Signature Pedagogies in the Disciplines: The Socratic Seminar

What does your teaching say about your discipline? What’s the teaching and learning DNA of your discipline? Come to these short, high-impact sessions where you will explore the signature pedagogies of the disciplines. Signature pedagogies are the distinctive teaching practices that shape how future professionals think, perform, and engage. How do you expect your students to think and act when they complete your course?

Each session includes a quick dive into one field’s signature pedagogy (e.g. studio critique, Socratic seminars, clinical rounds, case-based learning, lecture, to name a few), followed by a reflective prompt for participants to identify their own teaching patterns, values, and assumptions. Why should you attend?

• Discover what’s implicit in your practice
• Connect deep disciplinary knowledge to everyday teaching
• Learn how other fields approach learning and what you might borrow!

Whether you teach in fine arts, business, the sciences, humanities, or helping professions, this series invites you to reflect, connect, and evolve your practice.

In this session we will look at the Socratic Seminar.

The Socratic seminar is a signature pedagogy in disciplines such as law, philosophy, education, and the humanities. It’s both a pedagogical method and a dialogic learning process, where students are guided to engage in structured, inquiry-based discussion through the use of open-ended questions rather than direct instruction. The dialogue aims to help students to think critically, articulate arguments, examine assumptions, and refine their reasoning. The emphasis is not on arriving at a single correct answer but on exploring complexity through respectful debate practices that mirror the practices of professional discourse in these disciplines.