount remained the same!

This lead into a discussion about which product receives the biggest discount and why. Also what we thought affected the discount, and how sales aren’t always as straightforward as they seem.

This was a fun, easy, and real-world lesson that helped students review percents without sitting through a review lesson or by doing practice problems.

We did go over the worksheet to address any class misconceptions before we broke out to look up different products.  Originally, many students found the percent tax by finding the tax and then adding it to the original. This was a great opportunity to introduce original(1+percent) which they see for growth and decay later in the chapter.