The Circle of Inquiry: Socratic Seminars
Deep Dives Into Assessment Methods for the AI Age, Part 3
This series on AI-resistant assessment began with the design critique, a method that makes thinking visible through the real-time defense of creative work. Part 2 examined video logs, where students record themselves thinking aloud, preserving the embodied reality of cognition through multimodal evidence that anchors assessment in physical presence. Both methods share a common principle: they shift the locus of assessment from artifact to performance, from what students can eventually produce to what they can demonstrate through immediate, observable engagement.
But both the critique and the vlog remain individualistic. The design critique, though often conducted in group settings, ultimately evaluates each student’s defense of their own work. The vlog captures a single student’s thinking process, recorded in isolation and submitted for instructor or peer review. These structures are pedagogically sound, and as I’ve argued, they create robust barriers against AI-generated work. Yet they represent only one dimension of what I’ve called the dialogic institution—the reimagining of education around human interaction as the primary site of learning and assessment.
The following third installment examines a method that distributes both the intellectual work and the evaluative criteria across the entire learning community: the Socratic Seminar. Unlike the vlog, which documents individual thinking, or the critique, which tests individual defense of work, the Socratic Seminar makes the conversation itself the object of assessment. Students must not only articulate their understanding but show their capacity to think-with-others in real time.
From the Atelier of Athens: The Socratic Method’s Educational Lineage
While the method bears Socrates’ name, its contemporary incarnation owes more to mid-20th-century American educational philosophy than to ancient Athenian practice. To understand why the Socratic Seminar works as assessment, we need to trace two intellectual lineages: the classical tradition of dialectic inquiry and the democratic education movement that brought it into modern schools.
The historical Socrates, as depicted in Plato’s dialogues, practiced elenchus—a form of cross-examination designed to expose contradictions in his interlocutors’ beliefs. This was fundamentally asymmetrical. Socrates controlled the conversation, selecting whom to question and determining when an answer was sufficient. The goal was not collaborative knowledge-building but individual recognition of ignorance, the first step toward philosophical wisdom.
The modern Socratic Seminar inverts this power structure. In 1982, philosopher Mortimer Adler published The Paideia Proposal, a manifesto arguing that American education had fragmented into vocational training for some students and intellectual development for others. Adler organized this curriculum around three distinct types of learning: gaining organized knowledge through lectures and readings, developing intellectual skills through coaching and practice, and what he called the “enlargement of understanding of ideas and values”—achievable only through Socratic dialogue.
Adler’s insight matters because it identifies exactly where traditional assessment fails in the AI era. The first two columns are precisely what large language models excel at demonstrating. They can recall facts, summarize texts, and execute procedures. But Adler’s third column requires something different. It demands the weighing of competing values, the synthesis of multiple perspectives, and the adjustment of one’s thinking based on reasoned challenges from others. This work happens only in dialogue, through what Adler called the “maieutic” process.
The constructivist theory of Lev Vygotsky provides additional theoretical grounding. Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development describes the space between what a learner can do independently and what they can achieve with guidance. In traditional instruction, the teacher provides this guidance. In a Socratic Seminar, the guidance is distributed across the peer group. Students collectively construct understanding through what Vygotsky called “intersubjectivity”—the shared meaning arrived at through social negotiation.
This theoretical foundation reveals why the Socratic Seminar resists AI. A language model can generate text that sounds like analysis. It cannot engage in genuine intersubjectivity because it lacks a subjective position to begin with. It cannot adjust its mental model based on a peer’s emotional reaction or revise its interpretation when confronted with textual evidence it overlooked. The social negotiation of meaning that Vygotsky identified as central to human learning is beyond the reach of current AI systems.
Why the Socratic Seminar Resists Artificial Intelligence
The resilience of the Socratic Seminar stems from its insistence on presence, spontaneity, and social responsiveness. The challenge is not that AI cannot take part in discussions about texts, but that it cannot show the specific human capacities we’re actually assessing.
Consider what happens in a well-designed seminar. A student makes a claim about a text: “Brutus was ultimately a patriot, not a traitor.” Another student challenges this: “But doesn’t his speech at the funeral reveal his self-deception about his motives?” A third student enters: “I think you’re both right—he genuinely believed in the Republic, but Shakespeare shows us he’s also motivated by envy of Caesar’s power.” The conversation continues, with students building on, refuting, and refining each other’s interpretations.
This exchange shows several capabilities simultaneously. Students must track the developing conversation, reference specific textual evidence, acknowledge the validity of opposing views while maintaining their position, and adjust their thinking based on additional considerations raised by peers. Most importantly, they must do all of this in real time, without the luxury of revision or the ability to generate multiple responses and select the best one.
An AI can certainly generate thoughtful-sounding commentary about Julius Caesar. But when asked to reconcile its interpretation with a peer’s conflicting reading, to locate the specific passage that supports a claim made three minutes ago, or to explain how its current position differs from the view it expressed at the beginning of the discussion, the limitations become apparent. While an AI can track a thread within a single session, it lacks the embodied memory of the room’s social dynamics and the cumulative, shared history of the class’s prior discussions.
There’s also the matter of what Donald Schön called “reflection-in-action,” which we covered in Part 1 of this series. In a seminar, students must read the social dynamics of the group, deciding when to speak, when to hold back to let a quieter voice emerge, when to challenge directly and when to build bridges between opposing positions. They must notice when the conversation has stalled and offer a new angle, or recognize when an idea needs more development before the group moves on. These are acts of social intelligence that require presence and real-time responsiveness to subtle cues—body language, tone, pacing, and group energy.
Finally, the seminar assesses something that no artifact can capture: the capacity for intellectual humility and growth. When a student says, “I came in thinking X, but after hearing Maria’s point about the marketplace scene, I now see Y,” they’re showing metacognitive awareness of their own learning process. An AI can simulate this language easily. But in a live seminar, the teacher has observed the student’s initial position, tracked their engagement with competing views, and witnessed the moment of genuine revision. The process is visible in ways that make authenticity verifiable.
The Three Structures of Socratic Dialogue
The Socratic Seminar is not a single method but a family of related structures, each serving different pedagogical purposes and offering different assessment opportunities. Understanding these variations allows you to match the format to your learning objectives and class size.
The Traditional Circle represents the purest form of the method. All students sit in a circle facing each other, with no barrier between them and no hierarchical arrangement. The teacher sits as part of the circle but remains largely silent after posing the opening question. This format works best with classes of 15-25 students and creates maximum accountability. There is no back row to hide in and no desk to serve as a barrier between a student and the group.
The pedagogical purpose here is equity of voice. Every student has equal physical access to the conversation. The teacher’s silence forces students to address each other directly rather than performing for the instructor’s approval. When you assess a Traditional Circle seminar, you’re evaluating not just the quality of individual contributions but the distribution of participation. A successful seminar shows evidence that the conversation has moved away from a hub-and-spoke pattern (where all comments go through one or two dominant voices) toward a web of peer-to-peer exchanges.
Think of a courtroom jury deliberation as depicted in films like 12 Angry Men. The power of that format comes from the fact that jurors must convince each other, not perform for a judge. The same dynamic operates in a well-run circle discussion. Students quickly learn that empty rhetoric or unsupported claims won’t survive group scrutiny.
The Fishbowl variation addresses the practical challenge of larger classes. Here, students divide into two concentric circles. An inner circle of 10-15 students conducts the actual discussion while an outer circle observes. After 15-20 minutes, the circles swap positions. This structure serves a dual assessment purpose. Inner-circle students are evaluated on speaking, evidence use, and collaborative meaning-making. Outer-circle students are assessed on active listening, analytical observation, and written documentation of the discussion.
The Fishbowl’s power lies in making listening visible as an intellectual practice. Students in the outer circle might be required to track a specific inner circle partner, noting moments when that student built on others’ ideas, introduced new textual evidence, or helped the group through an interpretive impasse. This tracking sheet becomes an artifact of engaged attention. It is evidence that the observer was cognitively active throughout the discussion.
The Structured version introduces scaffolding that makes the method more accessible while maintaining its AI-resistant features. Students prepare specific roles before the seminar: the questioner who poses challenges to the group, the connector who relates the text to current events or other readings, the passage examiner who directs attention to overlooked sections, or the summarizer who periodically synthesizes the discussion’s trajectory.
This structure works particularly well in STEM or technical courses where students may feel less confident in open-ended discussion. A student discussing an ethical case study in engineering might serve as the passage examiner, directing the group’s attention to specific sections of the code of ethics being analyzed. Another student, acting as connector, might relate the case to a recent controversy in their field. The roles provide entry points while still requiring real-time response to the developing conversation.
Integrating the Socratic Seminar into Your Syllabus
The seminar cannot function as an occasional add-on or a one-time event. It requires “front-loading,” a substantial time investment early in the term to establish norms, practice the method, and build the habits of academic discourse that make rigorous assessment possible later.
Consider a semester-long literature course where you plan to use Socratic Seminars as a major assessment component. Your schedule might look like this:
Week 2: Introduction and Modeling. You demonstrate the method using a short, accessible text, perhaps a contemporary op-ed or a brief poem that addresses themes relevant to your students’ lives. You participate as a member of the circle, modeling the behaviors you expect: asking follow-up questions, acknowledging other speakers by name, using precise textual references, and expressing uncertainty where appropriate. This demonstration is crucial. Students need to see what a substantive academic conversation looks like before you ask them to produce it.
Week 4: Low-Stakes Practice Round. Students conduct their first full seminar on a text that won’t “count” toward their grade. You observe and take notes but avoid intervening except to pose new questions if the conversation stalls completely. After the seminar, you debrief as a class, celebrating what worked (specific moments of powerful evidence use or successful building on peers’ ideas) and identifying areas for growth.
Week 7: First Graded Seminar. By now, students understand the format and expectations. This seminar focuses on a central course text and contributes 10-15% of the semester grade. You use a detailed rubric that students have reviewed in advance, tracking both individual contributions and the overall quality of group dialogue.
Week 11: Advanced Seminar with Increased Stakes. The second graded seminar might account for 20% of the final grade. At this point, you can introduce more complex expectations: requiring students to prepare written analyses beforehand, asking them to engage with secondary sources alongside the primary text, or conducting the seminar in two rounds so every student experiences both the inner and outer circle roles.
The assessment criteria strengthen throughout the semester. Early seminars might focus heavily on basic participation, such as did students come prepared, contribute to the discussion, and reference the text? Later seminars should show more sophisticated skills: synthesis of multiple viewpoints, recognition of competing interpretations’ relative strengths, and metacognitive awareness of how the discussion has shifted individual understanding.
This progression matters because it addresses a common critique of discussion-based assessment: that it advantages students who are naturally confident speakers. By slowly building the community’s norms and explicitly teaching the skills of academic dialogue, you create space for different communication styles to develop. The quiet student who makes two carefully considered interventions that redirect the entire conversation’s trajectory should be valued as highly as the frequent speaker whose many comments, while thoughtful, primarily reiterate points already made.
How to Conduct the Socratic Seminar Successfully
The success of a Socratic Seminar as an assessment depends on meticulous attention to three elements: preparation requirements, discussion architecture, and real-time facilitation. Each deserves detailed examination.
Preparation: The Entrance Ticket System
Students cannot participate meaningfully without genuine engagement with the text. But in the AI era, traditional preparation assignments, such as summary paragraphs or comprehension questions, are easily outsourced to language models. The entrance ticket must therefore require human-only work.
The most effective entrance tickets demand a personal connection. Instead of “Identify the main themes,” ask students to “Find one sentence that contradicted something you believed, and explain why.” Instead of “What is the author’s argument?”, require “Locate a passage you read three times and still found confusing, then articulate what specifically confuses you about it.” These prompts resist AI completion because they demand either a subjective response tied to individual experience or metacognitive awareness of one’s own reading process.
The entrance ticket should be a physical artifact—an annotated text, a handwritten notecard, something that cannot be produced instantly via copy-paste. You check these tickets at the door. A student who arrives with generic “the author explores themes of identity and belonging” commentary doesn’t enter the circle. A student whose text is covered with question marks, personal reactions, and underlined passages demonstrating active wrestling with ideas has earned their seat.
Discussion Architecture: Creating the Container
The physical setup matters more than you might think. Students must sit in a true circle with no desks between them, all at the same level. There is no teacher’s desk serving as a subtle power differential. In a fishbowl arrangement, the outer circle sits immediately behind the inner circle, close enough that an outer circle student can tap their inner circle partner’s shoulder to pass a note with a new idea or a located quotation.
The text itself should be visible and accessible throughout. Each student needs their annotated copy, and you might project key passages on a screen as reference points. This visibility serves an anti-AI function: when a student makes a claim about textual evidence, the group can immediately verify it. Hallucinated quotations are instantly caught.
You establish three ground rules before every seminar: First, speak to each other, not to me. Second, cite the text specifically—no vague “somewhere the author says.” Third, build or challenge and don’t just add new topics. Every comment should connect to what came before, either extending an idea or questioning its foundation.
Real-Time Facilitation: The Art of Productive Silence
Your primary responsibility during the seminar is not to guide the discussion but to document it. You should maintain a visual map of the conversation flow, including who speaks to whom, how often, and for how long. This map becomes data for assessment.
Use a simple notation system: each student is a node, each conversational exchange is an arrow. When Maria responds directly to Marcus’s point, draw an arrow from Maria to Marcus. When Jordan builds on both Maria and Marcus, add arrows from Jordan that point to both. After 30 minutes, this map reveals the conversation’s architecture. A healthy discussion shows a dense web of peer-to-peer connections. A struggling discussion shows a star pattern with one or two students at the center and others isolated at the periphery.
You intervene only under specific conditions. If the conversation has genuinely stalled, for example after 20 seconds of silence with students looking to you for direction, pose a new core question that redirects attention to an unexplored section of the text. If the discussion has become dominated by two students engaged in debate while others watch passively, you might call for “new voices” or ask a specific quiet student a direct question. But these interventions should be rare. The goal is for students to sustain intellectual work independently.
Post-Discussion: The Exit Ticket and Metacognitive Closure
The seminar doesn’t end when the circle breaks. Within 48 hours, students submit a brief reflection responding to specific prompts: What claim did someone else make that you initially disagreed with but now find convincing? What textual evidence emerged in the discussion that you hadn’t noticed in your preparation? How has your interpretation of the text shifted?
These exit tickets serve dual purposes. They verify that students were genuinely present and engaged. You cannot answer “What changed your mind?” without having attended to the discussion. They also make learning visible to students themselves, creating metacognitive awareness that deepens the educational impact beyond the immediate conversation.
Limitations, Pitfalls, and Honest Challenges
The Socratic Seminar is demanding work that introduces genuine pedagogical challenges. It would be dishonest to present it as a simple solution to AI-generated work without acknowledging its costs and complications.
The Scale Problem
A 30-minute seminar with 25 students means the average student has barely a minute of speaking time. In courses with 40+ students, you’ll need to run multiple seminar groups, which multiplies your assessment burden. While the vlog uses asynchronous peer review to solve the scale problem, the seminar solves it synchronously through the Fishbowl structure. Some instructors conduct rolling seminars across multiple class periods while other students work on different tasks, but this fragments the shared learning community that gives seminars much of their power.
The Equity Challenge
Oral assessment disadvantages certain learners. Students with social anxiety, those on the autism spectrum, English language learners still building fluency, and students from cultural backgrounds where challenging authority or peers is discouraged—all face barriers that written assessment rarely imposes. The seminar structure can replicate existing hierarchies where confident, privileged students dominate while marginalized voices remain silent.
This challenge requires active mitigation, not mere acknowledgment. Digital back-channels, using tools like Padlet or Mentimeter, where students can contribute in writing while the verbal discussion proceeds, create parallel pathways for participation. Explicit “new voices” prompts from the instructor can interrupt dominance patterns. Structured prep roles (described earlier) provide designated entry points. But these accommodations must be built into the design from the start, not added as afterthoughts.
The Coverage Tension
Seminars are time intensive. A single 45-minute seminar might cover what a lecture could address in 15 minutes. In courses with extensive content requirements, the time trade-off feels acute. You’re exchanging breadth for depth and coverage for engagement. This is a pedagogical choice that requires institutional support. If your department or school culture is heavily invested in content coverage metrics, you’ll face resistance.
The Assessment Burden
Grading a Socratic Seminar is cognitively exhausting. You’re tracking 20+ students simultaneously, evaluating both individual contributions and collective patterns, and making real-time notes while staying alert to moments requiring intervention. Unlike grading essays, where you can pause and return to the task, seminar assessment happens in the moment and cannot be revisited except through a review of recordings (which creates its own time burden).
Some instructors address this by having students in the outer circle serve as peer evaluators, tracking specific inner circle partners. This distributes the assessment work while teaching students to recognize quality discourse. But it requires training observers in what to look for and creates grading complexities when you must synthesize multiple peer evaluations with your own observations.
The Socialization Risk
Like the design critique discussed in Part 1 of this series, the seminar socializes students into disciplinary values by making evaluation criteria visible through live discussion. Students learn what the community considers “good” thinking by observing how peers’ contributions are received. This is powerful for building shared standards, but it can also reinforce established assumptions uncritically. Students may absorb unexamined biases. What the community rewards might include unstated preferences for certain argumentation styles, cultural references, or ways of speaking that privilege some students while marginalizing others. As the instructor, you must make implicit criteria explicit and create space for students to interrogate those criteria, not just internalize them.
The AI Preparation Question
While the live seminar itself resists AI, the preparation phase remains vulnerable. Students might use ChatGPT to generate their entrance ticket questions or to help them identify important passages. This isn’t necessarily problematic—we allow students to use dictionaries when reading complex texts—but it requires careful assignment design. Entrance tickets must demand work that AI cannot do convincingly: personal connection or specific memory of previous readings in the course.
Your Socratic Seminar Implementation Toolkit
This section consolidates principles discussed earlier into a sequential framework for conducting a single seminar session, from preparation through final assessment. Treat this as an adaptable structure rather than a rigid prescription.
Step 1: Norms and Architecture
The first graded seminar requires groundwork. Before assessing students on discussion skills, establish what those skills look like through a practice round with a low-stakes text. Your role in this preliminary session is to model productive behaviors: building on others’ comments by name, citing specific passages, and asking genuine questions rather than rhetorical ones. Debrief afterward with students to create a shared understanding of what makes discussion substantive. This collaborative norm-setting matters more than any list you could impose, though you should revisit these norms before each subsequent seminar to keep them active in students’ minds.
Physical setup reinforces these norms. Arrange students in a true circle with no desks between them, everyone at the same level. The fishbowl variation places the outer circle immediately behind the inner one, but the principle holds: face-to-face configuration with the text visible and accessible throughout. Establish ground rules explicitly at the outset—speak to each other rather than to you, cite specific passages when making claims, and either build on or challenge what’s been said rather than introducing unrelated topics.
Step 2: The Entrance Ticket
Preparation requirements serve as the gateway to participation. Require students to arrive with annotated texts using a specific marking system—perhaps highlighting claims in yellow, evidence in blue, and questions in green. Preparation prompts should demand a personal response: connections to their own experience with the text’s themes, or specific moments where their interpretation shifted during reading. Check these tickets at the door. No ticket means no participation and a significant grade penalty.
Step 3: The Assessment Rubric
The rubric must value both speaking and listening, recognizing that productive dialogue requires more than verbal contribution. A balanced approach weighs preparation and textual grounding at 25%, quality of individual contributions at 30%, and collaborative discourse—including the capacity to build on others’ ideas, ask productive questions, and move conversation forward—at another 25%. Active listening makes up 15%: demonstrating engagement with peers’ comments and synthesizing ideas across multiple speakers. The remaining 5% addresses conduct and adherence to seminar norms. Share this rubric in advance, reference it explicitly during post-seminar debriefs, and use it to help students understand what substantive participation actually requires.
Step 4: Active Facilitation and Data Mapping
Your primary activity during the seminar is documentation. Map the conversation as it unfolds: who speaks, to whom, for how long, and about what. A paper diagram works well—nodes for each student, arrows showing conversational connections. This record becomes assessment data, revealing participation patterns that may not be apparent in the moment.
Facilitate through this documentation rather than through constant intervention. The students’ capacity to sustain intellectual work independently is part of what you’re assessing. Intervene when the conversation has genuinely stalled or when participation patterns have become inequitable, but resist the impulse to redirect every time the discussion takes an unexpected turn. Your restraint creates space for students to develop their own discursive momentum.
Step 5: Closure and Reflection
The seminar’s educational value extends beyond the discussion itself. Within 48 hours, require students to submit structured reflections that verify both attendance and intellectual engagement. Prompts should demand specificity: identifying a particular moment when someone challenged their interpretation, explaining the evidence used, and describing their response. Another effective prompt asks students to trace how one idea evolved through the conversation, noting which peers contributed to developing it and how it changed from initial statement to final form. These reflections serve dual purposes—they provide assessment verification while developing metacognitive awareness.
Return grades with evidence-based feedback within one week. Vague praise tells students nothing useful. Instead, offer concrete observations that identify what worked and why. You might note that a student’s third comment demonstrated sophisticated synthesis by connecting a character’s speech to an earlier discussion of rhetoric, or that their follow-up question helped the group recognize a contradiction they’d been circling around. For students who struggled, identify specific skills to develop for the next seminar. A student who spoke twice but introduced new topics each time rather than building on the existing discussion needs different guidance than one who remained silent. Frame this feedback as development rather than deficit: challenge them to make at least one comment next time that explicitly references a peer’s previous statement.
Why the Effort Matters
The Socratic Seminar represents a fundamental reconceptualization of what we assess in education. It evaluates the messy, contingent process of thinking-with-others rather than the polished product of solitary work. It measures what students can do right now, in this moment, with these people, using these ideas—not what they might eventually produce in isolation. This shift from artifact to performance and from product to process makes the method AI-resistant.
But the resistance to AI is almost incidental to the deeper pedagogical value. When we ask students to engage in sustained, evidence-based dialogue about complex ideas, we’re developing capacities that matter far beyond their ability to outsmart a language model. We’re teaching them to listen genuinely, to revise their thinking based on better evidence, to disagree respectfully, and to recognize the limits of their own understanding. These are the competencies that define educated citizenship in a democracy.
The Socratic Seminar is demanding. It requires more planning than a multiple-choice exam, more cognitive energy than grading essays, and more faith in students’ capacity for intellectual growth than simply delivering content and testing its retention. But in an age when the submission of text can no longer serve as reliable evidence of learning, the seminar offers something irreplaceable: proof of a mind at work, right here, right now, in conversation with other minds struggling toward understanding together.
The images in this article were generated with Nano Banana Pro.
P.S. I believe transparency builds the trust that AI detection systems fail to enforce. That’s why I’ve published an ethics and AI disclosure statement, which outlines how I integrate AI tools into my intellectual work.