Elevate The Norm

Author: Clay Shumate

  • Socratic Seminar Rubric: A Four-Criterion Version for Grades 6–12

    Socratic Seminar Rubric: A Four-Criterion Version for Grades 6–12

    By Clay Shumate

    A Socratic seminar rubric should score four things: preparation, use of the text, how a student treats other people’s ideas, and what they wrote afterward. It should not score how many times somebody spoke. The full rubric is below, free, on this page, with no email to give — and a printable version at the bottom if you want one.

    It comes with an argument, because a rubric that counts talking turns is worse than no rubric at all — and because the research on rubrics is more qualified than the phrase “research-based rubric” suggests.

    Key Takeaways

    • Four criteria, four levels, and none of them is participation frequency. Counting comments rewards volume and punishes the students who most need the practice.
    • Most of the score comes from writing, not talking. Preparation before and reflection after are visible, gradeable, and fair to a student who spoke twice.
    • Analytic beats holistic on reliability. A review of 75 studies found scoring agreement improves with analytic, topic-specific rubrics plus exemplars or rater training.
    • Rubrics are not automatically valid. The same review is explicit that a rubric improves agreement between scorers without guaranteeing you are measuring the right thing.
    • You cannot facilitate and score thirty students at once. Anyone who says otherwise is describing a checklist, not an assessment.

    Free Download · PDF

    Socratic Seminar Rubric (Four Criteria)

    The same four-criterion rubric printed above, laid out to print and cut, plus the scoring rotation for thirty students and a student self-score half-sheet.

    Download the free PDF

    Free. No email address required. Designed for grades 6–12. Browse every printable in Your Free Library.

    What Should a Socratic Seminar Rubric Measure?

    The things a student controls, that leave evidence, and that you would still care about if the student were quiet. That test eliminates most of what standard seminar rubrics score.

    Four criteria survive it.

    1. Preparation. Did they read it, mark it, and bring a written question? This is visible before anyone speaks and it is the single best predictor of whether the seminar works.
    2. Use of the text. When they did speak or write, did they point at a specific place in the text, or at a general impression?
    3. Treatment of other people’s ideas. Did they build on, question, or directly respond to a classmate — or deliver a prepared statement into the middle of the circle and stop?
    4. Reflection afterward. Can they name what changed in their thinking and whose comment did it? This one is only answerable by a student who was listening, which is why it is the hardest to fake.

    If your gradebook is standards-based, those four map cleanly onto speaking-and-listening standards without inventing a category: preparation and use of the text are evidence standards, treatment of others’ ideas is a collaborative-discussion standard, and the reflection is usually assessable under both. You do not need a “participation” line item, and if the gradebook has one, these are what should feed it.

    One caution on the third criterion, and it is the one I would want a department to talk through before adopting any seminar rubric. Norms about interrupting, turn length, directness and how openly you disagree are not universal — they vary by family, by community, and by what a student has been taught is respectful. A rubric that scores “treatment of others’ ideas” can quietly encode one conversational style as the correct one. Keep the descriptors pointed at what the student did with the idea — responded to it, questioned it, built on it — and away from manner, volume and poise. If a descriptor could be satisfied by a confident student who said nothing of substance, it is scoring style.

    Three of those four produce writing. That is deliberate. A rubric whose evidence is mostly written is a rubric you can actually apply after the period ends, and it is a rubric a student who said very little can still score well on.

    The Socratic Seminar Rubric

    Four criteria, four levels, no participation count. Copy it, cut it, change the language to match your school’s scale. It is free, it is printed in full right here, and there is a printable version at the bottom of this page.

    One framing worth saying to students before you hand it over: the level-one column describes something that happened on one day, not a kind of person. A student who arrived without the text marked is a student who arrived without the text marked. If a descriptor reads to a fourteen-year-old like a verdict on their character, rewrite it — that costs nothing and it changes whether they look at the rubric again.

    Four by four Socratic seminar rubric table with criteria for preparation, use of the text, treatment of others' ideas and reflection afterward, each described at beginning, developing, proficient and advanced levels
    The full rubric. The same table is written out below so you can copy it.
    Criterion1 — Beginning2 — Developing3 — Proficient4 — Advanced
    PreparationText arrived unmarked. No written question.Text lightly marked. Question is general or copied from a prompt.Text marked in several places. One specific written question tied to a passage.Text marked with a reading in mind. Question names a passage and asks something the student genuinely cannot answer.
    Use of the textContributions are opinion or recall with no reference to the text.Refers to the text generally — “the author says” without locating it.Points to specific lines or passages when making a claim.Uses the text precisely, including passages that complicate their own position.
    Treatment of others’ ideasSpoke over a classmate, or offered statements unconnected to what came before.Waits and contributes, but contributions do not respond to anyone.Builds on, questions, or disagrees with a specific classmate’s point.Responds to the strongest version of a classmate’s point, and invites people who have not spoken.
    Reflection afterwardNo written reflection, or one that restates a position with no evidence of listening.Describes what the seminar was about rather than what changed.Names something that changed or sharpened, with a reason.Names what changed, whose comment did it, and what would still need to be settled.
    Free to copy, cut and rewrite. No email address. A printable version is linked below.

    Why This Rubric Does Not Count How Often You Spoke

    Because a participation count measures confidence and rewards it, and confidence is not the skill you are teaching. The moment students know comments are scored, you get performances of the right length at the right frequency, and the conversation stops being about the text.

    Two column table contrasting what belongs on a Socratic seminar rubric with what does not, including how many times a student spoke, manner and poise, and conduct
    If a descriptor could be met by a confident student who said nothing of substance, it is scoring style.

    There is a second reason, and it is about who pays. A qualitative study of quiet students — ten undergraduates, so treat it as a description rather than a finding about your seventh period — found that nine of the ten struggled with instructor expectations for verbal participation, and six reported physical reactions when speaking aloud: trembling, blushing, stuttering. One described planning out what they wanted to say before speaking. A frequency count charges those students a fee the loud ones never pay, for a behavior that is not the learning objective.

    Related, and worth checking against your district’s grading policy: criterion three has to stay academic. “Responded to a classmate’s specific claim” is an academic behavior. “Was respectful” is conduct, and in a lot of districts conduct is not permitted inside an academic grade — for good reason. If a student’s behavior in a seminar is a problem, that is the conduct system’s job, handled the way you would handle it on any other day, and not something you fold into a score for a speaking standard.

    This also gives you a clean answer when a parent asks. A quiet student can earn full marks here, because three of the four criteria are about preparation, precision and listening, and none of them requires their child to perform in front of the class. Say that in the same sentence you send the rubric home, before anyone has to ask.

    If your school requires a participation grade, pull it from criteria one and four — both of which are written, both of which are about preparation and listening, and neither of which requires a student to perform. Then say out loud to the class that talking is not scored. The first seminar after they believe you is a different conversation.

    One thing that belongs nowhere on a rubric: the behaviors that are not a continuum. In my room, making fun of how unusual somebody’s name is is a hard stop — not a criterion where a student can earn a 2. A rubric is for things that improve by degrees. Hard stops are a different category, and putting them on a scoring scale quietly suggests there is an acceptable amount.

    Do Rubrics Actually Help?

    They reliably help scoring agreement. Their effect on learning is real, mixed, and badly confounded — and the honest version is more useful than the sales version.

    Jonsson and Svingby reviewed 75 empirical studies on rubrics. Their finding on reliability is clear: scoring “can be enhanced by the use of rubrics, especially if they are analytic, topic-specific, and complemented with exemplars and/or rater training.” Their finding on validity is the one people skip — rubrics do not by themselves make an assessment judgement valid. Two teachers agreeing on a score is not the same as the score measuring the thing you care about.

    Panadero and Jonsson then reviewed 21 studies on using rubrics formatively. Some reported large effects on performance — effect sizes from 0.99 to 1.6 — and others reported little or nothing. The authors are direct about why that range is not as impressive as it looks: “most studies reporting on such improvements have combined the use of rubrics with other instructional interventions.” The rubric usually arrived alongside self-assessment, peer assessment or extended instruction, so the rubric’s own contribution is hard to isolate. They also note that positive effects were more likely in higher education, in interventions lasting several weeks or longer, and when rubrics were paired with metacognitive work.

    What they identify as the mechanism is worth keeping, because it tells you how to use the thing: rubrics work by making expectations transparent, which reduces anxiety, supports feedback, and lets students plan. Students in those studies described using a rubric “much like a recipe or a map.”

    The practical conclusion: hand the rubric out before the seminar, not after. A rubric used as a scoring instrument is a grading tool. A rubric used as a description of what good looks like, given to students in advance, is the version with evidence behind it.

    Analytic or Holistic?

    Analytic, if you want two teachers to agree. That is the clearest single recommendation in the rubric literature, and the rubric above follows it — four separate criteria scored separately rather than one overall impression.

    Jonsson and Svingby list four things that improve scoring agreement, and it is worth reading them as a to-do list rather than a finding: analytic design, topic-specific criteria, exemplars, and rater training. The first two are free and you did them by choosing this rubric. The third costs one seminar — keep two reflections, one strong and one thin, and show students both. Anonymised means actually anonymised — names and identifying details stripped, and the student asked first. A class can usually recognise its own handwriting and its own arguments, and “this is the weak one” is not a thing to do to a student by accident. The fourth matters only if more than one adult is scoring.

    “Topic-specific” is the one worth acting on. A rubric that says “uses evidence effectively” is generic and every scorer fills in their own meaning. Rewriting that row to name what evidence looks like in this text — a line number, a date, a specific claim — takes two minutes and does more for consistency than any amount of descriptor polishing. The same principle runs through the site’s approach to rubrics generally: specific beats elegant.

    How Do You Score Thirty Students in One Period?

    You do not, and the sooner you stop trying the better your seminars get. Facilitating and scoring are two jobs. Doing both means doing the first one badly, and the first one is the one that makes the seminar work.

    Four rows describing who scores which rubric criteria: the teacher scores preparation and reflection from paper, a rotating group of six is scored on the live criteria, students self-score first, and outer-circle observers record behaviour only
    Facilitating and scoring are two jobs.

    Three ways out, in order of how much I trust them.

    1. Score the writing, not the room. Criteria one and four are collected on paper. That is half the rubric done at your desk, after school, fairly, with no memory involved.
    2. Score a rotation. Pick six students per seminar for criteria two and three and tell them in advance. Over five seminars everyone gets scored twice on the live criteria. Telling them beforehand is not cheating — it is the transparency the research says is doing the work.
    3. Use the fishbowl. If half the class is in an outer circle already, give each observer one partner and one behavioral thing to record. Their notes are not the grade, but they are evidence you did not have to generate while running the conversation.

    Check one thing before you adopt any of this: if a student has an IEP or 504 plan that addresses oral participation, the live criteria may need to be replaced rather than adapted for that student. Ask the case manager rather than improvising a workaround, and note that this rubric already makes that easy — half the score is written, so substituting the other half costs you less than it would on most discussion rubrics.

    On time, honestly: four criteria for twenty-eight students is about twenty minutes if you are scoring the written half from paper and six students on the live half. It is not nothing. It is roughly the cost of grading a set of exit tickets, and it is the reason the rotation exists.

    What I would not do is score from memory at the end of the period. Twenty minutes after a good seminar, what you remember is who was interesting, and “interesting” correlates with confident far more than it correlates with prepared.

    Who Should Do the Scoring?

    Students first, on the same rubric, before you score anything. This is the change that makes the rubric an instructional tool rather than a grading one, and it costs four minutes.

    Hand out the rubric before the seminar. Afterward, have each student score themselves on all four criteria and write one sentence of evidence for each. Then score them yourself. Where you disagree by more than one level, that is your conversation — and it is a better conversation than any comment you would have written unprompted.

    Two guards on this. The student’s self-score is not the grade; it is information, and the moment it becomes the grade you have taught them to inflate it. And peer scoring should stay behavioral: what a classmate did, not how well they did it. A fifteen-year-old can honestly record “went back to the text three times.” A fifteen-year-old should not be handing another fifteen-year-old a 2 out of 4 on how they treat people’s ideas. This is the same line the site draws around having students judge their own work: the judgement is real, and it does not become the record.

    What to Do With the Score

    Use it to decide what to teach next, and put as little of it in the gradebook as your school allows. A seminar rubric’s best use is diagnostic.

    Look down the columns rather than across the rows. If twenty of twenty-eight students scored low on use of the text, that is not twenty-eight individual grades — that is one lesson about citing a line, and you should teach it before the next seminar instead of recording twenty low scores. If preparation is the weak column, the problem is upstream of the seminar entirely and no amount of facilitation will fix it.

    If the scores do go in the gradebook, weight them low and tell students the weight. A seminar is a practice format. Grading practice heavily is how you get students who will not risk a wrong reading out loud, which is the one behavior the whole format exists to produce.

    What to Do Next

    Take the rubric above, rewrite the use of the text row so it names what evidence looks like in the specific text you are teaching, and hand it to students the day before — not the day after. Score criteria one and four from the paper they turn in. Pick six students for the live criteria and tell them who they are.

    Then run it twice before you judge either the rubric or your class. If you need the rest of the format, it is in the guide to running a Socratic seminar, and the questions that make one worth scoring are in the seminar question bank.

    Before you go: grab the free Socratic Seminar Rubric (Four Criteria) (PDF) — ElevateTheNorm.com branded, printable, no email required.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What should a Socratic seminar rubric include?

    Four criteria: preparation, use of the text, treatment of other people’s ideas, and written reflection afterward. Three of the four produce writing, which means you can score them after the period rather than while facilitating, and a student who spoke twice can still score well. What it should not include is a count of how many times a student spoke.

    Should you grade a Socratic seminar at all?

    Grade the preparation and the reflection, and weight the whole thing lightly. A seminar is a practice format, and grading practice heavily produces students who will not risk a wrong reading out loud — which is the behavior the format exists to create. If a participation grade is required, take it from the written criteria and say plainly that speaking is not scored.

    Why shouldn’t a rubric count how many times a student speaks?

    Because it measures confidence and charges a fee to students who find speaking aloud genuinely hard. A study of quiet students found most struggled with verbal participation expectations and several reported physical symptoms — trembling, blushing, stuttering — when speaking in class. Frequency is also easy to game: three short comments at the right moments will beat one student who prepared thoroughly and spoke once.

    Is an analytic or holistic rubric better for a seminar?

    Analytic, if you want consistency. A review of 75 rubric studies found scoring reliability improves when rubrics are analytic and topic-specific and are paired with exemplars or rater training. Holistic rubrics are faster and less consistent, and with something as fuzzy as discussion quality, consistency is exactly what you are short of.

    Do rubrics actually improve student learning?

    The evidence is genuinely mixed. A review of 21 studies of formative rubric use found effects ranging from very large to nothing, and noted that most studies combined rubrics with other interventions, so the rubric’s own contribution is hard to isolate. What the authors identify as the mechanism is transparency — which means handing the rubric out before the seminar rather than attaching it to the grade afterward.

    How do you score thirty students during one seminar?

    You do not. Facilitating and scoring are two jobs, and doing both means doing the facilitation badly. Score the two written criteria from paper afterward, and score the two live criteria for a rotating group of about six students per seminar, told in advance. Over five seminars everyone gets scored twice on the live criteria.

    Should students score themselves on the seminar rubric?

    Yes, before you score them, using the same rubric with one sentence of evidence per criterion. Where your score and theirs differ by more than one level, that gap is the conversation worth having. Keep the self-score as information rather than as the grade — the moment it becomes the grade, students learn to inflate it.

    Is this Socratic seminar rubric free to use?

    Yes. It is printed in full on this page and there is a free printable version too, with no email address to hand over, and you are welcome to copy it, cut criteria, or rewrite the language to match your school’s scale. Rewriting the use-of-the-text row so it names what evidence looks like in your specific text is the single change that will do the most for consistency.

    Sources

    1. Jonsson, Anders, and Gunilla Svingby. “The Use of Scoring Rubrics: Reliability, Validity and Educational Consequences.” Educational Research Review, vol. 2, no. 2, 2007, pp. 130–144. Review of 75 empirical studies; reliable scoring “can be enhanced by the use of rubrics, especially if they are analytic, topic-specific, and complemented with exemplars and/or rater training”; rubrics do not by themselves guarantee valid judgements. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ796733
    2. Panadero, Ernesto, and Anders Jonsson. “The Use of Scoring Rubrics for Formative Assessment Purposes Revisited: A Review.” Educational Research Review, vol. 9, 2013, pp. 129–144. 21 studies; effects on performance ranged from large (0.99–1.6) to negligible, and “most studies reporting on such improvements have combined the use of rubrics with other instructional interventions.” Positive effects more likely in higher education, over longer interventions, and when paired with metacognitive activity. https://platform.europeanmoocs.eu/users/4567/Les3/Panadero-Jonsson-rubrics-3.pdf
    3. Murphy, P. Karen, et al. “Examining the Effects of Classroom Discussion on Students’ Comprehension of Text: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 101, no. 3, 2009, pp. 740–764. Discussion produced strong increases in student talk and substantial gains in text comprehension, but “few approaches to discussion were effective at increasing students’ literal or inferential comprehension and critical thinking and reasoning.” https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ861185
    4. Applebee, Arthur N., Judith A. Langer, Martin Nystrand, and Adam Gamoran. “Discussion-Based Approaches to Developing Understanding: Classroom Instruction and Student Performance in Middle and High School English.” American Educational Research Journal, vol. 40, no. 3, 2003, pp. 685–730. 64 middle and high school English classrooms, grades 7, 8, 10, 11 and 12. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ782328
    5. Medaille, Ann, and Janet Usinger. “Quiet Students’ Experiences with the Physical, Pedagogical, and Psychosocial Aspects of the Classroom Environment.” Educational Research: Theory and Practice, vol. 31, no. 2, 2020, pp. 41–55. Ten upper-division undergraduates — not secondary students; nine of ten struggled with verbal participation expectations and six reported physical symptoms when speaking aloud. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1274336.pdf

    About Clay Shumate

    Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher in the public schools of West Alabama, with seven years of classroom experience, a B.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education. He writes about project-based learning, student responsibility, respect, and practical ways to hold young people to a higher standard while giving them room to learn from mistakes. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and writes to its Code of Ethics; this site’s editorial standards and corrections policy are published in full. More about Clay.

  • Sub Plans for Middle and High School: What to Leave So the Day Actually Runs

    Sub Plans for Middle and High School: What to Leave So the Day Actually Runs

    Sub plans are the instructions you leave so someone else can run your class for a day. Good ones do three jobs: they keep students safe, they keep students doing real work, and they tell a stranger what normal looks like in a room they have never seen. Most sub plans only try to do the second job, and that is why most sub days go sideways.

    This guide covers what to put in sub plans for grades 6–12, how to write the day so a substitute can actually follow it, the difference between emergency sub plans and the ones you write for a planned absence, and what to do about the days no substitute shows up at all. If you want the other side of the door — what the person walking in can and cannot control — that is in the guide to running a room that isn’t yours.

    Key Takeaways

    • Sub plans are written for a stranger, not for you. Anything that only makes sense if you know the room has to be spelled out.
    • Write the day in minutes. Start and stop times for each task turn a vague plan into one a substitute can enforce.
    • Emergency sub plans are a different document. They stand alone, they are built at the start of the year, and anyone in the building can run them.
    • Report the absence early. In one large district’s data, substitute coverage rose sharply for every hour a job was posted ahead of time through the first day.
    • Plan for no sub at all. When an absence goes uncovered, students are often split into other rooms or a colleague gives up a planning period. The plan has to work for them too.
    • Make the work count. Students can tell a holding pattern from a real assignment, and they act accordingly.

    What Should Sub Plans Include?

    Sub plans should include the schedule written in minutes, a seating chart and roster, how the room normally runs, the exact location of every copy, answer keys, the names of people to call, the health and safety information your school requires you to share, and a sheet for the substitute to write back on. That is the binder. The lesson is only one part of it.

    Checklist of eight items for a sub plans binder: the day in minutes, seating chart and roster, how the room runs, where the work is, answer keys, who to call, health and safety notes, and a note-back sheet
    The lesson is one part of the binder. The other seven are what a stranger needs at 7:40 a.m.

    Think about what a substitute actually needs at 7:40 in the morning. Not your philosophy of teaching. They need to know where the copies are, what happens when the bell rings, and who to send for when something goes wrong. A plan that says “students will continue their reading” tells them nothing about any of that.

    The day, in minutes

    Each period gets a start time and a stop time for every task. “8:05–8:15: bell work on the board. 8:15–8:40: reading and questions 1–6. 8:40–8:50: turn in to the tray by the door.” Times give the substitute something to point at. A posted time is easier to hold students to than an adult’s opinion about when they should be done.

    Seating chart and roster

    A substitute who can use names is in a different room than one who can’t. Keep the seating chart current and mark two or three students per class who can answer a question about where things are. Pick them for reliability, not for being your favorites. A seating chart built for the room you actually have does double duty here.

    How the room runs

    Entry, materials, phones, restroom passes, dismissal. Write down how these work in your room, not how they work in the handbook. If students pick up their own folders at the door, say so. If phones go in a pocket chart, say where it is. Most of what a substitute reads as students “getting away with something” is students following a routine nobody told the sub about. Your routines and procedures are the thing being handed over.

    Where the work is, and the keys

    Copies made, labeled by period, in one place, named in the plan. Answer keys in the same folder. Keys let the substitute check work and let students who finish early check their own, which keeps the last fifteen minutes from turning into the loudest fifteen minutes of the day.

    Who to call, and the private information

    Name the teacher next door and the number for the office. Say plainly that if something is unsafe, the substitute does not need anyone’s permission to call for help. Health plans and emergency procedures belong in the binder only in the form your school requires. Do not leave copies of individual student plans loose on a desk; follow your building’s procedure for what a substitute is given and where it is kept.

    Write Sub Plans to the Minute

    My own rule for running a room is short: “Taking control of a classroom is done by organization to the minute and then you pause. Be confident.” The posted times are the setup. The pause is the enforcement. You lay out the plan, stop talking, and let the silence do its job.

    A substitute cannot borrow your confidence, and they do not have your history with the class. What they can borrow is your organization. If the plan is written to the minute, the substitute does not have to invent authority. They read the time, point at the board, and wait. The plan carries the weight a stranger’s voice cannot.

    That is also why vague plans fail even with a strong substitute. “Work on the project” leaves the adult in the room arguing about what counts as working. “Draft paragraph two, due in the tray at 9:20” does not. If you have never written the room down this way, a written classroom management plan is the document to start from.

    Emergency Sub Plans vs. Planned-Absence Sub Plans

    Emergency sub plans are the ones you build before you need them. They stand alone, they do not depend on yesterday’s lesson, and anyone in the building can run them cold. Planned-absence sub plans are written the week you know you’ll be out and continue the unit students are already in.

    Two-column comparison: emergency sub plans are written in advance, stand alone, can be run by anyone and are filed where the office can find them; planned-absence sub plans are written the week before, continue the current unit, and are replaced each time
    Emergency sub plans are the ones you can’t write when you need them.

    The emergency folder is the one that matters most, because it is the one you can’t write when you need it. You wake up sick at 5:30. Your kid has a fever. There is a family emergency two hours away. Nobody is writing a lesson plan in those moments, and nobody should have to.

    Three rules make emergency sub plans work:

    • Standalone. No reference to “where we left off.” The work makes sense on any day of the year.
    • Keyed and copied. A full class set for each day, with an answer key, already in the folder.
    • Findable. The office knows where the folder is. So does the teacher next door. Tell them both.

    Three days is the right number for most secondary teachers. One day runs out the first time you’re out twice in a month, and five days is a lot to build before the year has started.

    I write these for my own room and put them on TPT. The Any-Day Emergency Sub Plan Card is free: one page any adult can run, in any subject. If you teach social studies, Emergency Sub Plans World History is five strange-but-true readings with questions and answer keys, written so a substitute can hand them out without knowing the content. The same format covers Civics Sub Plans Vol. 1 for government classes and Renaissance Sub Plans. For a full ancient-to-medieval sequence, the Ancient & Medieval Sub Plans Bundle covers Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages in one folder.

    Out the week of Halloween? Halloween Sub Plans are five spooky history readings a substitute can run cold, so the sub day isn’t a word search.

    Subject-Neutral Sub Plans That Still Count

    Not every emergency day can be a content day. Sometimes the substitute is covering three different preps, or the class is being split into other rooms. That is when subject-neutral work earns its place. The test is simple: would a reasonable student see it as real work, and would you actually look at it when you got back?

    Work that passes that test:

    What fails the test: a movie with no task, a word search, or a packet nobody collects. Students read those as a day off, and the substitute pays for it.

    Behavior and Logistics: What the Substitute Needs to Know

    Tell the substitute what normal looks like, so they can tell when something isn’t. If partner talk is how your room works, say so, or a quiet-room substitute will spend the day fighting your design. If one class needs a seating change after lunch, write it down. If a student has a plan for stepping out when they need to, put it in the binder the way your school requires.

    Then give them something to say when a student pushes back. Most substitutes have a few phrases they lean on; it helps to leave a few that match how your room already talks. The free 5 De-escalation Scripts You Can Use Today fit on one page in the binder. If you want the full set for yourself, De-escalation Strategies for Teachers has 100 scripts for middle and high school.

    Finally, leave clear limits. Name the two or three things a substitute should write down and leave for you, rather than handle on the spot. That protects students from a stranger making a big call on a single day, and it protects the substitute from having to.

    When to Write Sub Plans, and When to Report the Absence

    Five-step timeline for sub plans: build the emergency folder in the first two weeks, report the absence right away, write the day in minutes before you leave, let the plan do the work, and grade the work when you return
    Report the absence early. Coverage drops for jobs posted at the last minute.

    Build the emergency folder in the first two weeks of school, while you still have the energy and before you need it. Look at it again at the start of each grading period and swap anything that has gone stale.

    When you know you’ll be out, report it right away. In a study of a large West Coast district, Brookings researcher Jing Liu and colleagues found that how early a substitute job was posted was one of the strongest predictors of whether it got filled. Coverage climbed quickly for each hour of notice through the first 24 hours, and jobs posted at the last minute were the least likely to be covered. A plan that never gets a substitute to read it is a plan for whoever ends up in your room instead.

    Plan for the Day No Substitute Comes

    Uncovered absences are not rare. In the same district data, teachers were out about 11.8 days a year, and roughly one of those days went without a substitute. When that happened, students were split into other classrooms about 37 percent of the time, a teacher gave up a planning period about 35 percent of the time, and an administrator covered about 12 percent of the time.

    The same study found that schools serving more disadvantaged students had systematically lower substitute coverage, and that substitutes often cited student behavior when they named the schools they avoided. Reporting from 2024 citing federal survey data put the share of public schools that had difficulty finding substitutes at 35 percent in 2023–24. Read honestly, that is not a reason to blame anyone. It is a reason to write plans that a colleague can run in another room, with your students sitting in the back of a class that isn’t theirs.

    That means one more rule for emergency sub plans: they have to work for 25 minutes in someone else’s room. A one-page reading with questions does. A lab, a discussion, or anything that needs your projector does not.

    What Students Should Be Doing, and Why It Matters

    Students behave differently on a sub day for reasons that make sense. The adult is new, the routine is off, and the day looks like it might not count. Responding to that isn’t a character flaw. It’s a reasonable read of what they’ve been handed.

    The fix is on our end. Leave work that is clearly real, collect it, and tell them in the plan that you will read it. Then do. If the work is graded, grade it the way you would on any other day. Don’t punish a whole class for what the substitute’s note says a few students did; deal with those students individually, the way you would if you had been there.

    Families notice this too. If a sub day turns into a grade, a student should be able to explain to a parent what the assignment was and why it counted. If you get questions, clear parent-teacher communication is easier when the work was clearly worth doing.

    Review Sub Plans Like the Person Reading Them

    Before you file it, read the plan as a stranger would. Could someone who has never been in your building find the copies? Could they start class without asking anyone? Could a colleague run the same pages in their room? Could a student tell what they are being graded on? If any answer is no, that is the line to fix.

    Build Sub Plans Once

    The point of all this is that the hard thinking happens once. A good emergency folder is built in August and keeps paying for itself every time life gets in the way. A good binder template means the planned-absence day takes twenty minutes to write instead of an evening.

    If you would rather start with everything already built, The Teacher Emergency Kit Ultimate Bundle puts 64 resources for grades 6–12 in one download. If you’re buying during a sitewide sale, the TPT sale guide explains how the discounts stack. Free printables for the rest of the classroom are in the free resource library.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What should be included in sub plans?

    A minute-by-minute schedule for each period, a seating chart and roster, how routines like entry, phones, and dismissal work, where the copies and answer keys are, who to call for help, the health and safety information your school requires, and a sheet for the substitute to leave notes on. The lesson itself is only one part.

    What are emergency sub plans?

    Emergency sub plans are standalone lessons you prepare before you need them, usually at the start of the year. They don’t depend on where the class left off, they come copied with answer keys, and they are kept where the office and a neighboring teacher can find them. Three days is a practical number for most secondary teachers.

    How detailed should sub plans be?

    Detailed enough that someone who has never been in your building could run the day without asking anyone. Use start and stop times for each task, name exactly where materials are, and spell out routines that students already know but a substitute doesn’t.

    Should sub plan work be graded?

    If you want students to take it seriously, yes. Collect it, read it, and grade it the way you would on any other day. Work that is never collected teaches students that sub days don’t count.

    What if no substitute is available?

    Plan for it. When an absence goes uncovered, students are often split into other classrooms or a colleague covers on a planning period. Emergency sub plans should work in 25 minutes in someone else’s room, which means short readings with questions rather than labs or discussions.

    Can a substitute show a movie?

    Only with a task attached and only if your school allows it. A video with a set of questions that gets collected is work. A movie with nothing attached tells students the day doesn’t count, and the substitute usually pays for that.

    How early should I report an absence?

    As early as you can. In one large district’s data, coverage rose sharply with each hour of notice through the first 24 hours, and last-minute postings were the least likely to be filled.

    Sources

    • Liu, J. (2020). America faces a substitute teacher shortage—and disadvantaged schools are hit hardest. Brookings Institution, Brown Center Chalkboard. Read the analysis — source for the 11.8 days of average absence, the share of uncovered absences and how they were covered, the effect of posting time on coverage, and the lower coverage rates in disadvantaged schools. Data from one large urban district on the West Coast, 2011–12 to 2017–18; it describes associations in that district, not a national rate.
    • DiFurio, D. (2024). Substitute teachers keep schools running. Here are the best ways schools can attract more amid the shortage. Stacker, with HeyTutor. Read the article — source for the 35% of public schools reporting difficulty finding substitutes in 2023–24 (attributed there to NCES School Pulse Panel data) and for the finding that substitutes rank solid lesson plans highest when choosing an assignment (from Red Rover’s 2023 survey of about 4,000 substitutes). This is a secondary summary; the NCES and Red Rover figures are cited as reported there.

    About Clay Shumate

    By Clay Shumate — Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher in the public schools of West Alabama, with seven years of classroom experience, a B.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education. He writes about project-based learning, student responsibility, respect, and practical ways to hold young people to a higher standard while giving them room to learn from mistakes. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and writes to its Code of Ethics; this site’s editorial standards and corrections policy are published in full.

  • Student Goal Setting: What Works in Grades 6–12, and What the Evidence Won’t Carry

    Student Goal Setting: What Works in Grades 6–12, and What the Evidence Won’t Carry

    By Clay Shumate

    Student goal setting is the practice of having students name a specific, near-term target for their own learning, plan how they will hit it, and check whether they did. It is cheap, it is popular, and the federal evidence review rates it “promising” rather than strong — which is a more useful place to start than the version you got in a faculty meeting.

    What follows is what the research supports, the large trial that found nothing, and the part that actually moves the needle: the plan, not the goal.

    Key Takeaways

    • The official rating is Tier III, “promising evidence.” That is the third-highest tier, below strong and moderate. Anyone selling this as settled is overselling it.
    • The best secondary study is correlational. 1,273 high school students over five years showed a significant relationship between goal writing and proficiency — with no control group, so causation is not established.
    • A large randomised trial found nothing. About 1,400 first-year college students, precisely estimated null on grades, credits and persistence — and it was a failed replication of a pilot that had reported more than half a standard deviation.
    • The plan beats the goal. Across 94 studies, forming a specific “if X, then I will Y” plan had a medium-to-large effect on goal attainment (d = .65). Wanting it more is not the mechanism.
    • Goal setting alone is not an intervention. The federal review says so outright: it “cannot be assumed to produce positive outcomes for students” on its own.

    Free Download · PDF

    The Student Goal and If-Then Plan Sheet

    Student-facing: five tests for a goal worth setting, the if-then plan frame, four worked examples by subject, and a two-week check-back log.

    Download the free PDF

    Free. No email address required. Designed for grades 6–12. Browse every printable in Your Free Library.

    What Is Student Goal Setting?

    Student goal setting is a short cycle, not a form. The student names a specific target for their own learning, decides what they will actually do to reach it, does it, gathers some evidence, and judges honestly whether they got there. Then the cycle runs again.

    The word doing the work in that definition is own. A target a teacher assigns and a student copies onto a sheet is not goal setting; it is an objective with a student’s handwriting on it. The federal practice guide is specific that letting students set their own goals is one of the components associated with better outcomes, alongside goals that are proximal (near-term rather than end-of-year), specific rather than general, and optimally challenging — hard enough to require something, not so hard the student has already lost.

    It is also the forward-facing half of a pair. Student self-assessment asks a teenager to judge work they have already done. Goal setting asks the same student to aim at work they have not done yet. Neither one works well without the other — a goal set by a student with no accurate read on where they currently stand is a guess.

    Does Student Goal Setting Actually Work?

    The honest answer is “promising, conditional, and less certain than the training implies.” Three pieces of evidence, and they do not all point the same way.

    The official rating. The Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest reviewed student goal setting for the Institute of Education Sciences and rated it Tier III, “promising evidence” under the federal evidence standards. Tier III is the third-highest of four. It means there is correlational research with statistical controls behind the practice — not that it has been shown to cause anything in a well-controlled trial.

    The best secondary-school study. Moeller, Theiler and Wu followed 1,273 high school students across five years, 21 teachers and 23 Nebraska schools, using a portfolio system built on self-assessment, goal writing and evidence collection. Goal writing and action-plan writing both showed statistically significant relationships with language proficiency scores, independent of teacher effects. It is a large, long, genuinely secondary study, and the authors say plainly that there was no control group and causation cannot be established.

    The trial that found nothing. Dobronyi, Oreopoulos and Petronijevic randomly assigned about 1,400 first-year university students to a structured goal-setting exercise, with or without follow-up reminders, against a control group. They found “no evidence of an effect of treatment” on grades, credits taken, credits failed, or second-year persistence — and their sample was large enough to have detected a 7 percent standardised effect. Their study was an attempt to replicate an earlier pilot that had reported a treatment effect on GPA of more than half a standard deviation. It did not replicate.

    Those students were undergraduates, not teenagers, and a one-off written exercise is not a classroom routine. Both of those are real reasons the null might not transfer. But it is exactly the kind of result that quietly disappears from professional development, and it is the reason the federal review ends up at “promising” instead of “strong.”

    What the review actually concludes is the sentence to keep: goal setting “in isolation cannot be assumed to produce positive outcomes for students.” It works when it is attached to planning, self-evaluation, regular feedback and reflection. Handed out as a September worksheet, it is a September worksheet.

    Why Do Most Classroom Goal-Setting Systems Die by October?

    Because the goal gets set and nothing after it is scheduled. Every failure I have watched has the same shape: a strong launch, a folder, and then nothing on the calendar that forces anyone to look at the folder again.

    Four specific failure modes, and each one has a cheap fix.

    1. The goal is too far away. “Raise my grade this semester” gives a student nothing to do on Tuesday. Proximal beats distal in the research and in the room. Two weeks is a good default.
    2. The goal is a wish, not a behavior. “Try harder in this class” cannot be checked by anybody, including the student. If you cannot tell from the outside whether it happened, it is not a goal.
    3. Nobody scheduled the review. This is the big one. If the goal review is not a thing that happens on a specific day, it does not happen. Put it in the plan the same way you would put in a quiz.
    4. The teacher owns it. The moment students believe the goal sheet is for you — for a binder check, for a walkthrough, for the folder an administrator might ask about — they write what looks good. You will get twenty-eight reasonable-sounding goals and zero information.

    There is a version of the fourth failure that no teacher can fix alone. If a district requires the goal sheet as a walkthrough artifact or a PLC deliverable, it has made the sheet an adult document by design, and students will read that correctly within a week. Goal setting is cheap enough to mandate and fragile enough that mandating it is usually how it dies. If it has to be collected, collect the evidence that the review happened — a date, a count — and leave the goals themselves with the student.

    The fourth one is the one worth guarding hardest, and it connects to something this site keeps coming back to: a choice that is really a compliance task in disguise teaches students to produce the appearance of the thing instead of the thing.

    What Makes a Goal Worth Setting?

    Five tests, and a goal that fails any of them will not survive two weeks. Run a student’s draft against these before it goes in the folder.

    Numbered list of five tests for a student goal: the student wrote it, it names a behavior rather than a wish, it is optimally challenging for that student, it is close enough to act on, and it has an if-then plan under it
    Run a student’s draft against these before it goes in the folder.

    The hardest of the five is the third. “Optimally challenging” sounds like jargon, and in practice it means a goal a student has maybe a sixty percent chance of hitting — which means some goals are supposed to be missed. Say that to the students in those words, on day one: you are supposed to miss some of these, and missing one is not a problem you will be in trouble for. If you do not say it, they will write goals they are certain of, and the whole system drifts toward targets everybody hits and nobody learns anything from. Say it to whoever reads the folder too, for the same reason.

    And “optimally challenging” is calibrated to the student, not to the class. A goal that is a genuine stretch for one student is a formality for the one beside them, which means the whole point breaks the moment you set a common goal and call it differentiated. It also means a student who has spent years being told they are behind may aim absurdly low the first time. That is information, not defiance, and the move is to negotiate one notch up rather than to reject the goal. The same argument sits underneath holding a standard high while making the path to it real: a target nobody misses was never a target.

    Are SMART Goals the Right Format?

    They are a reasonable checklist and a weak intervention, and it is worth knowing which one you are using. Specific and measurable are supported by the research on goal specificity. What SMART does not contain is the part that most predicts whether a goal gets reached.

    Look at what a SMART goal actually produces: a well-formed description of a destination. “I will score at least 80 percent on the next two vocabulary quizzes.” Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound — and it contains no information about what the student will do differently on Wednesday. A student who could already answer that question did not need the acronym.

    I am not telling anyone to throw the format out. If your school uses it, use it. Just do not stop there, because the next section is where the evidence is.

    The If-Then Plan That Does the Work

    Adding a specific “if X happens, then I will do Y” plan to a goal had a medium-to-large effect on whether the goal got reached — d = .65 across 94 studies. Psychologists call these implementation intentions. Students can call them if-then plans and use them in about ninety seconds.

    Table comparing a wish, a SMART goal and an if-then plan, showing what each sounds like and why the if-then plan names the moment, the action and the thing it replaces
    SMART describes a destination. The if-then plan names the moment you act.

    Gollwitzer and Sheeran’s meta-analysis describes them as “if-then plans that link situational cues… with responses that are effective in attaining goals.” The effect split two ways that map exactly onto what teenagers struggle with: d = .61 for getting started and d = .77 for getting derailed. The larger of the two is the one about staying on track after something goes wrong, which is the failure mode for most students, most of the time.

    Two honest limits from the same paper. If there are few real barriers to a goal, the if-then plan is superfluous — a student who was going to do it anyway does not need one. And the strong effects showed up “predominantly when the underlying goal intention was strong.” An if-then plan attached to a goal the student does not care about does nothing. That is not a flaw in the technique; it is the reason the student has to write the goal.

    Here is the frame students actually use, and it is worth writing on the board: “If it is [a specific time or trigger], then I will [a specific action].” The test is whether a stranger could tell from the outside that it happened. Watch a real one get fixed: “I will review my notes more” is not a plan. “If it is Tuesday and I have finished eating, then I will redo the two problems I got wrong before I open my phone” is one, because it names the moment, the action and the thing it replaces. Most student first drafts are missing the moment. That is the only edit you usually have to make.

    Worth saying about the population too: this meta-analysis spans health, behavior change and academic contexts across a wide age range, not a set of secondary classrooms. The mechanism is general. The classroom result is a reasonable inference, not a measured one.

    Student Goal Setting Examples for Grades 6–12

    A usable goal names a behavior, a number and a date, and is followed by a plan that names a moment. Here is the difference in practice, by subject.

    Table of four student goal setting examples in math, social studies, science and English, each paired with the if-then plan that sits under it
    Four subjects, four goals, and the plan that makes each one survive two weeks.

    Notice what every one of the good versions has that the bad version does not: a specific when. Not “I will study more” but “when I sit down Tuesday after practice.” The when is the whole mechanism. Without it the student has written a wish with a deadline attached.

    One more thing about the examples above: none of them is about a grade. Grade goals are the ones students reach for first, and they are the least useful, because a grade is an outcome the student only partly controls and it gives no instruction about behavior. “Get a B” tells you nothing to do Tuesday. If a student insists on a grade goal, ask the follow-up: what would have to be different in your week for that to happen? The answer is the actual goal.

    What Teachers Should Not Do With Student Goals

    Three things, and all three are common.

    Do not grade the goal. A graded goal is a goal a student sets low, which destroys the only thing a goal is for. Grade the work; the goal is instrumentation. If you need a grade out of the process, grade whether the reflection is honest and specific — a student who writes “I did not do this and here is why” has done the assignment correctly.

    Do not post them. Goal walls, goal charts and public trackers look like accountability and function as ranking. A student setting a goal is disclosing what they are not good at yet, in front of everyone they eat lunch with. Some students can carry that and some cannot, and you will not know which is which until it goes wrong. Keep goals in a folder, a document, or a conversation.

    Do not let a classroom goal collide with an IEP goal. If a student has goals written into an IEP or a 504 plan, those are legal documents with their own review cycle and their own people attached. A classroom goal that restates them turns your folder into a parallel record of a student’s disability, and one that pulls against them creates a conflict the student has to resolve. Ask the case manager first. Usually the answer is simple — keep the classroom goal about something the IEP does not cover — but it should be a decision rather than an accident.

    And tell families what this is before they hear about it secondhand. One sentence in a syllabus or an email does it: students set a short-term learning goal every two weeks, the goals are not graded and are not a judgment about the student, and a missed goal is a normal part of how the routine works. Parents who learn about a goal folder from a worried fourteen-year-old will assume it is an evaluation, and they will be reasonable to assume it.

    Do not let a goal become a record. If a student’s goal sheet contains anything about their home life, their diagnosis, their family or their mental health — and if you ask an open enough question, eventually one will — then you are holding a document you did not plan to hold. Keep the prompts academic and behavioral, say clearly what you do and do not do with the sheets, and know your school’s policy before you build a system that collects them. A goal-setting routine is a data-collection routine whether you designed it as one or not.

    How Often Should Students Revisit a Goal?

    Every two weeks, on a date that is already on the calendar, and in writing. Anything longer and the goal stops being operative; anything shorter and you are spending class time on the system instead of the work.

    The review is three questions and it takes six minutes. Did you do the thing you said you would do? What is the evidence? What is the goal for the next two weeks — the same one, or a different one? A student who missed and says why has not failed the routine. A student who quietly rewrites history has, and the way you prevent that is by making it clearly safe to have missed.

    The version I trust most is not a form at all. I pull students over one at a time and ask them to defend their own decisions out loud — why this goal, why that plan, what the evidence is. It takes longer than collecting sheets and it is harder to fake. A student who has to say it to your face either has a reason or discovers on the spot that they do not, and both of those outcomes are more useful than a folder.

    The arithmetic does not work at scale, and pretending otherwise is how this advice gets ignored. Six minutes times a hundred and forty students is not a thing anyone is doing every two weeks. So rotate: five or six conversations per cycle, everybody else writes, and every student gets a real check-in roughly once a quarter. Choose the five deliberately rather than by who volunteers — the students who most need to say it out loud are rarely the ones raising a hand.

    One thing to watch for across cycles: a student who misses every goal is not a student who is failing at goal setting. It is a miscalibration, and the calibration is the adult’s job. Sit down, cut the goal in half, and let them hit one. A student who has never once hit a target they set has learned only that setting targets is pointless, which is worse than not having asked. When these check-ins feed a conversation with families, they are also most of the preparation for a conference the student actually leads.

    What to Do Next

    Pick one class. Have every student write one two-week goal that names a behavior and a number, and then — this is the part that matters — have them write one sentence underneath it in the form “If [specific moment], then I will [specific action].” Put the review date in your plans before the students leave the room.

    Then run it twice before you judge it. The first cycle teaches them the format. The second one is the first real data you will get, and it will tell you more about your class than the goals themselves do.

    And set your expectations where the evidence sets them. This is a promising practice that works as part of something — planning, feedback, honest self-assessment, a conversation — and does very little on its own. A worksheet in September is not a goal-setting system. A date on the calendar is.

    Before you go: grab the free The Student Goal and If-Then Plan Sheet (PDF) — ElevateTheNorm.com branded, printable, no email required.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is student goal setting?

    It is a short repeating cycle in which a student names a specific, near-term target for their own learning, plans what they will actually do to reach it, gathers evidence, and judges honestly whether they got there. The key word is “own” — a target the teacher assigns and the student copies onto a sheet is an objective in the student’s handwriting, not a goal.

    Does student goal setting improve achievement?

    The federal evidence review rates it Tier III, “promising evidence” — the third-highest of four tiers. A five-year study of 1,273 high school students found a significant relationship between goal writing and proficiency, but it had no control group. A randomised trial of about 1,400 first-year college students found no effect at all on grades, credits or persistence. The honest summary is that it helps when it is attached to planning and feedback and does little by itself.

    Are SMART goals good for students?

    They are a reasonable checklist for describing a destination and a weak intervention on their own. Specific and measurable are genuinely supported by the research on goal specificity. What SMART does not include is any statement of what the student will do differently, and that is the part that predicts whether the goal gets reached. Use it if your school uses it, then add an if-then plan underneath.

    What is an if-then plan and why does it matter more than the goal?

    It is a sentence in the form “if [specific situation], then I will [specific action]” — researchers call it an implementation intention. Across 94 studies it had a medium-to-large effect on goal attainment, d = .65, with d = .61 for getting started and d = .77 for getting back on track after getting derailed. A goal describes where you want to end up. The if-then plan names the moment you will act.

    How often should students revisit their goals?

    About every two weeks, on a date that is already in your plans. Longer than that and the goal stops being operative; shorter and you spend class time on the system instead of the work. The review is three questions and takes six minutes: did you do it, what is the evidence, and what is the goal for the next two weeks.

    Should student goals be graded?

    No. A graded goal is a goal the student sets low, which removes the only thing a goal is useful for. If you need a grade from the process, grade whether the reflection is honest and specific. A student who writes “I did not do this, and here is why” has done the assignment correctly.

    Should I post student goals on the wall?

    No. A public goal chart looks like accountability and functions as a ranking, because a student setting a goal is disclosing what they are not good at yet in front of everyone they eat lunch with. Keep goals in a folder, a document or a conversation. Visibility is not the mechanism; the plan and the review date are.

    Why do goal-setting systems stop working after a few weeks?

    Almost always because nothing after the goal was scheduled. The four usual causes are a goal that is too far away, a goal that describes a wish rather than a behavior, a review that never got a date, and a system students correctly perceive as being for the teacher’s binder. Only the last one is about motivation, and it is fixed by keeping the goals out of anything that gets inspected.

    Sources

    1. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest. Student Goal Setting: An Evidence-Based Practice. 2018. ERIC ED589978. Rates student goal setting Tier III, “promising evidence,” under federal evidence standards; identifies optimally challenging, proximal, specific, self-set and mastery-oriented goals as the supported components; and states that goal setting “in isolation cannot be assumed to produce positive outcomes for students.” https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED589978.pdf
    2. Moeller, Aleidine J., Janine M. Theiler, and Chaorong Wu. “Goal Setting and Student Achievement: A Longitudinal Study.” The Modern Language Journal, vol. 96, no. 2, 2012, pp. 153–169. Five-year quasi-experimental study, 1,273 high school students, 21 teachers, 23 Nebraska schools; goal writing and action-plan writing significantly related to proficiency scores independent of teacher effects. No control group; the authors state causation cannot be established. https://www.ncssfl.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MLJ.2012.GoalSettingandStudentAchievementLongitudinalStudy.pdf
    3. Dobronyi, Christopher R., Philip Oreopoulos, and Uros Petronijevic. “Goal Setting, Academic Reminders, and College Success: A Large-Scale Field Experiment.” Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, vol. 12, no. 1, 2019, pp. 38–66. Randomised trial, approximately 1,400 first-year university students; “no evidence of an effect of treatment” on grades, credits or persistence, precise enough to detect a 7 percent standardised effect. A failed replication of a pilot reporting more than half a standard deviation on GPA. Population: undergraduates, not secondary students. https://oreopoulos.faculty.economics.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/dobronyi-et-al-goal-setting-academic-reminders-and-college-success-jree-2019.pdf
    4. Gollwitzer, Peter M., and Paschal Sheeran. “Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 38, 2006, pp. 69–119. 94 studies; overall d = .65, with d = .61 for getting started and d = .77 for getting derailed. Notes that effects are reduced when few barriers exist and that strong effects appeared “predominantly when the underlying goal intention was strong and activated.” Spans health and behaviour-change contexts across a wide age range, not secondary classrooms specifically. https://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/goal_intent_attain.pdf

    About Clay Shumate

    Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher in the public schools of West Alabama, with seven years of classroom experience, a B.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education. He writes about project-based learning, student responsibility, respect, and practical ways to hold young people to a higher standard while giving them room to learn from mistakes. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and writes to its Code of Ethics; this site’s editorial standards and corrections policy are published in full. More about Clay.

  • Small Group Instruction in Middle and High School: Make the Table the Seat Students Want

    Small Group Instruction in Middle and High School: Make the Table the Seat Students Want

    By Clay Shumate

    Small group instruction in middle and high school works when being called to the table reads as a privilege instead of a diagnosis. That means three things: everyone goes, including your strongest students; nobody gets announced; and the table itself is the best seat in the room. Below are two ready-to-run systems built on that rule — one for middle school and one for high school — because a sixth grader and a senior want very different things from the same ten minutes.

    Small group is where a lot of the real teaching happens and also where a lot of the stress sits. Teachers are told to pull groups every day, and then they watch a fourteen-year-old slump in his chair on the walk over because everyone in the room knows what that walk means. This page is about fixing the walk.

    Key Takeaways

    • The problem is status, not content. Teenagers are more sensitive to status and respect than younger children, and a small group that looks like the low group gets treated like one.
    • Everyone goes, every cycle. If your top students never sit at the table, every student who does sit there has been labeled.
    • Middle school: The Studio. A class-named table, quiet invitation cards, and three session types — including a Sneak Peek that lets students see tomorrow’s material before anyone else.
    • High school: Consults. Booked ten-minute slots that run like office hours. The schedule is public; the reason each student is there is not.
    • Check your roster every two weeks. The same five names three cycles in a row means you have built a fixed low group, which is the version the evidence warns against.

    Free Download · PDF

    Small Group Instruction Toolkit

    Two pages: eight cut-apart invitation cards for The Studio, a ten-slot consult booking sheet for high school, and a private teacher tally for catching a fixed low group early.

    Download the free PDF

    Free. No email address required. Designed for grades 6–12. Browse every printable in Your Free Library.

    Two-column comparison of small group instruction in middle school and high school covering name, entry, hook, length and exit, with a warning that the same five names three cycles running means a fixed low group
    Same rule underneath. Different packaging for a sixth grader and a senior.

    Why Does Small Group Instruction Stop Feeling Okay After Elementary School?

    Because the walk to the table becomes public information about who is struggling, and adolescents are built to notice that kind of information.

    In elementary school, reading groups are just how the day works. By middle school, students start doing the math on who gets pulled and why. David Yeager, Ronald Dahl and Carol Dweck put the developmental piece plainly: compared to younger children, middle adolescents “show a greater sensitivity to status and respect, resulting from pubertal maturation.” They also warn that anything that feels like talking down — repeating what students think they already know — “may come across as infantilizing and therefore disrespectful.” A small group that feels like a remedial pull-out hits both nerves at once.

    The help-seeking research points the same direction. Ryan, Hicks and Midgley found that students focused on social status and on looking capable were more likely to avoid asking for help and to see it as a threat to their self-worth, and that lower-achieving students with those goals avoided help the most. That sample was fifth graders, so read it as the pattern forming, not as a secondary-school result. A later conference paper from the same Michigan research group, surveying 968 seventh graders, found that when students believed their teacher took care not to embarrass students who had difficulty, they were less likely to avoid seeking help. It is a conference paper rather than a peer-reviewed article, and it is correlational. But it names the lever precisely: not embarrassing anyone is not a nice extra. It is the condition that makes help usable.

    So the design problem is not “how do I teach a small group.” Most teachers know how. It is “how do I make going to the table cost a student nothing in front of their friends.”

    What Does the Research Say About Grouping in the First Place?

    Grouping inside a class helps a little, and the risk is almost entirely in groups that never change.

    A second-order meta-analysis by Steenbergen-Hu, Makel and Olszewski-Kubilius, pulling together a century of studies, found that students benefited from within-class grouping and from cross-grade subject grouping, while sorting students into separate classes by ability without changing the curriculum did not change achievement. A review chapter by Ed Baines summarizes the within-class finding as small positive effects “with students at all levels benefiting.”

    The Education Endowment Foundation’s toolkit is more cautious, and you should hear it. It estimates within-class attainment grouping at about two months of additional progress, rates the evidence as “very limited” (22 studies), and warns that lower-attaining students can suffer from lower teacher expectations and lasting damage to their attitudes. Its fix is the one both systems below are built on: group flexibly, so students know ability is not fixed.

    That is the honest summary. Small groups are not magic. Small groups that turn into a permanent low table are a real harm. Everything below is designed to stay on the right side of that line.

    What Is the One Rule Under Both Systems?

    The table has to be a place students want to be, and every student has to end up there.

    My room runs as a workshop. Students are almost always working alongside somebody, and I pull people to a whiteboard table I made. It sits in a corner under a lower lamp, with a rug and nicer chairs than the rest of the room. You want to go there with me. Students ask.

    That last part is the whole point. I did not solve the “dumb table” problem with a policy or a speech about growth. I solved it by making the table the best seat in the room. The two systems below are built out from that idea for two very different age groups. Neither one needs a budget. A lamp, a rug and a table students can write on go a long way; a lamp-lit corner does more for the mood of a small group than any sentence you can say about it.

    Three rules hold for both:

    • Everyone goes. Every student, every two-week cycle, including the ones who do not need help. Their visits are real — a challenge or a preview — not a decoy.
    • Nobody is called across the room. No names read aloud. Notes, cards, a booked slot. The call is private; the table is visible.
    • The rest of the room runs without you. If the other twenty-five students need you every ninety seconds, small group collapses. Post what everyone else is doing before the first student sits down.

    How Do You Make Small Group Instruction Cool in Middle School?

    Run it as The Studio: a class-named table you get invited to, with sessions that sometimes let you in on something before anyone else.

    Middle schoolers want to belong, want a little novelty, and are acutely aware of fairness. The Studio leans into all three.

    Five-step list for a middle school small group system: the class names the table, invitation cards delivered quietly, three session types called Fix-It, Level-Up and Sneak Peek, one open chair students can request, and leaving as the expert
    The Studio: small group instruction for grades 6–8, built as an invitation.

    1. Let the class name the table

    In the first couple of weeks, put three or four names on the board and let classes vote. “The Studio” is a fine default; students will come up with better ones. It sounds small. It is not. A place with a name the students chose is their place. A place the teacher calls “my reteach table” is yours, and everyone knows what it is for.

    2. Invitations, not call-outs

    Print a stack of small cards — “You’re invited to The Studio. Round 2, today.” — and set one on a student’s desk while you circulate. Middle schoolers like getting a card. Nobody else hears a name, and the student gets a minute of warning instead of being yanked out of whatever they were doing.

    3. Three kinds of session, and nobody outside knows which

    • Fix-It. The reteach. Something from an exit ticket or a confusion flag that three or four students missed.
    • Level-Up. A harder version of today’s task for students who are ready. This is what makes your strongest students regulars.
    • Sneak Peek. Ten minutes on tomorrow’s material before the class sees it. This is the status flip. The students who went walk into tomorrow’s lesson already knowing the vocabulary and the first example, and they get to be the ones with their hands up. Pre-teaching is also one of the kindest things you can do for a student who usually lags, and it never looks like help.

    The card never says which kind it is. From the outside, all three look the same.

    4. Table privileges

    The Studio should be physically better than a desk. Students write directly on the whiteboard surface with markers — middle schoolers will do almost any math problem if they are allowed to write it on a table. Better chairs. The lamp. A visible timer set to eight or ten minutes so everyone, including you, knows the session ends.

    5. One open chair

    Keep one seat that students can request. A clip or a sticky note on the board: “Save me a seat.” When students start booking themselves in, you have won. That chair is also your honesty check — if nobody ever asks for it, the table is not yet a place anyone wants to be.

    6. Leave as the expert

    Every student walks back to their table group carrying one thing to explain. “Tell your group the two ways we found to check this.” They come back from The Studio as the person who knows something, not the person who was missing something. If your room is already arranged around partner work and groups of four — the site’s guide to seating charts covers layouts — this step costs nothing.

    How Do You Make Small Group Instruction Work in High School?

    Run it as Consults: booked ten-minute meetings that work like a professor’s office hours, where the student brings the agenda.

    High schoolers do not want a cute name or a card. They want to be treated like adults, and a small group that feels like fourth-grade reading circle will be resisted with their whole body. So borrow the language and structure of how adults actually get help: office hours, a coach’s film session, a design critique, a one-on-one with a manager.

    Five-step list for a high school small group system run like office hours: booked not pulled, nobody comes empty-handed, the schedule is public but the reason is not, stretch consults on the same sheet, and the student writes the next step
    Consults: small group instruction for grades 9–12, run like office hours.

    1. Booked, not pulled

    Post a sign-up sheet — paper on the wall or a simple form — with ten-minute slots for each day of the cycle. Students can book themselves. When you book a student, tell them privately: a note on their paper, a message through your learning platform, a quiet word while you circulate. “I put you down for Thursday, second slot. Bring your thesis.” That is how an adult schedules a meeting with another adult.

    2. Nobody comes empty-handed

    The price of a consult is bringing something: a draft, a problem you got wrong, a question you could not answer. The student talks first for the opening minute or two — what they brought and where they are stuck. This is the autonomy piece, and it matters. The Yeager, Dahl and Dweck review notes that whether adolescents felt an intervention supported their autonomy changed whether it worked. A consult where the student sets the agenda feels like their meeting. A reteach where you repeat the lesson at closer range feels like being talked down to.

    3. The schedule is public; the reason is not

    Post who is booked and when. Names and dates, nothing else. Everyone can see that the strongest student in the room is booked Tuesday and the quiet kid in the back is booked Wednesday and there is no visible difference between those two facts. Why each person is there stays between you and them.

    4. Stretch consults on the same sheet

    Your strongest students book consults too — for a harder problem, feedback on an ambitious draft, a question that goes past the unit. This is the single most important design choice in the whole system. If only struggling students ever sit down, the sheet becomes a list of who is struggling, and every protection above falls apart.

    5. The student writes the next step

    Before they stand up, the student writes one line in their own words: what they will do next and by when. Not your summary of what they should do — theirs. It is short, it is theirs, and it is the only record the consult needs. If you want students getting better at judging their own work, the site’s piece on self-assessment during group work pairs well with this.

    6. Talk to them like colleagues

    No cheerleading, no “great job, buddy.” Tell them what is working, what is not, and what you would do next if it were your draft. Respect in the classroom is mostly this: talking to a seventeen-year-old about their work the way you would want someone to talk to you about yours.

    How Do You Fit This Into a Real Class Period?

    One or two sessions a day, ten minutes each, on a two-week cycle.

    Do the arithmetic before you promise anything. A class of 28 in groups of three or four is roughly eight sessions per cycle. Over ten school days, that is one session most days and two on a few. That fits. Three sessions a day, every day, does not fit anyone’s real schedule, and a system you drop in October helps nobody.

    Use a short routine for the rest of the room: a posted task with a clear finish line, a “what to do when you are stuck” list that does not start with walking up to the table, and a rule that the table is not interrupted except for emergencies. Practice it for the first week with a two-minute session so the room learns to run without you. Clean transitions matter here more than almost anywhere else; every minute lost moving students to the table comes out of the session.

    Decide who goes from evidence, not from memory. An exit ticket or a quick check sorted into piles tells you who needs a Fix-It, who is ready for a Level-Up, and who would benefit from a Sneak Peek. The site’s formative assessment strategies for reading describes a sort-don’t-mark routine that feeds straight into this.

    What Are the Signs the Table Has Become the Low Group?

    Same names, same kind of session, three cycles in a row. Keep a simple tally — name, date, session type — and look at it every two weeks. Four warning signs:

    • The same five students fill most of the seats. That is a fixed group, and it is the version the EEF warns can depress attitudes and expectations.
    • Your top students have not been in weeks. Book them. A Level-Up or a stretch consult is a real session, not a favor.
    • Nobody uses the open chair or books themselves. The table is not yet desirable. Fix the table before you fix the students.
    • You are reteaching the whole lesson at the table. Ten minutes is for one sticking point. If the whole lesson did not land, that is a whole-class problem, and it belongs to the whole class tomorrow.

    One more boundary: The Studio and Consults are classroom instruction. They do not replace small-group services written into an IEP or a 504 plan, and a student’s visits should not be counted as those services unless the plan and your case manager say so.

    Where Does the Evidence Run Out?

    Nobody has run a trial on invitation cards or booking sheets. The two systems here are designs built from well-supported principles — adolescents’ sensitivity to status and respect, the link between feeling safe from embarrassment and seeking help, and the case for flexible over fixed grouping. The individual features are not tested interventions, and you should treat them as a starting point to adjust, not a protocol.

    The grouping evidence itself is also thinner than it sounds. The EEF rates it very limited. The meta-analytic finding is small and positive. The help-seeking studies are correlational, one is on fifth graders, and one is a conference paper. What the evidence does support, fairly consistently, is the direction: teenagers avoid help that costs them status, and groups that never change carry real risk. Both systems are built to push against exactly those two problems.

    What Should You Do Next?

    Pick the system for your grade band and start small. Name the table or post the booking sheet this week. Run one session a day for two weeks with at least two of your strongest students in the rotation. At the end of the cycle, look at your tally and at the open chair. If students are asking to come, keep going. If they are not, change the table before you change anything else.

    Related reading on this site: student voice and choice for how much control to hand students, and high expectations for students for why a table everyone attends is a statement about what you expect from all of them.

    Before you go: grab the free Small Group Instruction Toolkit (PDF) — ElevateTheNorm.com branded, printable, no email required.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is small group instruction in middle and high school?

    It is a short, focused session with three or four students while the rest of the class works independently. In grades 6 to 12 it usually runs eight to ten minutes and targets one sticking point, a challenge task, or a preview of upcoming material. The difference from elementary school is less about content and more about how students feel walking to the table.

    How do I stop students from feeling singled out when I pull a small group?

    Three things. Put every student in the rotation, including your strongest, so being called says nothing about ability. Call students privately with a card, a note or a booked slot instead of reading names aloud. And make the table the most comfortable seat in the room so going there reads as a privilege.

    What if my high school students refuse to come to the table?

    Refusal usually means the table still looks like the low group. Switch to booked consults, let students set the agenda by bringing their own draft or question, and make sure your top students are visibly on the booking sheet. If a student still declines, offer them a different slot rather than insisting in front of the class.

    How often should each student get small group time?

    Once every two-week cycle is a realistic floor for a class of about 28. That works out to roughly eight sessions of three or four students, or about one session a day. Students who need more can come more often, as long as the rest of the class still rotates through.

    What does the rest of the class do during small group instruction?

    A posted task with a clear finish line, a short list of what to do when stuck that does not start with interrupting the table, and a rule that the table is only interrupted for emergencies. Practice the routine with very short sessions during the first week so the room learns to run without you.

    Is ability grouping bad for students?

    Fixed ability groups carry real risk, especially for lower-attaining students, whose expectations and attitudes can suffer. Flexible groups that change based on recent evidence show small positive effects in the research, though the evidence base is limited. The practical rule is to group by what students need this week and to reshuffle constantly.

    Can small group sessions count toward IEP or 504 services?

    Not automatically. These sessions are general classroom instruction. If an IEP or 504 plan specifies small-group services, check with the case manager about what counts and how it is documented before treating any classroom session as meeting that requirement.

    Sources

    1. Yeager, David S., Ronald E. Dahl, and Carol S. Dweck. “Why Interventions to Influence Adolescent Behavior Often Fail but Could Succeed.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 13, no. 1, 2018, pp. 101–122. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5758430/
    2. Ryan, Allison M., Lynley Hicks, and Carol Midgley. “Social Goals, Academic Goals, and Avoiding Seeking Help in the Classroom.” Journal of Early Adolescence, vol. 17, no. 2, 1997, pp. 152–171. Sample: 443 fifth graders. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/items/485258a6-d9dc-4464-b205-fd8faa0b8b70
    3. Friedel, Jeanne, Roxana Marachi, and Carol Midgley. “‘Stop Embarrassing Me!’ Relations Among Student Perceptions of Teachers, Classroom Goals, and Maladaptive Behaviors.” Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, New Orleans, 2002. Sample: 968 seventh graders. https://public.websites.umich.edu/~pals/AERA2002%20handout.pdf
    4. Steenbergen-Hu, Saiying, Matthew C. Makel, and Paula Olszewski-Kubilius. “What One Hundred Years of Research Says About the Effects of Ability Grouping and Acceleration on K–12 Students’ Academic Achievement.” Review of Educational Research, 2016. Summary read via Duke University: https://today.duke.edu/2016/12/new-analysis-finds-two-measures-boost-k-12-academic-achievement
    5. Baines, Ed. “Ability Grouping.” Review chapter, UCL Institute of Education (2nd ed.). https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/10086616/1/EdBaines-AbilityGrouping-2ndEditionFinal1.pdf
    6. Education Endowment Foundation. “Within-Class Attainment Grouping.” Teaching and Learning Toolkit. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/within-class-attainment-grouping

    About Clay Shumate

    Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher in the public schools of West Alabama, with seven years of classroom experience, a B.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education. He writes about project-based learning, student responsibility, respect, and practical ways to hold young people to a higher standard while giving them room to learn from mistakes. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and writes to its Code of Ethics; this site’s editorial standards and corrections policy are published in full. More about Clay.

  • Questions for Socratic Seminar: 40 That Work in Grades 6–12

    Questions for Socratic Seminar: 40 That Work in Grades 6–12

    By Clay Shumate

    Good questions for a Socratic seminar have no answer you could look up, no answer the teacher is holding, and at least two defensible readings in the text itself. That is the whole test. A question that a prepared student can settle in one sentence is a comprehension check — useful, but it will not carry thirty minutes of discussion.

    Below are forty questions you can use tomorrow, sorted by what they are for, plus the way to write your own out of whatever text you are already teaching.

    Key Takeaways

    • Three kinds of question run a seminar: one opening question, several core questions you may never need, and closing questions that ask what changed.
    • The research on “higher-order questions” is weaker than the training says. One meta-analysis of 20 studies found a significant positive effect; a second, of 14 studies, found the effect small. Both are true and both are old.
    • What does hold up is the authentic question — one the teacher does not already have an answer to. In a study of more than 1,100 eighth and ninth graders, that predicted higher literature achievement.
    • Wait longer than feels reasonable. Teachers average about one second. Three is the floor for a recall question, and for a genuinely open one there appears to be no ceiling.
    • Students should be writing questions too. A seminar where only the teacher asks is a recitation with the chairs moved.

    Free Download · PDF

    40 Socratic Seminar Questions

    All forty questions in five groups, the six stems to post for students, and the ten-minute method for turning a text of your own into seminar questions.

    Download the free PDF

    Free. No email address required. Designed for grades 6–12. Browse every printable in Your Free Library.

    What Makes a Good Socratic Seminar Question?

    Four things, and you can test all four in about a minute. Write your question down, then run it against this list before you take it anywhere near a class.

    1. You cannot answer it in one sentence. Try. If you finish in a line, you have written a comprehension check. Keep it — just do not open with it, and file it with your other ways of checking what landed.
    2. You do not already know the answer. This is the hard one, because teachers are trained to ask questions we can assess. A seminar question is one where you would genuinely take notes on the replies.
    3. The text can support more than one answer. Not “what do you think” — opinions with no evidence anchor produce a conversation nobody can lose or learn from. The disagreement has to be arguable from the page.
    4. It cannot be Googled. If a phone settles it in twenty seconds, it will get settled in twenty seconds.

    The fourth one has quietly become the most important. A question like “what were the causes of the conflict” is a research task. “Which of the causes the author lists is doing the most work, and which one is there to make the argument look balanced?” is a seminar, because the answer is not written down anywhere.

    The Three Kinds of Question a Seminar Needs

    An opening question, a stack of core questions, and a closing question — and you should expect to use the opening one and maybe two others. The stack is insurance, not a script.

    Numbered list of four question types for a Socratic seminar: the opening question, core questions, closing questions, and the follow-up built on what a student just said
    Three kinds you write down, and the one you cannot.

    The opening question is the only one you are guaranteed to ask. It should be answerable from a first reading, hard enough to divide the room, and broad enough that four different students can enter it from four different places. It usually points at the whole text rather than a line.

    Core questions go down into the text. These are the ones that name a paragraph, a word choice, a contradiction between two claims. Write six and plan to use two — and if you have five preps and six is not happening, write three. Three real ones beat six you assembled at 10pm. The worst thing you can do with a good stack is work through it, because then you are running the agenda and the students are answering it.

    Closing questions leave the text. What does this mean for something the students actually deal with? What changed in your thinking, and whose comment did it? That second one belongs in the post-seminar writing, and it is the single best assessment item this format produces. One guard on it: ask students to name a classmate for credit, never for criticism. “What did this conversation get wrong?” is a question about the conversation, and it is worth saying so out loud before they write.

    There is a fourth kind that never gets written down, and it is the one that matters most in the room: the follow-up. Building the next question out of what a student just said — researchers call it uptake — is what separates a discussion from a round of answers.

    Does Asking Harder Questions Actually Improve Achievement?

    Less clearly than the training slides claim, and it is worth knowing why before you rebuild your question bank around Bloom’s taxonomy. Two meta-analyses looked at the same question and did not agree.

    Kathleen Cotton’s synthesis for the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory lays both out. Redfield and Rousseau’s 1981 meta-analysis of 20 studies “concludes that asking higher cognitive questions has a significant and positive effect on student performance.” Samson and colleagues ran a second meta-analysis in 1987 across 14 studies and found that students exposed to higher cognitive questions did outperform others, “but that the effect size is small.”

    A later critical review by Mikyeong Yang went further, concluding that this body of work “reported incoherent results” and that the evidence cannot support the expectation that higher-cognitive questions are more effective than fact questions. So: a real effect, a small effect, and a serious argument that the whole line of research is not measuring what it thinks it is.

    Here is what survives all three, and it is not about difficulty at all. Nystrand and Gamoran studied eighth- and ninth-grade English classes across sixteen middle schools feeding nine high schools, testing more than 1,100 students in fall and spring. Students whose teachers asked a higher proportion of authentic questions — ones the teacher did not already have an answer to — and who practiced uptake scored significantly higher on literature achievement.

    Authentic is not the same as hard. “Analyze the author’s use of irony” is high on Bloom’s and completely inauthentic if you have a rubric in your hand describing the right answer. “Is the last line a joke?” is simple, open, and genuinely contested. Write for authentic, not for the taxonomy. It is the same trade as anywhere else on this site: real questions hand students something to do, which is what giving students a genuine decision rather than a cosmetic one actually looks like inside one class period.

    One more number worth carrying, from the same Cotton synthesis: in ordinary classroom recitation, about 60 percent of teacher questions are lower cognitive, 20 percent higher cognitive, and 20 percent procedural. A seminar is one of the few structures that changes that ratio on purpose.

    40 Questions for Socratic Seminar

    Eight questions in each of five categories, written to be subject-general so you can drop your own text into them. Every one of these is a shell — swap in your author, your document, your data set.

    Two things before you use them. They are subject-general on purpose, which means the question is only as safe as the text you put under it; choosing a text on a contested public issue is a decision that belongs to you and your school’s policy, not to a question bank on the internet. And the fourth group — the ones that surface disagreement — is asked to the room, never to a named student. “Who read that line differently?” is an invitation. “Marcus, you disagree, right?” is an ambush, and the student you do it to will remember it longer than the text.

    Opening questions (use one)

    1. What is the most important sentence in this text, and what does the rest of it do?
    2. What is this author afraid of?
    3. If you had to remove one paragraph without losing the argument, which one goes?
    4. Who is this written for? How can you tell?
    5. What does this text refuse to say?
    6. Is the author describing the world or arguing about it?
    7. What would have to be true for this to be right?
    8. What question is this text an answer to?

    Core questions: evidence and claims

    1. Which claim here has the least support behind it?
    2. Where does the author stop explaining and start assuming?
    3. Are the two claims in the second and fourth paragraphs compatible?
    4. What counts as evidence in this text, and who decided that?
    5. Is the strongest objection to this argument in the text, or did the author leave it out?
    6. Which detail would change your reading if it turned out to be wrong?
    7. Does the author distinguish what they know from what they think?
    8. If this were written by someone on the other side, which sentence would survive?

    Core questions: language and choice

    1. Why that word and not the obvious one?
    2. What work is the title doing?
    3. Where does the tone shift, and what happens right before it?
    4. Who is given a name in this text, and who is not?
    5. What is the effect of the thing the author repeats?
    6. Is the ending earned by what came before it?
    7. What would be lost if this were written plainly?
    8. Which sentence do you think the author rewrote the most times?

    Questions that surface disagreement

    1. Who in this room read that line differently than you did?
    2. What is the strongest version of the argument you disagree with?
    3. Is this a disagreement about the text or about something outside it?
    4. What would change your mind?
    5. Can both readings be true at once?
    6. What are we assuming that the text never says?
    7. Which of us is using a word to mean two different things?
    8. Is the disagreement about what happened or about whether it was right?

    Closing and reflection questions

    1. What did you come in believing that you are less sure of now?
    2. Whose comment changed or sharpened your thinking, and what did they say?
    3. What question do we still not have an answer to?
    4. What would you need to read next to settle this?
    5. Where does this argument show up outside of school?
    6. If you had to explain this text to someone in one sentence, what would you leave out?
    7. What did this conversation get wrong?
    8. What is the question you wanted to ask and did not?

    Question Stems Students Can Use

    The fastest upgrade to a seminar is teaching students to ask each other questions instead of taking turns making statements. Most students arrive with one move — say your opinion and stop — and a short posted list fixes it faster than any amount of coaching.

    Six question stems students can use in a Socratic seminar, including what in the text makes you say that, can you say more, I read that line differently because, are you saying X or Y, what would change your mind, and we have not heard from
    Post six. Nobody reads twenty.

    Post six stems and refer to them by name. Do not post twenty; nobody reads twenty.

    The other half of this is teaching students to write a question, since you are requiring one at the door. Give them one frame and it stops being mysterious: point at a specific place in the text, say what confused or bothered you about it, and end with a question you cannot answer yourself. “On page two the author says X, but earlier they said Y — which one are they actually arguing?” is a better seminar question than most of mine, and a fourteen-year-old can produce it on the second try.

    For a student who found the text hard, say plainly that the question can be about the part they did understand. A question from paragraph one is a real contribution. Nobody has to have finished the text to have something worth asking about it.

    Two of these deserve a note. “What in the text makes you say that?” does most of the work of a facilitator and it is the one stem I would teach first — it is polite, it is not a challenge, and it forces the conversation back to the page every time it drifts. And “Can you say more?” is how a quiet student participates without having to produce a position of their own, which matters more than it sounds like.

    How Long Should You Wait After Asking?

    Three seconds minimum, and for a genuinely open question, longer than you think you can stand. This is the oldest finding in the questioning literature and it is still the one teachers violate most.

    Table of wait-time research findings: teachers wait about one second, comment within nine-tenths of a second, three seconds is the recall-question threshold, no threshold was found for open questions, and answers lengthen at three to five seconds
    Teachers average about one second. Eight costs you nothing.

    Mary Budd Rowe measured it in the early 1970s. Teachers allowed an average of about one second for a student to respond, and followed a student’s answer with a comment within roughly nine-tenths of a second. When those two waits were stretched to three to five seconds, student responses got longer, more students answered without being called on, speculative thinking went up, students began comparing their evidence to each other’s rather than to the teacher, and fewer questions went unanswered. Worth naming honestly: Rowe’s classrooms were elementary science. The effect has held up widely, but that is the population she measured.

    One cheap adjustment that goes with the wait: put the opening question in writing as well as saying it. On the board, on the handout, anywhere it stays. A student who processes slowly, who missed the first three words, or who is rereading the text while you talk should not lose the question because it only existed as sound. It costs nothing and it changes who is able to answer.

    Cotton’s synthesis adds the part that matters for seminars specifically: three seconds is the threshold for lower cognitive questions, and for higher cognitive questions there appears to be no threshold at all — students “seem to become more and more engaged and perform better and better the longer the teacher is willing to wait.”

    I have tested the ceiling on this and I would not recommend the experiment. I once waited more than five minutes. It was one of the most awkward moments of my life, that section finished nine minutes behind my other classes, and it is the only time I have ever assigned homework. I am not telling that story as a technique. I am telling it because the price of waiting is real and it is worth knowing what it costs before you decide the silence is unbearable at eight seconds. Eight seconds costs you nothing.

    How to Turn Your Own Text Into Questions in Ten Minutes

    Read for the seams, not for the content. You are not looking for what the text says. You are looking for the places where it strains.

    1. Mark every hedge. “Arguably,” “some have suggested,” “it is possible that.” Each one is a place the author was not sure, and each one is a question.
    2. Find two sentences that do not quite fit together. Not a contradiction — a tension. “Are these both true?” is a seminar question that writes itself.
    3. Note what is missing. Who is not quoted. Which objection is not answered. What the author had to leave out to make the piece work.
    4. Write your opening question from the whole text, and three core questions from the marks you made.
    5. Answer your own opening question in one sentence. If you can, go back to step two.

    That is the whole process, and it gets faster. The fourth time you do it you will find yourself marking hedges while you read for other reasons, which is a better outcome than any question bank.

    Questions That Wreck a Seminar

    Four shapes, and all four are easy to write by accident.

    • The question you already answered in class. Students will give you your own words back, correctly, and nothing will happen.
    • The yes-or-no question with an obvious side. “Was the narrator wrong to lie?” gets twenty-eight yeses. Ask instead what the lie cost, and who paid.
    • The question that requires a personal disclosure. “Have you ever been treated this way?” will get an honest answer from a fifteen-year-old in front of twenty-seven peers, and that is exactly the problem. Keep the question on the text and let students bring themselves to it if they choose. If a text is likely to pull the room in that direction, that is a conversation to have with an administrator before it is a seminar question.
    • The question with a correct answer you will eventually supply. Students can smell this within four minutes, and once they have, the seminar becomes a guessing game about you.

    The third one is the one worth being most careful with, because it usually comes from a good instinct. Relevance is not the same as exposure. A question can matter to a student’s life without requiring them to narrate it to the class.

    What to Do Next

    Take the text you are teaching this week and spend ten minutes on the five steps above. Write one opening question, three core questions, and one closing question. Then pull four questions from the bank here that fit the same text, so you have something in reserve you did not have to invent.

    Ask your opening question once, and count to eight in your head before you do anything else. That is the whole practice. If you want the rest of the format — the norms, the seating, what to do about the students who will not talk — it is in the full guide to running a Socratic seminar. And if the questions you write keep coming out as comprehension checks, that is not a failure; it means you have a set of quick checks for understanding and a seminar question still to write.

    Before you go: grab the free 40 Socratic Seminar Questions (PDF) — ElevateTheNorm.com branded, printable, no email required.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What makes a good Socratic seminar question?

    One you cannot answer in a sentence, that you do not already have an answer to, that the text can support more than one answer to, and that a phone cannot settle in twenty seconds. The first two are the ones teachers miss. We are trained to ask questions we can assess, and a question you can assess is usually a question you already answered.

    How many questions should I prepare for a seminar?

    One opening question, about six core questions, and two closing questions — and expect to use three of them. The stack is insurance against a dead room, not an agenda. Working through all nine is how a seminar turns back into a recitation with the chairs moved.

    What is the difference between an authentic question and a higher-order question?

    An authentic question is one the teacher does not have an answer to. A higher-order question is one high on Bloom’s taxonomy. They are not the same thing, and the research suggests the first matters more. “Analyze the author’s use of irony” is higher-order and completely inauthentic if you are holding a rubric describing the right answer.

    How long should I wait after asking a seminar question?

    Three seconds is the research floor, and for open questions there appears to be no ceiling — students engage more and perform better the longer the teacher is willing to wait. Teachers average about one second, which is why this feels so unnatural. Eight seconds costs you nothing and changes who answers.

    Should students write their own seminar questions?

    Yes, and it is the change that most reliably fixes a flat seminar. Require one written question from every student, collected on the way in. Make it an expectation rather than a bar — a student who arrives without one writes it in the first two minutes. A seminar where only the teacher asks questions is not a seminar.

    Can I use the same questions for any text?

    Most of them, yes. The forty here are deliberately subject-general: “what does this text refuse to say?” works on a court opinion, a poem, a lab report and a political speech. What does not transfer is the core questions, because those name a specific paragraph or word choice. Write those yourself from the text in front of you.

    What questions should I avoid in a Socratic seminar?

    Anything you already answered in class, yes-or-no questions with an obvious side, questions with a correct answer you plan to supply eventually, and questions that require a student to disclose something personal in front of the class. That last one usually comes from a good instinct — relevance — but relevance is not the same as exposure.

    Do harder questions actually raise achievement?

    The evidence is genuinely split. A 1981 meta-analysis of 20 studies found asking higher cognitive questions had a significant positive effect on performance; a 1987 meta-analysis of 14 studies found the effect small; and a later critical review argued the whole line of research reported incoherent results. What holds up better is the authentic question and the follow-up built on what a student just said.

    Sources

    1. Cotton, Kathleen. Classroom Questioning. School Improvement Research Series, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, May 1988. Reports Redfield and Rousseau (1981), 20 studies, “significant and positive effect” for higher cognitive questions, against Samson et al. (1987), 14 studies, effect “small”; a three-second wait-time threshold for lower cognitive questions and no apparent threshold for higher cognitive ones; and a 60 / 20 / 20 split of lower cognitive, higher cognitive and procedural questions in ordinary recitation. https://educationnorthwest.org/sites/default/files/ClassroomQuestioning.pdf
    2. Rowe, Mary Budd. Wait-Time and Rewards as Instructional Variables: Their Influence on Language, Logic, and Fate Control. 1972. ERIC ED061103. Teachers allowed an average of about one second for a response and commented within about nine-tenths of a second; extending both to three to five seconds produced longer responses, more unsolicited appropriate answers, more speculative thinking, more student-to-student evidence comparison and fewer unanswered questions. Population: elementary science classrooms. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED061103
    3. Nystrand, Martin, and Adam Gamoran. Student Engagement: When Recitation Becomes Conversation. National Center on Effective Secondary Schools, 1990. ERIC ED323581. Eighth- and ninth-grade English classes in sixteen middle schools feeding nine high schools across eight Midwestern communities; over 1,100 students tested fall and spring. Higher proportions of authentic questions and uptake predicted significantly higher literature achievement. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED323581.pdf
    4. Yang, Mikyeong. “A Critical Review of Research on Questioning in Education: Limitations of Its Positivistic Basis.” Asia Pacific Education Review, vol. 7, no. 2, 2006, pp. 195–204. Argues that the teacher-questioning meta-analyses “reported incoherent results” and that the evidence cannot support the expectation that higher-cognitive questions outperform fact questions. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ752340.pdf
    5. Applebee, Arthur N., Judith A. Langer, Martin Nystrand, and Adam Gamoran. “Discussion-Based Approaches to Developing Understanding: Classroom Instruction and Student Performance in Middle and High School English.” American Educational Research Journal, vol. 40, no. 3, 2003, pp. 685–730. 64 middle and high school English classrooms, grades 7, 8, 10, 11 and 12. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ782328
    6. National Paideia Center. “Paideia Seminar.” The seminar defined as a collaborative intellectual dialogue facilitated with open-ended questions about a text, run as a pre-seminar / seminar / post-seminar cycle. https://paideia.org/blogs/npc/paideia-socratic-seminar

    About Clay Shumate

    Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher in the public schools of West Alabama, with seven years of classroom experience, a B.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education. He writes about project-based learning, student responsibility, respect, and practical ways to hold young people to a higher standard while giving them room to learn from mistakes. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and writes to its Code of Ethics; this site’s editorial standards and corrections policy are published in full. More about Clay.

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