The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is one of a handful of books I’ve read in one sitting. One thing I love about the novel is the way it plays with the truth that fiction tells that nonfiction sometimes can’t capture. Tim O’Brien refers to this tension in “Good Form” as “story truth” and “happening truth.” He argues in that chapter (or story) that “story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth.” O’Brien’s storytelling challenges readers to consider whether a fictional account can communicate emotional or experiential truths that a factual account might not.

Even though I don’t teach the whole novel to students, I like to teach “How to Tell a True War Story” and “Good Form” because both stories blur the distinction between fact and fiction. O’Brien deliberately unsettles our assumptions about fact and fiction, making these stories especially rich material for inquiry and discussion. Reading these stories allows my students to consider an intriguing question: What makes a story true?

This question becomes even more interesting when we complicate it: Whose truth?

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer critiques American representations of the Vietnam War. His protagonist works as an advisor to a Hollywood director filming a Vietnam War film called The Hamlet. The narrator quickly realizes that the director is uninterested in his input; he simply wants the appearance of having consulted someone who can speak to the Vietnamese experience.

This critique adds another dimension to the discussion. As Nguyen argues through his protagonist, “His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created” (134).

A story might communicate an important truth about one person’s experience while obscuring someone else’s.

What happens when students reconsider a story?

Associated Press photojournalist Eddie Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1968 photograph, Saigon Execution. I show this photograph to students and ask them to interpret what they are seeing without giving them context. Many students initially assume the photograph depicts the killing of an innocent civilian. Later, after exploring O’Brien’s stories and an excerpt from The Sympathizer, I show students the photograph again, this time providing historical context. Students return to their original interpretations and consider how the additional information complicates what they believed they knew.

The photograph captures a real event, but the story audiences construct around that event may become more influential than the historical circumstances themselves. In that sense, the photograph raises some of the same questions about story-truth and happening-truth that O’Brien explores in his fiction.

I don’t want to persuade students that factual truth doesn’t matter or that every interpretation is equally valid. Interpretations should be based on the evidence we have before us. I want my students to become more attentive readers and thinkers who recognize both the possibilities and limitations of storytelling. Stories can illuminate experiences we might otherwise struggle to understand, but they can also obscure perspectives, reinforce assumptions, and shape how we remember history.

I created a resource for teaching this lesson, Story-Truth, Happening-Truth, and the Power of Narrative. It’s a two-day lesson that includes teacher guidance, student handouts, and slides, with source references for the copyrighted materials. I’d love for you to check it out if you’re interested.

If you’re planning to go to NCTE this year, I’d love to connect! I am presenting three sessions.

On November 20, 11:00 AM-12:15 PM, I’ll be presenting a poster session, Where Words Become Witness: Imagining Justice across Literature and History in Hall A. This session focuses on a cross-curricular course in Social Justice in Literature and History that I designed and teach. I’d love to discuss it with you. I’ll be sharing a Google Drive folder with a course overview, sample unit map, sample text pairings, discussion protocols and inquiry structures, and a bibliography and resource list.

On November 21, 8:15 AM-9:30 AM, I’ll be at the roundtable session sponsored by the GSEA, Innovate & Illuminate: Expanding Queer and Trans Possibilities in English Education, in 122-B. My table session, From Erasure to Imagination: Teaching LGBTQIA+ History Through Literacy and Joy, will focus on my revised LGBTQIA+ unit in the Social Justice Course.

Attendees will get a link to a Google Drive folder with the following:

• The Audacity of Joy: LGBTQIA+ Unit Overview
• Three Literacy Practices for Teaching LGBTQIA+ History
• Why Joy?
• LGBTQIA+ History Card Protocol (for use with Glisten’s LGBTQ+ History Flashcards)
• Audre Lorde “Litany for Survival” Activity
• Bayard Rustin Four Burdens Protocol
• Marriage Equality Role Play Activity: Competing Visions of Liberation
• Queer Futurity: Voices in Conversation Activity
• Queer Futurity Project
• Texts and Media Rationales for three unit texts
• Discussion as a Literacy Practice: Protocols for Reading Against Erasure, Reading for Complexity, and Reading for Joy & Possibility
• Steal These Tomorrow: Five Literacy Moves for Reading History, Identity, and Social Change

On November 22, 9:00 AM-10:15 AM, I will be presenting a poster session with the Right Question Institute on the Question Formulation Technique at Deceptively Simple, Authentically Meaningful: Discover Practical Tools for Student-Driven, Inquiry-Based Primary Source Learning in Hall A.

I hope to see you in Philly! I’ve never been, so if you have good recommendations, please let me know.

Sharing my classroom ideas here on this blog and at my Teachers Pay Teachers store, The Inquiry Classroom, has given me new opportunities to connect with educators. Presenting at NCTE and other conferences, as well as developing professional learning for my colleagues, has also created space for conversations about the questions we encounter in our teaching. Those exchanges—and continually revising my own practice—have renewed my enthusiasm for this work. Consulting gives me a way to collaborate more directly with teachers and schools.

I can help educators with:

• Curriculum design and collaboration: Developing or rethinking units, courses, text selections, and interdisciplinary connections.
• Workshops and professional learning: Practical, collaborative sessions shaped around a department’s goals.
• Assessment and grading consultation: Examining assessments, refining rubrics, and considering how grading communicates learning.

For example, a department might want to refresh a familiar unit with new texts and questions, then develop an assessment that gives students more room to demonstrate their understanding.

I begin with teachers’ knowledge of their students and school context. My approach is rooted in inquiry, meaningful assessment, and equitable and inclusive learning. I bring experience from my current role as Instructional Coach, extensive work as a Department Chair, and research in authentic assessment and equitable grading practices.

This blog will continue as my space for teaching reflection and sharing ideas. You will still find resources at The Inquiry Classroom. Dana Huff Educational Consulting is where you can explore consulting and professional learning opportunities.

I would love for you to visit Dana Huff Educational Consulting or get in touch about a project, even if your plans are still taking shape. I am available to work virtually or locally in New England, with travel by arrangement. Please feel free to share this news with a colleague or school leader who might be interested.

For a book called How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster’s guide is surprisingly entertaining. I first encountered the book in its first edition, back in 2005 (how is that possible?), years before I began teaching AP Literature. Foster explains that he originally imagined his audience as nontraditional students returning to college, whose literary analysis skills might be a bit rusty. Instead, he discovered that AP Literature teachers were assigning the book to their students.

Is Foster Worth Teaching?

I mostly lurk in the AP Lit Facebook groups, but I’ve noticed a fair bit of discussion lately about whether students should read Foster. Some teachers question the book’s value; others worry about spoilers or struggle to find meaningful ways to incorporate it into their courses. A recent post at Pop Culture Pedagogy even argues against teaching the book, raising several worthwhile concerns.

Some teachers wonder whether Foster is worth assigning. Others worry about the spoilers or struggle to find meaningful ways to incorporate the book into their courses.

I find assigning Foster useful. One of my students a few years ago said that this book cracked open a door that really helped her approach her reading. By the time she encountered my class (and Foster), I was only assigning selections from the book. She decided to read the whole thing, but I found that most students responded to How to Read Literature Like a Professor when they read selections, rather than the entire book.

Foster gives students something to look for. He makes literary patterns accessible and explains concepts through engaging examples. His discussions of quests, vampires, symbolism, and other conventions can help students recognize possibilities they might otherwise overlook.

Yet, I acknowledge the book’s limitations. Foster’s examples have traditionally leaned toward canonical literature, although the third edition incorporates more contemporary works. And yes, he reveals significant plot developments in some of the books he discusses.

When I was in high school, I started watching a lot of old classic movies. I watched Citizen Kane and had the delightful experience of being surprised by the ending—it hadn’t been spoiled for me. I understand the value—and joy—of encountering a work without knowing its ending, even though spoilers haven’t persuaded me to stop assigning Foster.

Do Students Have to Read the Whole Book?

When I first started teaching the book, I assigned the whole book. Students sometimes felt they already understood concepts Foster was explaining. Others questioned whether they needed every chapter.

My students suggested I might allow students to pick chapters they might find helpful. So, I started allowing students to select certain chapters.

After some experimentation, I landed on requiring students to select and read three chapters from How to Read Literature Like a Professor. I had a practical rationale for this decision: three chapters provide meaningful exposure without consuming an unreasonable amount of reading time. Students can also select chapters that interest them, reinforce something they already understand, or address a weakness in their literary analysis. Someone intrigued by quests or vampires can pursue that interest. Someone who struggles with symbolism can deliberately choose Foster’s chapter on symbols.

Chapter selection can become an act of metacognition. Students are considering what they already know, what they need, and what might help them become stronger readers.

What Wasn’t Working for My Classroom

To bring students’ reading together, I assigned a Socratic seminar discussion. The results were not quite what I wanted.

When students had read different chapters, they struggled to sustain a meaningful seminar. They tended to summarize what they had read rather than use those ideas to explore larger questions about literature.

The different reading assignments were not really the problem. As the students explained it to me, the discussion structure wasn’t giving them a productive way to share and apply their knowledge. It’s possible to have a good Socratic seminar on this book, but my students found it challenging because I hadn’t scaffolded the discussion appropriately.

I considered having students present on different chapters, but I worried that the activity would become a series of chapter summaries rather than an opportunity to engage meaningfully with Foster’s ideas.

Students Needed to Put Foster to Work

The first novel I teach after our introductory unit is Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and while it’s an excellent novel for applying many of Foster’s ideas, I realized that students needed an opportunity to put those ideas to work immediately, before moving into a longer text.

I came up with a new approach—Put Foster to Work: Literary Detective Agency.

• Students become experts on a Foster chapter and identify what another reader most needs to know.
• Through structured Literary Speed Dating, they exchange useful interpretive strategies.
• They apply those strategies to Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” looking for details and patterns that might support an interpretation.
• They share their interpretations and consider how other readers might extend or complicate them.

This activity worked because students were using Foster’s ideas to investigate an unfamiliar text. They stopped summarizing Foster and started applying his ideas. They developed an interpretation rather than simply noticing a pattern.

For example, noticing food imagery in “Girl” is useful, but explaining how domestic instruction conveys cultural knowledge and expectations about womanhood requires deeper analytical thinking.

What I Learned from Trying the Literary Detective Agency

Students successfully identified meaningful details in “Girl” and immediately applied ideas from their reading. The lesson gave them a clearer purpose for discussing chapters they hadn’t all read. I was impressed with their interpretations, and they seemed animated by the text itself.

The lesson wasn’t perfect, of course. The Literary Speed Dating activity needed more structure, and I noticed that students tended to cluster around certain chapters. Next time, I may introduce some parameters to encourage greater variety while preserving student choice. I’ve also refined the Literary Speed Dating activity to provide more guidance for students.

The most important takeaway for me, however, is that students benefit more when the reading leads directly to meaningful analytical work.

Rethinking Foster

I’ve come to think that the real value of Foster isn’t teaching students to read exactly as he does. It’s giving them a starting point for developing their own interpretations. Do AP Literature students need to read every chapter of Foster’s book? I don’t think so. What matters more is whether they can use the ideas they encounter to become more confident, perceptive, and independent literary analysts. I want students to use Foster’s book as a tool to approach a text and to gain confidence in interpreting it for themselves. I don’t necessarily think students need to read literature like a professor. But a little professorial advice for approaching a text doesn’t hurt.

I’ve since turned the lesson into Put Foster to Work: Literary Detective Agency, a classroom-tested resource that includes structured activities, a literary investigation, teacher guidance, and an optional assessment. If you’re looking for a different way to approach Foster in your AP Literature classroom, I’d love for you to check it out.

I absolutely love teaching Song of Solomon. I’m excited to start it with my current AP Lit seniors this Friday. One reason I love teaching this book is that it rewards the patient reader, and it’s a joy to see students discover Morrison’s writing. I recently heard from a former student who graduated years ago, and he shared that he was re-reading Song of Solomon and still considered it his favorite book. One of my all-time favorite teaching moments was during a discussion of Morrison’s craft when a student marveled, “How does she do this?”

When We Know Too Much

I’ve taught the novel for about ten years, and I still discover something new each time. But familiarity brings its own challenge: the more often we teach a book, the easier it becomes to see connections our students haven’t yet discovered. We recognize the patterns in characters’ names, the recurring imagery of flight, and the significance of details that initially seem unimportant. Students have not yet learned to notice these details. With Song of Solomon, this temptation to make connections for students is especially strong because Morrison constructs meaning across widely separated scenes. But what do we take away from students when we explain a connection before they’ve had a chance to discover it?

Students discovering the novel for the first time benefit from the guidance of class discussion. Providing interpretations may help students understand a passage, but letting them investigate and reconsider details builds their capacity to read challenging literature independently.

One of my favorite examples is Magdalene called Lena’s rebuke of Milkman in chapter 9. She says

You have yet to wash your own underwear, spread a bed, wipe the ring from your tub, or move a fleck of your dirt from one place to another. And to this day, you have never asked one of us if we were tired, or sad, or wanted a cup of coffee. You’ve never picked up anything heavier than your own feet, or solved a problem harder than fourth-great arithmetic. Where do you get the right to decide our lives? (215)

When we reach this passage, students are often so fed up with Milkman that they are cheering Lena on. However, I ask students to note these tasks and think about what neglecting them says about Milkman. I don’t tell them why these tasks will matter; we will discover that information later. They might not understand the full significance now, but later, when Guitar sees Milkman help a man lift a crate, we understand Guitar’s belief that Milkman must be moving the gold to keep for himself. After all, he’s never lifted anything heavier than his own feet. We also understand the significance of the small tasks he performs for Sweet:

He made up the bed. She gave him gumbo to eat. He washed the dishes. She washed his clothes and hung them out to dry. He scoured her tub. She ironed his shirt and pants. He gave her fifty dollars. She kissed his mouth. He touched her face. She said please come back. He said I’ll see you tonight. (285)

This contrast becomes evidence of Milkman’s transformation. He begins doing some of the very things Lena claims he has never done. After reading this passage about Sweet, we return to Lena’s earlier rebuke, but that’s not the most important teaching move. The critical move is not announcing the connection in advance. When students recognize the connection between these two passages themselves, it is more powerful than if I had told students what to look for. Not every student will notice the connection independently, but class discussion can bring out those “a-ha” moments and help students see how Morrison rewards readers who make connections.

Withholding Interpretations Isn’t Withholding Support

Withholding interpretations doesn’t mean I am withholding support. When reading a writer as complex as Toni Morrison, students need frameworks. I provide this guidance through a reader’s notebook and inquiry routines:

• Scene Study helps students consider how a scene functions.
• Character Mirror invites them to analyze characters in relation to one another.
• Symbol Tracker helps them trace recurring details.
• MOWAW Reflection encourages them to connect individual moments to the novel’s larger meaning.

These structures don’t tell students what conclusions to draw or what interpretation I’m looking for. Instead, they help students develop the reading habits that strengthen their interpretations. A question I frequently return to is “What makes you say that?” It drives students into the text to support their ideas with evidence. Inquiry requires careful instructional design and, sometimes, more preparation and more deliberate teacher moves than direct instruction.

Learning to Change Our Minds

Morrison repeatedly asks readers to revise their understanding as new information emerges. For example, students (and Milkman) begin with incomplete information about Milkman’s family, but they follow his journey of discovery as he fills in the gaps in his family tree. Macon and Pilate remember the details surrounding their father’s death differently, though their stories correspond in interesting ways. Students learn that changing your interpretation isn’t evidence of misunderstanding. In fact, it shows you’re learning to read more deeply. Teaching this novel requires a classroom culture that makes students feel comfortable expressing uncertainty, testing their interpretations, and revising their thinking.

Years after taking my class, students will not remember every detail about Milkman’s family history. But I hope they will remember how to approach a complex work: pay attention, ask questions, notice patterns, listen to other interpretations, and remain willing to reconsider. The goal is to help students become readers who can develop their own interpretations of whatever they encounter next.

I’ve recently finished rebuilding my Song of Solomon unit for The Inquiry Classroom, drawing on nearly a decade of teaching the novel and refining the activities that help students make these discoveries. It includes 14 complete lessons, reading notebooks, reusable Inquiry Routines, staged family-tree reveals, collaborative investigations, and a student-selected literary analysis assignment.  Longtime readers of this blog may recall that I teach Beyoncé’s Lemonade album alongside Song of Solomon, and I’ve included tips for this optional extension. Check out this resource below.

This site and resource are not affiliated with or endorsed by the College Board.

Students finish reading a chapter and ask:

“What does it mean?”

or

“What’s the right interpretation?”

Many students see literary analysis as guessing what the teacher is thinking.

The problem wasn’t that my students couldn’t think deeply. They didn’t yet have a framework for asking productive questions.

Like many teachers, I started with existing critical theory resources. They were academically accurate, but I found they didn’t give high school students enough guidance or help them understand why the lenses mattered in the first place.

Critical lenses aren’t about memorizing theory. They’re about learning different ways to approach a text.

Critical lenses don’t change the text; they change what we notice.

Different readers naturally notice different things in a text. We all bring our experiences, beliefs, biases, and identities to what we read. However, trying on different critical lenses allows us to develop stronger interpretations and more valuable insights. More importantly, they help us develop empathy and understanding for others. That’s one of the reasons I believe critical lenses belong in every English classroom, not just AP Literature.

Students need to see a model for how to read using critical lenses. They benefit from a common text, ideally something short that everyone is reading together and that invites a variety of interpretations. I used to use The Great Gatsby because students typically read it the year before AP Literature, and they are mostly familiar with it. However, I discovered that not all my students read it, and not all the students who had remembered it could recall it well enough. Once I realized students needed to experience critical lenses before defining them, I stopped looking for a text and started looking for a common experience.

Enter American Gothic.

Instead of beginning with literary theory, I begin with one familiar image.

Most students are familiar with this painting, but they don’t even have to have seen it before for this activity to work. I essentially take students through each of the critical lenses I’ve found most helpful and ask them questions about what they see through each lens. If students are stuck, I might guide them to notice a few things. For example, when using a Feminist Lens, I might suggest the figures’ placement and clothing reveal something about their gender roles. When using an Ecocritical Lens, I might suggest the only nature visible is a set of manicured trees, relegated to the periphery of the canvas.

Students look at the same painting repeatedly. Only the questions change. The image stays the same. That’s when they realize what a critical lens actually is: a different way of seeing the text.

Every year, there’s a moment when the room changes. For my students, it often happens during the Queer Theory example. They suddenly realize that the painting hasn’t changed; their thinking has. More specifically, the questions they’re asking have changed.

After I hit upon this method for teaching critical lenses, I guide students through

• learning individual lenses
• to choosing a lens
• to comparing lenses
• to combining lenses
• to writing through a lens

As a result, their analysis was sharper. One student shared that she wished she had learned critical lenses years ago. She said, “It would have saved me so much time getting started with a literary analysis!”

After years of refining this sequence in my own classroom, I finally organized it into a complete Critical Lenses curriculum. It includes the modeling lesson, teacher guide, student handouts, application activities, and planning tools I use to help students become more thoughtful, independent literary readers. If you’re looking for a way to help students move beyond plot summary and begin asking richer questions about literature, I hope this resource helps your students experience the same “aha!” moment mine do every year.

This site and resource are not affiliated with or endorsed by the College Board.

I’m excited to announce that I will be presenting at NCTE’s upcoming annual convention on November 19-22 in Philadelphia. I will share details about when and where you can find my presentations once I have them.

Session 1: GSEA’s Roundtable: Innovate & Illuminate: Expanding Queer and Trans Possibilities in English Education

My part of the session is called “From Erasure to Imagination: Teaching LGBTQIA+ History Through Literacy and Joy.” It will focus on how I revised a unit on LGBTQIA+ literature and history in my cross-curricular Social Justice course to center resistance and joy.

Session 2: Where Words Become Witness: Imagining Justice Across Literature and History

This is a poster session in which I’ll share how I’ve structured my Social Justice course. I’m looking forward to chatting with folks about this class.

Session 3: Deceptively simple, authentically meaningful: Discover practical tools for student-driven, inquiry-based primary source learning (Using the Question Formulation Technique)

This session is with the Right Question Institute. I’ve written about using the QFT on this blog before, and I’m excited to work with RQI again.

One of the biggest challenges of teaching Never Let Me Go isn’t helping students understand the plot. The plot is fairly straightforward. Students tend to have more difficulty understanding how to read the novel.

Many students approach the book as if it were a mystery. They spend the first half asking, “What’s really going on?” and become frustrated by the unanswered questions. While curiosity is part of Ishiguro’s design, it’s not the novel’s primary challenge.

The real challenge is learning to read Kathy’s narration, which makes it perfect for teaching the AP® Lit CED skills on narration:

• 4. A  Identifyanddescribe the narrator or speaker of a text.
• 4. B  Identify andexplainthe function of point of view in a narrative.
• 4. C  Identify and describe details, diction, or syntax in a text that reveal a narrator’s or speaker’s perspective. 
• 4. D Explainhowanarrator’sreliabilityaffectsa narrative.

Students often assume that if a narrator leaves things out, they’re being deceptive. Kathy isn’t lying to readers. Instead, she remembers selectively, revisits events with new understanding, and tells her story through the imperfect lens of memory.

That distinction changes everything.

Instead of asking “what happened?”, students begin asking:

• Why does Kathy remember this?
• What doesn’t she fully understand?
• What is Ishiguro asking readers to infer?

Once I realized this, I stopped organizing my unit around plot developments and started organizing it around interpretive moves.

Each lesson asks students to practice a different way of reading:

• noticing what is withheld
• examining how memory shapes meaning
• investigating emotional subtext
• tracing patterns of delayed revelation
• building literary arguments from inference rather than summary

The goal becomes helping students learn how to read the novel rather than simply finish it.

When students begin reading Kathy’s narration instead of chasing answers, they notice that the novel’s emotional power doesn’t come from surprising revelations.

It comes from the gradual realization that readers, like Kathy herself, have been living with an incomplete understanding all along.

That’s a much richer reading experience, and it leads to more thoughtful discussions and stronger analytical writing.

That shift in my thinking became the foundation for my inquiry-based Never Let Me Go unit.

The resource includes seven lessons built around narration, memory, identity, structure, and ethical inquiry, along with original activities, writing instruction, Socratic seminar materials, quizzes, and teacher resources designed for AP Literature, IB Literature, and advanced high school English courses.

If you’re looking for a unit that helps students move beyond plot summary and into genuine literary interpretation, I hope you’ll find it useful.

This site and resource are not affiliated with or endorsed by the College Board.

This is the point in the year when AP teachers look at the calendar and panic a little, particularly if our students are still freezing when they see the prompt or defaulting to formulaic, shallow essays.

We teach students five-paragraph essays and encourage them to hunt for devices, which leads students to focus on what they should include rather than what they should argue. Timed writing becomes performance rather than an opportunity to show thinking.

Timed writing is not just about speed, although students do need to learn how to start the writing task quickly. It’s also not just about structure, though students need to learn to organize their ideas. Timed writing is about understanding the prompt, making an argument, and developing ideas under pressure.

When I teach my students how to approach timed writing, I encourage them to slow down at the start. Students often rush into writing without fully understanding the prompt or taking time to plan (and they pay for it later). Taking even a few minutes to annotate the prompt and sketch out a plan leads to stronger, more focused essays.

I teach my students to focus on a line of reasoning. Instead of listing literary devices, they should be building an argument about how those choices work together to create meaning. The shift from identifying to analyzing is often what makes the biggest difference in their writing.

I make reflection part of the process. I ask students to assess their work using the AP rubric.  Reflection helps students improve over time as they begin to see patterns and set goals to address areas for improvement. The eventual goal is for students to have a clear idea of how they performed on the AP exam.

When I schedule a timed writing practice, I begin by encouraging students to break down the prompt. I offer a 10-minute reading period to annotate the prompt and plan quickly before setting the timer. I find this helpful since students will have some reading time on the actual exam, and it also reduces panic, as students can calmly dive into the passage and prompt.

A simple checklist can help students feel more in control of the process and more confident that they are meeting expectations.

Reflecting on the process and product helps students identify areas to target for improvement and gives them a sense of how they are preparing for the exam.

Over time, I’ve been looking for ways to make this process more consistent and manageable (for my students and for me). I recently put together a set of tools that support this approach.

The Timed Writing Toolkit includes:

• a prompt breakdown guide
• a planning template
• a writing checklist
• a reflection sheet

The toolkit is designed to help students approach timed writing with clarity and purpose, without relying on rigid formulas. It can be used repeatedly, so students begin to internalize the process over time.

Whether you use these exact tools or not, shifting the focus from formula to thinking can make a real difference in how students approach timed writing and in the quality of the writing they produce.

I was really excited when I first heard about Socratic seminars. At first, I used them occasionally because I wasn’t sure students could sustain a full period of discussion. After a few successful attempts, I began integrating seminars more regularly into my teaching. At the time, I assessed student learning primarily through participation grades.

Over time, I noticed that students seemed to compete to participate, and they didn’t try to invite quieter students into the conversation. Discussion became more about how much students could say than what they might learn. I started to realize that the problem was how I was structuring and grading discussion.

Grading participation didn’t work for me because I wasn’t measuring what students were really learning. Instead, it rewarded students who were louder, more confident, or quicker to respond. Students who were quieter, multilingual learners, and those who needed more time to process were often left out.

I started thinking about the rubric I was using. One section focused on a written reflection students completed after the seminar. I enjoyed reading these reflections because they revealed a great deal about what students were learning. I realized how much intellectual work listening really was, and students who were quieter during discussion often shared the most insightful explanations of how the seminar influenced their thinking.

What if the whole grade focused on the reflection? What if, instead of grading how often students spoke, I focused on how they were thinking?

I decided to rethink how I assessed Socratic seminars. Before a seminar discussion, I use the Question Formulation Technique to help students create questions for the discussion. Students plan for the seminar by taking notes on their initial thinking about the question and gathering evidence.

On the day of a seminar, I give students a few minutes to gather their thoughts, look over their notes, and mentally prepare. Then the students lead their discussion. Inevitably, they find a rhythm and share facilitation duties. I track the students’ discussion using Equity Maps. I rarely intervene; I don’t even look directly at students during discussion, because they tend to start talking to me instead of each other.

After the discussion, I assign the reflection, which is typically due the next class period. Students focus on key ideas raised in the seminar, their responses to peers’ comments, and how their thinking changed.

When I stopped grading participation and started grading reflection, seminars changed. The seminars encouraged deeper thinking and made space for more voices. Students shared that they felt less pressure and were able to be more fully present and listen because they were not worried about making enough comments. They no longer had to perform participation. Instead, they just did it. The discussions felt more meaningful.

A few years back, I had a really interesting discussion about grading participation with a class after two students advocated for a participation grade. They were both very comfortable in discussion and high performers. In the conversation that followed, they realized that all the other students preferred being graded on their reflections. As one student shared, “I don’t see why we should get a grade for something that is just expected.” In the next seminar, the two students advocating for a participation grade opted to listen rather than speak. Both of them shared in their reflections that being quiet felt awful. What a learning experience! And they never would have learned it had they not been free to take that risk.

You might be thinking that if you don’t grade participation, students won’t participate. I understand that concern, but there are several ways to support engagement. Start by giving students space to generate their own questions. Tools like the QFT help students invest in discussion because their questions are centered.

Reassure students that a few moments of silence mean people are thinking. Students (and teachers) are often uncomfortable with silence, but if you wait, students will find their way back into the discussion.

I have also found that students are invested in seeing their feedback from Equity Maps, so I share parts of the discussion report that Equity Maps generates. They find it really interesting to see how the discussion flowed, and I always show them their equity quotient, the number of speakers relative to how much each person speaks. Inevitably, students want to see that equity score go up. Last year, a student even talked me into giving the class a pizza party if their equity score rose to the highest tier. While I didn’t wind up having to pay for pizza, I would have been happy to either way; the students were focused on ensuring all voices were valued.

In addition to using Equity Maps and the QFT, I started using other tools to support this approach to seminars: graphic organizers for students and reflection prompts in an easy-to-replicate template.

If you’re interested, I’ve put those materials together into a Socratic Seminar toolkit you can use or adapt in your own classroom.  The toolkit includes discussion structures (full-class, fishbowl, and small-group), student prep and reflection tools, a simple tracking system, and a rubric focused on thinking rather than participation. You can take a look here if it’s useful.

Seminars feel completely different now that I focus on thinking instead of participation. Students are still engaged, but they leave more space for quieter voices and have become more comfortable letting the discussion breathe. Their reflections show how much they value the learning happening in discussion.

A few months ago, a student told me seminars were her favorite part of class, and that she especially liked listening to others’ ideas. Recently, after a discussion, one student simply said, “That was fire.”