Hola a todos :)
In my middle school hallway, I was always hearing my fellow social studies and language arts colleagues talking about their amazing Socratic Smackdowns. Before we dive in, as always, if you have a question while you are reading, please use the chat feature! I would love to be able to answer your questions in real time as you reading through the post.
Let's first explain what a Socratic Smackdown actually is. A Socratic Smackdown offers a fun approach to having students practice discussion strategies. In the Spanish classroom, it is a great way to get them speaking in the target language. Socratic Smackdown is a printable game designed to be played with up to forty students at a time. In the game students are awarded points for using different discussion methods. Students can also lose points for interrupting or distracting others.
This year was my first year trying it out, and I absolutely loved it! In my 8th grade Spanish class, we were having a unit watching the Netflix show, Go! Vive a Tu Manera. I was looking for some way to have the students discuss with their peers their thoughts on the show. This was the perfect way! This could be a great speaking activity for shows/movies you watch in the classroom, novels you are reading, articles the students have read, or cultural items you are discussing in class.
So, how do I set it up?
1. First decide what you want your students to speak about. I think it is extremely helpful for the students to have a resource in front of them during the Socratic Smackdown to aid in their discussion. I first gave the students 10 minutes of think time with these sentence starters about our show.
2. Set the students desks up into a fishbowl formation. You can either have multiple socratic smackdowns going on at one time, or have one large one. I personally prefer multiple smackdowns. I grouped my students by ability. That way my high flyers could really take their conversations where they wanted them to go, and I could stay near my lower groups to offer insights, or keep the conversation going if it stopped. I had 3 groups of eight students. Their desk formations looked like this:
3. Tell the students where they will be sitting and who their partner is. Their partner is NOT who they are talking to. Their partner is the one keeping their score while they are participating in the smackdown. I let my students know by projecting this on the board:
4. Explain the scorecard to the students. This is what I gave each student to keep score. There are certain items where they give their partner points, but there are also certain items where they might takeaway points from their partner.
4. Decided what you want the time to be for each round. I would recommend keeping it fairly short for your first time. I set a timer for 7 minutes. After the timer went off, the partners switched places!
5. Let it happen! I promise you will be amazed at what your are hearing and seeing in your classroom. The greatest part about it is that it is 100% in the target language!
6. Have students swap their score cards and have a conversation on why they scored what they did. This is a wonderful opportunity to also have the students do some individual reflection as well.
Last but not least, here is an example of one of my middle groups during the socratic smackdown!
If you have any questions, please reach out to me. I also always LOVE to hear when something from my blog helped you! Thank you for reading!
Always,
Maestra Ehlert
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