Socratic seminars in schools: an effective tool to develop cognitive strategies in students

Summary

How to optimize cognitive processes? How to improve the quality of children’s learning? Teachers, and other professionals, who want to work in education, frequently ask themselves these two important questions. An innovative proposal to revert this situation is The Socratic Classroom, introduced by Mortimer Adler, in the United States in 1982. The proposal consists on a series of occasions where students, after careful reading and analyses of a text, establish a deep discussion, generating a community of learners in a climate of respect and high intellectual level. The objective of this paper is to discuss this new way of learning, its advantages and results from its application in schools in Chile and in the United States. It is proposed as a valued contribution to the development of new didactic approaches facing the great cognitive challenges of the new century.