This seminar helps parents and educators become more effective readers and literature teachers by giving them a skeleton key – a proven, universal reading and teaching method that unlocks the secrets of every story ever written. Building on the idea that all stories share context, structure, and style, seminar sessions teach educators how to identify these elements in any story to discover its prevailing themes. Inspiring lectures and demonstrations by Adam Andrews present and model a Socratic teaching format that is both repeatable and powerful to produce thoughtful conversations about any story.
Lessons include live readings and Socratic discussions of stories by Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Leo Tolstoy, Beatrix Potter, and more. An included syllabus notebook contains necessary course materials and everything the teacher needs to conduct powerful literary discussions, including CenterForLit’s exclusive Socratic List, 173-questions that facilitate easy conversations and that simplify your lesson preparations. Questions on the list are arranged according to the story elements and move from elementary questions of identification to more advanced questions of interpretation. Properly employed, this list can: help teachers foster analytical thinking, engage their students in important discussions of ideas, and prove a rich resource for the creation of essay prompts.
