Today I was reading an archived article from Teacher Magazine about getting ready for the new school year since the first school day is just around the corner here in Texas. In this article, "The Mentor," Coleen Armstrong, a former teacher and TV talk show host and author answers teachers' questions about preparing for a new school year. One teacher wanted to know about how to give kids a sense of ownership in his/her U.S. History classroom. My interest really peeked here since I taught high school Social Studies for six years.

Follow up:

What Coleen recommended was showing clips from exciting videos and then using that as a basis for discussion with the class. She also recommended linking the past to current issues and using this to relate to students and get them talking. While I completely agree with these ideas and even used them in my classroom, I couldn't help but remember the times I tried this and literally heard crickets chirping as my students sat there praying for the bell to ring. Sometimes kids (and it may be just the dynamics of certain classes) just really don't want to get involved in discussion. Sometimes they need real motivation, for example, an assigned grade, to get involved. Now, that is my opinion and many teachers may not agree with me, but hey I am just sharing what worked for me.
So, what my colleagues and I did to encourage discussion at particular points of study during the year was conduct Socratic seminars. Remember, Socrates believed in asking questions as a true method of teaching. You ask questions and people are forced to think to come up with answers, which is just what I wanted my students to do. Keeping this in mind, I arranged their desks in a circle so that they could all see and hear one another which would hopefully help them respect one another as they shared. As students came into the room on these days I told them to find a seat and get out their notes (yes I always warned them when Socratic seminars were coming and helped them prepare by giving them some questions to answer in advance). When the bell rang, I was ready to go with a roll sheet in my hands. That way, I could check off when different students shared so that I could give them credit. This also helped me keep track of who had shared and who hadn't since my goal was to get everyone in the class to say something. To start everything off, I would throw out a question and wait for someone to answer. They did not have to raise their hands to speak but they had to take turns speaking.
What I found was that while there were still some students in some classes who absolutely refused to speak and share, most kids did share and most classes actually had true discussions. Sometimes it even got a little heated which was always exciting! For those that didn't share in class, I did have their answers to the questions (you know, the ones I had them answer prior to the seminar) which gave me something to grade them on and proved to me that they had at least learned something about the topic. For those that did share, I had their questions (or not if they chose not to do them--some kids love to talk and hate to do homework) and I had their comments in class to add together for an overall grade. This method proved to me to be a nice alternative to testing as a way to check students' understanding of material while also getting them more involved in the classroom.