In this activity students line up for a Socratic debate with the instructor. The instructor begins by asserting a position on some issue (e.g., “it is morally wrong for undergraduates to use AI to complete academic work.”). Students ask questions to draw out the instructor’s argument, and their goal is to find flaws in the instructor’s argument and help the instructor refine the argument. Students get one question per round, and the activity may go until it reaches a natural end or for a predetermined amount of time.

Skills & Content Emphasized: Asking questions, tracking a dialectic, real-time critical thinking, intellectual charitability, collaborative thinking, Socratic debates.

Variations

Abbreviated Version: If you have a lot of students and/or a short class period, divide the students into pairs/groups and have them collaborate on questions.

Flipped Socratipillar Debate: Have students vote on the position they will defend. Instructor asks students questions that challenge their position, and students waiting in line must revise their understanding of the position based on how the dialectic unfolds.

Notes

• This activity works best when students actually stand in a line, but it can be played with students seated.

• When figuring out how much time this activity will take, make sure to include both time spent asking questions and the time spent answering those questions!

• You can use this as an opportunity to emphasize specific course content. I recommend having students complete a structured note taking sheet or providing students with a handout on the content. This helps keep the debate from going off the rails.

Students are split into 2+ teams (depending on class size). They are given a set of facts about a firm (ex. the industry, number of employees, net profit for most recent fiscal year, operating region, whether the corporation is critical to national security, type of product) and asked to collectively bargain over a set of policies (ex. minimum pay for lowest paid employee, vacation days, retirement plans, work from home policy, parental leave policy, pets in office policy). Each team represents the interests of a stakeholder group, but they do not know which stakeholder group they represent. Their task is to bargain for the best policies over several rounds of bargaining. I recommend tracking the offers and counter-offers on a spreadsheet that is projected in the classroom. Here is how a typical class would go with two teams, Team A and Team B:

Round 1

Teams get 5 minutes to come up with initial offer. Each part of the offer must include a justification in moral terms. Each team’s offers and a quick summary of the justification are recorded on the spreadsheet.

Flip a coin to decide which team makes the first counter-offer. Say it’s Team A. Team A gets 4-5 minutes to confer on their counter-offer. Team A gets 5 minutes to present their counter-offer and justify — again, in moral terms — why they will or will not accept Team B’s offer for a specific policy and why their counter-offered policy is a moral improvement.

End of Round 1

Round 2

Team B confers for 4-5 minutes on Team A's R1 counter-offer. Team B gets 5 minutes to present their counter-offer and justify in moral terms why they will or will not accept Team A's R1 counter-offer.

At this point, the instructor can pause the bargaining and have students discuss the moral considerations each team has cited when making their offers/counter-offers.

Round 3

Team A confers for 4-5 minutes on Team B's R2 counter-offer. Team A gets 5 minutes to present their R3 counter-offer and justify it in moral terms.

…this activity can go on for a set amount of time or until the teams reach an agreement.

Skills & Content Emphasized: Collaboration, application of ethical concepts and considerations to real-world cases, reflective thinking, presenting/speaking, Stakeholder theory, Rawls’s veil of ignorance, thought experiments, collective bargaining.

We played it on Wednesdays, but it’s fun any day of the week! I would bring in an object and students would have 5-10 minutes to ask me questions to find out what the object was.

Objects I used: A twitch (veterinary device for horses), a glass power line insulator, a wooden weaving shuttle, and a string-hopper press from Sri Lanka.

Skills & Content Emphasized: Constructing questions, revising beliefs in light of new information, being willing to get the answer wrong, collaborative/diffused critical thinking, the elements of critical thinking (from Learning to Think Things Through)

Variations

Easy Mode: The game ends when students correctly identify what the object is, even if they don’t get the name right. E.g., they describe the object as a “wooden weaving tool” rather than as a “ wood weaving shuttle.”

Hard Mode: Students may only ask “yes” or “no” questions, and they must get the name of the object correct.

Notes

• This is a great activity to start a class with because it’s fast-paced and has low barriers to participation. In my experience this activity helps get students to pay attention in class and increases participation during the rest of the class.

• I sourced weird objects from my hobbies, friends, and even by posting on my local Buy Nothing group on Facebook.

Students split into groups and each group is given the same list of facts about an item in a sealed box. They are given 10 minutes to decide what they think is in the box and come up with an argument supporting their conclusion. At any time during the 10 minutes students are allowed to come up and handle the box.

Each group shares what they think is in the box. The class then votes on which answer they think is most likely.

Whichever answer gets the most votes is set as the conclusion of the argument.

Starting with the list of facts about the object, students must come up with premises for an argument that leads to the set conclusion.

Click here for a link to a document explaining this activity and describing how I used it when teaching Critical Thinking.

Skills & Content Emphasized: Informal reasoning and logic, reasoning in premise-conclusion form, inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, introduction to logic notation.