"Are we going to play the ball game today?"

I'm always looking on Pinterest for lesson ideas and activities and this one I found has been a winner! Similar to a talking stick, the ball acts as a cue to let everyone know who has the floor during a whole class discussion, but the addition of some sentence starters along with the fun of tossing a ball around make the game of Socratic Soccer a class favorite among my high school juniors.
Looking for a way to increase engagement and get my students to openly share their ideas, I decided to try out the Socratic Soccer ball during our Civil Rights Unit. I used different colored Sharpie markers to write out a collection of sentence stems so that whoever is holding the ball has a jumping-off point if they need it. If you'd like your own jumping-off point you can download this list of sentence starters.

Since I was stepping in to teach this unit in the middle of the semester, we spent the first day establishing some routines, vocabulary and procedures for the two weeks we would be studying the Civil Rights Unit. This is when I introduced the ball and we practiced playing Socratic Soccer by discussing what the inalienable rights of everyone in the classroom were. We agreed upon the rights around phone and bathroom use, which I then wrote out and put up in the classroom as well as in the Canvas module.
After the weekend, my students entered the class asking, "are we going to play the ball game today?"
"Is that what we're calling it?" I asked, to which they shrugged and questioned me on the name of the game.
"I call it Socratic Soccer," I told them. "We'll play it if we have time."

We ended that class period with a different game I had introduced for the unit, Catchphrase, but I set up my mentor teacher with several questions (shown above) for students who finished early to engage with the next day when I would not be in class.
I was initially concerned about the ball being used inappropriately or students being apathetic towards something "childish," but ultimately they proved me wrong and I'm excited to use Socratic Soccer as a back pocket activity to fill extra class time and to engage my students in fruitful and progressively more sophisticated discussions.
Happy learning!

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