How to Select Close Reading Passages

How to Select Close Reading Passages & How to Select Text for Socratic Seminars

Socratic Seminar Critical Thinking Reading Passages

Socratic Seminar Critical thinking reading passages are the foundation of Socratic seminars and quality close reading. Selecting reading passages that inspire curiosity, inquiry, critical thinking and can be used for either close reading or Socratic seminars takes pre planning and a bit of text analysis. One of the best methods for selecting Critical Thinking Reading Passages is using a Syntopical examination of how many great ideas the passages contain. Dr. Mortimer J. Adler created a list of 103 philosophical topics and ideas that philosophers have debated for millennia and these ideas can be used to analyze text for the quality of ideas presented. Text selection is key to quality close reading and immersive Socratic seminars.

ANALYZING AND ANNOTATING TEXT: HOW TO MARK A BOOK by Mortimer J. Adler (1902-2001) 

syntopical

1. Referring to a type of analysis in which different works are compared and contrasted.

After finishing his syntopical reading of the leaders' speeches, he wrote an essay comparing the language used by Reagan, Carter, Gorbachev, and Qaddafi.

A list of 103 philosophical topics

Dr. Mortimer J. Adler Co-Founder and Chairman Center For the Study of the Great Ideas

The 103 Great Ideas Alphabetically

The 103 Great Ideas by Category

THE 103 GREAT IDEAS

The list of 103 ideas is broken between the two volumes, as follows:

Volume I: Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy, Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, and Love.

Volume II: Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition,^[13] Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation,^[14] Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny and Despotism, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World.