Overview
The Socratic method is a form of cooperative and iterative dialogue where participants explore complex ideas through asking, exploring, and answering questions, rather than debating or lecturing. It emphasizes critical thinking, deep listening, and collective meaning-making. In Socratic Dialogue Circles, students engage in structured conversations around sustainability topics, encouraging them to reflect on their assumptions, explore their values, connect ideas, and build understanding together.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this activity, students will be able to:
- Practice respectful, inquiry-based, and value-based dialogue.
- Articulate their understanding of sustainability broadly or through specific TASK subjects.
- Demonstrate critical thinking
- Leverage listening skills (via listening for meaning vs listening for response)
- Reflect critically on the relevance of sustainability to their disciplines and lives.
Instructions
Title: "Exploring Big Sustainability Questions through Dialogue"
Step 1: Preparation
- Ensure students complete the TASK assessment individually to establish their sustainability knowledge baseline.
- Ask that students explore the TASK matrix, Navigational Charts, and or TASK Study Guides to familiarize themselves with sustainability topics and what’s meant by sustainability. Encourage them to critically reflect upon the question: What are we talking about when we say sustainability? What interconnections exist within the notion of sustainability?
- Organize students into small dialogue groups of 3 participants.
- Recommended: Brief students on the Socratic method
Resource
Step 2: Select the opening question
There two options for framing the dialogue question(s):
- Broad sustainability questions: Focus on overarching, open-ended questions such as:
- What does “sustainability” really mean across different contexts?
- Is economic growth compatible with sustainability?
- Who holds responsibility for advancing sustainability?
- Subject-specific questions: Select 2–3 specific TASK subjects (e.g., Gender Equality, Climate Change, Biosphere Integrity, etc.), perhaps choosing those with a clearer disciplinary relevance to your teaching. Assign a subject to each group and pose a big, opening question for each. For example:
- Gender equality: In what ways does gender equality challenge traditional power structures, and what stops us from changing it?
- Climate change: What does climate change reveal about human responsibility and our place in the natural world?
- Biosphere integrity: What intrinsic value does nature have beyond human use, and how does that impact sustainability?
Step 3: Structure the circle
- Arrange seats in a circle (or virtual equivalent).
- Use a talking piece or designated order to manage turns and encourage equal participation.
- Encourage students to pose questions to each other to deepen understanding, avoiding debates or attempts to “win” the discussion.
- Help students appreciate the importance of listening for meaning instead of listening for response. The goal is to first understand the viewpoint of the other.
- In a Socratic dialogue, one aims to understand and discover the facts, beliefs or assumptions that underpin the other's standpoint. The following prompts can be helpful examples to share with students:
- Why do you think that? or What makes you think that? (which can feel less confrontational)
- Let me see if I understand you, do you mean ___ or ____?
- What are we assuming? If we assume ____ instead, how may our perceptions change?
- What is the evidence for ____?
- What led you to that belief?
Step 4: Hold the dialogue
- Facilitate the dialogue for 45–60 minutes, ensuring everyone has the opportunity to speak and listen.
- Remind students of the dialogue norms: respect, curiosity, building on ideas, and embracing silence for reflection.
Step 5: Reflect and debrief
- Give students 10 minutes within their groups (or 10 minutes as an individual reflection break) to prepare answers to these prompts:
- What insight or moment stood out to you in the dialogue?
- How does this conversation connect to your understanding of sustainability in your field?
- What perspectives challenged or deepened your thinking?
- Facilitate a whole-class sharing session where students present highlights and lingering questions.
- Optional: Invite students to write and submit an individual reflection on the exercise and the prompts above.