The Socratic Seminar brings together many of the skills that AVID seeks to build in students: critical reading, inquiry, academic dialogue, collaboration, listening, and reflection. At its core, the strategy asks students to engage deeply with a shared text, prepare thoughtful questions, listen carefully to one another, and build meaning through dialogue, rather than debate.
A key element of this experience is that students are not simply recalling information or waiting for the teacher to confirm the “right” answer. They are learning how to examine ideas, support their thinking with evidence, clarify their reasoning, and consider multiple perspectives. Through this process, they learn to dialogue, rather than merely debate, meaning students are learning that rigorous thinking is about allowing their thinking to be shaped, tested, and strengthened through interaction with others.
In a world where answers and opinions are readily available through web searches or AI queries, these skills are more important than ever, and the Socratic Seminar remains a powerful way to help students develop them.
While it’s important that technology and AI do not replace student thinking and ownership in this powerful learning experience, we should still be asking ourselves: Does AI have a productive place in the Socratic process? Can it be used in a way that levels up the experience?
These questions can be asked before, during, and after the Socratic Seminar experience.
Before the Seminar
In this phase, students are preparing for the Socratic Seminar.
This is when they read or review the resource to be discussed. The first time through, they look for big impressions. On subsequent reviews, they dig more deeply into the key points, identifying major ideas and important pieces of evidence from the text. They call out key vocabulary and record initial questions about the content. Once they have a strong foundational understanding of the resources, students generate questions at each of Costa’s three levels.
There are a few beneficial ways that a student might use AI during this phase without shortcutting their own critical thinking process:
1. As a comprehension assistant
AI can be helpful in explaining confusing concepts, historical context, and unfamiliar vocabulary. You would not want your students to simply upload a copy of an article into AI and then ask it to do all the analysis. However, if the student does the initial review and planning, AI can serve as a helpful coach or assistant to clear up confusing aspects of that initial review.
For instance, a student might use a prompt like this:
“Explain these vocabulary words from the text in student-friendly language. Do not summarize the article or tell me what to think about it.”
2. To strengthen student-generated questions
Once again, this means that students do the work first. They review the source document and generate multileveled questions. Once they’ve completed that original thinking on their own, they could seek feedback from AI.
A prompt for this purpose could be:
“Review my Socratic Seminar questions. Tell me which ones are most open-ended and which might benefit from rewording. Organize my questions into Costa’s three levels of thinking and point out any gaps. Also, point out which questions need stronger connection to the text. Do not answer the questions for me or write new questions. Prompt me to improve my work.”
3. To practice the Socratic Seminar process
This could be accomplished in two different ways. One would be to use AI to facilitate a practice seminar discussion using a different topic than the one to be used in class. The other would be to practice using the same topic that students will use when they engage face-to-face.
You’ll need to determine if you want students to have a more general practice experience, so they can get used to asking good questions and supporting their responses, or if you want them to prepare specifically for the upcoming seminar. Both can have value.
If students are practicing for an upcoming topic, they’ll probably need to upload the source content and their preparation materials to the AI chatbot. With that context in place, they can prompt the chatbot with specific practice requests.
Here is an example:
“I am preparing for a Socratic Seminar. I have uploaded the source text and my preparation notes. Act as a practice partner, not as someone giving me answers.
My focus today is asking follow-up questions and building on another person’s idea.
Start by asking me one open-ended question connected to the text. After I respond, pretend you are a classmate and make a brief comment that gives me something to build on. Then, prompt me to ask a follow-up question or extend the idea.
Do not answer the seminar questions for me. Instead, coach me to:
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- Ask clearer follow-up questions.
- Connect my response to the text.
- Invite another perspective.
- Keep the conversation going.
- After eight exchanges, give me feedback on how well I asked questions and built on ideas.”
Here’s another example to help students practice paraphrasing and respectful disagreement:
“I am preparing for a Socratic Seminar. I have uploaded the source text, my notes, and my seminar questions. Act as a student practice partner.
My focus is paraphrasing before responding and disagreeing respectfully.
Ask me a question about the text. After I respond, give a short classmate-style response that either partially agrees or respectfully disagrees with me. Before I respond back, require me to paraphrase your point first by saying something like:
‘What I hear you saying is…’
Then, have me respond using respectful academic language. If my response sounds too much like a debate or argument, coach me to revise it so that it sounds more like dialogue.
Do not tell me what position to take. Help me practice listening, paraphrasing, and responding thoughtfully.”
If you want students to experience more general practice and not something directly related to an in-class topic, you might use a prompt like this one:
“I am preparing for a Socratic Seminar. Act as a practice partner, not as a teacher giving me answers. Your job is to help me practice thoughtful dialogue.
Here is the text or topic we are discussing: [paste text, excerpt, summary, or title].
Here are my notes and questions: [paste student notes and questions].
Please run a short practice Socratic Seminar with me, following these rules:
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- Ask me one open-ended question at a time.
- Do not give me answers or tell me what to think.
- After I respond, ask a follow-up question that pushes me to clarify, use evidence, consider another viewpoint, or explain my reasoning.
- Remind me to refer back to the text when my answer is too general.
- Occasionally model the role of a classmate by offering a different interpretation, but do not dominate the conversation.
- Help me practice dialogue, not debate.
- After eight to 10 exchanges, give me feedback on my preparation. Focus on my questioning, use of evidence, listening and responding skills, and depth of thinking.
Start by asking me a Level 1 opening question connected to the text. Then, move toward Level 2 and Level 3 questions.”
Since these prompts take some crafting, it’s probably a good idea to provide students with the wording you choose so they can copy and paste into the chatbot. This increases the probability that they have a good experience.
When students are finished, you might decide to have them write a reflection about their experience or perhaps submit the AI chat thread for your review. Because it’s time consuming to review all of this, you, the teacher, could have AI summarize the key takeaways from individual students or perhaps from the class as a whole.
During the Seminar
Once you move to the actual seminar experience, you’ll want to be careful that AI doesn’t replace any student thinking. The power of the seminar, after all, is the productive struggle that comes from high-level thinking and the interactions amongst students.
With that in mind, you may decide that students will not use AI at all during this portion of the experience. That can make a lot of sense.
If students are allowed to use AI, perhaps such use is limited to copilots who are listening and processing the central dialogue. If you go in this direction, these students could use AI in ways that are similar to how they would use it during the preparation stages, such as to help them with comprehension and clarity.
The more powerful use of AI at this phase may be how you use it as the teacher. If you have appropriate permission and the capability to record audio from the seminar, you might use AI to generate a transcript that can then be used to identify broad patterns and analysis afterwards.
For instance, you might upload the transcript and then add prompts like:
- “How often did students ask questions versus giving answers or opinions?”
- “Identify moments of interruption and assess the politeness of student interactions.”
- “Where did students build on one another’s ideas?”
- “Where did the conversation shift from dialogue toward debate?”
- “How often did students refer back to the text?”
This type of analysis can then be used by the teacher or even shared with the class for debrief and growth opportunities.
After the Seminar
Once the in-class seminar has concluded, there are a few options for using AI to wrap things up.
If you were able to capture the experience with an AI-generated transcript, the logical step would be to use it to debrief with the class. This can be a powerful way to break down impartial data from the seminar, and it can help students take a step back and review the experience less personally.
As a follow-up to this, teachers can take this data and use it to help plan next steps. For instance, you might upload the data into a chatbot and then prompt it with this:
“Using these observation notes, identify three strengths in the seminar and two skills to teach before the next seminar.”
Note: Before uploading any student data into an AI tool, it is always imperative to check with local leadership regarding related policy and adhere to all local, state, and national laws and guidelines.
If teachers want to take this a step further, they could ask the AI to help generate mini-lessons to fill in any gaps. If students struggled with asking follow-up questions, for example, AI can help the teacher create a 5-minute practice activity using clarification stems.
As for student use, you’ll likely still want them to do their own personal debrief and reflection. However, once they’ve completed that, AI can provide review and insights for them to go deeper.
For example, they could upload their own reflection and then add a prompt like:
- “Review my Socratic Seminar reflection. Tell me where I am being specific and where I need to add evidence from the discussion. Do not rewrite it for me.”
- “Based on my reflection, help me identify one specific goal for my next Socratic Seminar. Focus on listening, questioning, text evidence, or building on others’ ideas.”
To help make the review of these student comments more efficient, the teacher could have students submit their reflections using an online form, and then the teacher could paste the responses into AI, requesting a summary of key takeaways, trends, strengths, and areas to continue developing. AI tools can support with summarizing and save lots of time.
Do you need to integrate AI into the Socratic Seminar process? Absolutely not. Can it help to enhance the process? Possibly.
The key is to examine your goals and areas you’d like to improve, and then ask yourself if AI might be an effective thought partner in reaching those goals. If you’re not sure of the answer, you can even ask AI to help you think through that decision-making process as well.
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Rigorous Academic Preparedness
- Student Agency
- Insist on Rigor
- Break Down Barriers
Extend Your Learning
- AVID (official website)
- Socratic Seminars: Building a Culture of Student-Led Discussion (Mary Davenport via Edutopia)
- Crafting and Conducting a Successful Socratic Seminar (Megan Grandmont via National Council of Teachers of English)