Peers Educating Peers Handbook

One of PEP’s main goals is to connect cultures, breakdown stereotypes and build global citizenship. Our peer education and film making curricula use collaboration on authentic projects as a means of cultural bridge building. Another simpler and more direct means of connecting cultures is the online Socratic Seminar. These can be easily integrated into a pre-existing curriculum or added on as a way to diversify perspectives and help students truly understand the human element behind the headlines. While much of this can be achieved through posting in online discussions, there is no substitute for the face-to-face connections that live videoconferencing enables. The combination of learning and laughter that results can have a profound effect. The week-long curriculum outlined below describes a online Socratic Seminar project that involved students from the Boston Arts Academy, the Musab Bin Omair Secondary Independent School for Boys, the Al Wakra Secondary Independent School for Boys, and the Ahmed Bin Mohammed Al Thani Secondary Independent School for Boys in Qatar. Students participated in two Google Hangout videoconferences—the first as an icebreaker and the second for the online Socratic Seminar. 

How to Deal with Time Differences

The wonders of the internet age may be able to nullify distance and bridge cultural chasms, but no one has yet created a videoconferencing platform that incorporates time travel. Indeed, time differences between continents is still one of the biggest road blocks to international videoconferencing. One of the nice things about 21st century videoconferencing, however, is that students don’t need to be in the classroom to join in. Many of our best discussions have taken place with the American students in their classroom and the Qatari students—eight hours ahead of Boston—joining in from their individual home computers.  Teachers can still monitor the situation by switching in and out of Google Hangouts, and there’s a lot less background noise to compete with when students join in from home.

1. Partner Country Background

(90 minutes plus homework)

Before talking to people from another country it is important to provide students with some background information so that they can develop interesting and relevant questions that go beyond small talk. This is also a great time to confront stereotypes that students may have about the people they are talking to. For example when my American class talk to students from the Middle East, they are always pleasantly surprised to learn that Arab teenagers have many of the same pass-times and obsessions that they do, that they’re not Al Qaeda supporters, and that they too know how to laugh and have fun. Confronting these stereotypes ahead of time allows students to ask more thoughtful and sensitive questions when they meet.

Confronting Stereotypes: For a Do Now to start class, students should fill out a concept definition map with the name of the country or city in the middle of the page. They should write down everything they know (or think they know) and every reaction they have to that country. It may be necessary to push students further by asking them to write down stereotypes other people often have about that country, region, or religion.

Generating Discussion Questions: After debriefing the Do Now, remind students that the goal of the class is to come up with interesting questions to ask students at the ice-breaking videoconference.

Country Teach-in: The bulk of the class consists of a teach-in about the country’s history and current events. Any combination of teaching methods that efficiently convey information will suffice. For example, my preparation for a videoconference with Qataris included a short clip from comedian Maz Jobrani’s 2012 TED talk in Doha, a lecture on recent Middle Eastern and Qatari history, and a short documentary on Qatar’s rise to power and influence in the Middle East. We stopped along the way for students to write down questions that the lecture and videos inspired, and for homework the students read and annotated an article on the Arab Spring.

Sharing Discussion Questions Online (Optional): You may or may not want to share discussion questions with the other class before the icebreaking videoconference. This can be done online using platforms such as C2C, Edmodo, or Blackboard. This could create deeper, more specific discussions, but it may also disrupt the spontaneity that is key to a lively icebreaking discussion.

2. Icebreaking Videoconference

(1 hour)

When students from different countries meet, it is impossible to dive right into a Socratic Seminar without first providing time for students to get to know each other and ask simple questions about their lives, school, free time, and personal interests. This phase is unavoidable—students wont be able to help themselves—but it is also a necessary trust building measure that will allow students to comfortably tackle more controversial issues later on in the Socratic Seminar. Using Google Hangout, we broke up the classes into groups of four to six, with more or less equal numbers of students from each country. 

In order to have an authentic experience where the students feel like they’re engaged in a real conversation, not just listening to a presentation, it is essential to keep the videoconference groups small. The great think about Google Hangout is that you can set up as many separate videoconferences as you want. For instance, when we did a Google Hangout with 25 students—15 American and 10 Qatari—there were six conferences going on simultaneously.  Each student sat at their own computer and used headphones. It is ideal for students to use a set with a built in microphone, but regular headphones work just fine. At the start students exchanged names and made small talk. Within 15 minutes, however, they were moving into the discussion questions that had written in the previous class.  The students were deeply engaged, and after nearly an hour, I almost had to drag the students away from their computers. 

Debrief: After each videoconference take time to debrief. Students should share the most interesting things they learned and some of the questions the conference provoked. 

3. Socratic Seminar Preparation

(1 hour plus homework)

In this lesson a Socratic Seminar topic is chosen or assigned, and the class completes preparatory research. 

Choosing a Topic: The topic can be chosen by teachers or by students, depending on time and curricular constraints. The topic will work as long as it is relevant to most participants, and controversial enough that it can provoke in-depth discussion and friendly disagreement.

Preparation: The topic will dictate how much additional research needs to be done before students discuss. If, for instance, the subject is an extension of your curriculum that students have already studied, little or no research may be necessary beyond examining the shared text for the Socratic Seminar. If it is a new topic, however, a day or two may need to be reserved for background research.

Choosing a Shared Text: Once a topic has been chosen, a shared text must be assigned for all participants. Keep in mind that the “shared text” need not be a reading. Great Socratic Seminars can be held in response to films, visual art, statistical charts, or maps. The one requirement is that the sources are shared by all so that everyone has the same information and can therefore join in the discussion and understand what participants are talking about.

Reading the Shared Text: Students carefully read/watch/examine and take notes on the shared text. They should write down their reactions and analysis, and generate questions that they would like to ask at the Socratic Seminar. The teacher may want to assign specific discussion questions before the students read the shared text, but there is a danger that this could limit student analysis and discourage them from coming up with their own questions. 

Online Commenting: As a final preparation step it is ideal to have students exchange feedback on the shared text online before engaging in live discussion. This gives everyone a chance to get their thoughts together before the discussion and provides the opportunity for students to respond to each other more specifically in the Socratic Seminar. Time permitting, ask students to both post a comment and respond to someone else’s comment before the Socratic Seminar.

4. Online Socratic Seminar

(1 Hour plus homework)

Roles: Students should once again break up into groups of 4-6 to participate in the discussion of the shared text. While the goals of an online Socratic Seminar are the same as an in-class one, the roles are different (see Part 2 for the roles in a traditional Socratic Seminar). No discussion leaders are necessary with such small groups, but it is helpful to assign one or two observers to each group who listen and take notes on the conversation without participating. Once the discussion is over the observer(s) can share their views on how the discussion went, the major themes they heard, or ask larger questions that the discussion left out. 

Reflection: After the Socratic Seminar the class should reconvene to debrief how the discussion went and what they learned. They should also keep the conversation going by posting responses and further questions for their peers online.