Description
What is the most attention-grabbing teaching strategy? Anyone engaged in any form of teaching needs to be concerned about this question repetitively. This paper presents an innovative design for seminar teachings in social sciences and revives the classical teaching strategy of the Socratic method for modern learning environments. Human beings are living increasingly in a world dependent on technology and social media to communicate in which the global disruption brought by the pandemic has resulted in the deprivation of confidence and public-speaking skills. Students and anyone who is engaged in learning are especially affected by the process of social changes. This research argues that the best way for knowledge production comes with communicative interaction, and further advocates the effectiveness of the Socratic method in stimulating positive student engagement. As a reflection on the experience of teaching three distinct study disciplines for first-year and second-year undergraduate students in the United Kingdom, a set of innovative designs for the Socratic method in seminar teachings will be presented. The disciplines include American and Canadian Studies, Politics and IR, Sociology of Sport and German Studies. Findings suggest that the use of the teaching method encourages relatively quickly students to actively engage in seminars and improves the public speaking skills of students. Further research might take a quantitative approach in testing the innovative teaching approach.
