Building a positive classroom culture involves fostering an inclusive environment where students feel valued, respected, and empowered to express themselves and collaborate with their peers.
Philosophical Chairs Protocol
The Philosophical Chairs Protocol is a classroom debate structure that builds empathy, critical thinking, and respectful discourse. Students take positions on a debatable statement, present arguments, and may shift sides if persuaded by new reasoning. The protocol helps learners practice perspective-taking, evidence-based argumentation, and openness to change.
The Socratic Seminar
The Socratic Seminar is a discussion protocol where students engage in evidence-based dialogue with one another rather than the teacher. The deck explains how to prepare students, structure the seminar with inner and outer circles, and use it as either a formative or summative assessment. It connects the practice to Jewish learning traditions, framing it as covenant and conversation across generations.
The Socratic Seminar: Part II
The Socratic Seminar: Part II builds on Part I by moving from understanding the protocol to planning its use in specific disciplines. The deck guides teachers to decide how, when, and for what purposes to run seminars, and to align them with content, skills, and assessments. It also offers variations and examples, helping educators adapt the seminar for formative or summative use.
Formative Assessments
These formative assessments can be used in any subject, and we’ve also included space to add what areas of content and what skill you’re assessing as well as what meaning you hope your students derive from learning.
Choice Menu for Learning
These choices are based on the degree of challenge. The exemplars we are sharing are for Jewish texts, but this strategy can applied to almost any academic discipline. Students can choose or teachers can direct students to start with the learning activity with a moderate, medium or high degree of challenge. Note that students are being asked to do the learning work and assess what they have learned, rather than teachers doing the work for them. Teacher can allow students to work with a teacher, a partner or individually for most of the activities.
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How to Build Better, More Effective Tests and Quizzes
Read this Edutopia article on your tests might be falling short due to a few fixable missteps. Here’s how educators are fine-tuning their approach for better, more accurate results.
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