After the Viewing Questions: Teaching Into the Spider-Verse

Use your students’ excitement about Into the Spider-Verse to spark rich, thoughtful discussion. Want to keep it low-prep? Get my Into the Spider-Verse Socratic Seminar.

So you watched the Into the Spider-verse and had your students work on the viewing questions... now what?

An Into The Spider-Verse Socratic Seminar Discussion Guide for English Class

If you want to keep it short, sweet, and simple because you've got other things to do, then you could have students do a socratic seminar about the movie and wrap it up in a day or two. The Socratic Seminar discussion questions I created for the Spiderverse Summer Survival Pack are designed to spark dialogue and give students an entry point into various aspects of the movie.

Spark Film-to-Text & Text-to-Text (Film-to-Film...) Connections

One of my favorite questions in the Spider-verse Socratic Seminar is about what makes a scary villain.

Who's scarier? Doc Ock or Kingpin?

Are you more scared of an antagonist that's driven by grief?

Or one that's driven by ambition?

For me, that question brings to mind a scene from a horror movie that chilled me for a long time.

In Eden Lake, a couple, Jenny and Steve (Kelly Reilly & Michael Fassbender), go for a mini getaway, and there's a group of rowdy boys harassing them and anyone in the general vicinity.

*spoiler alert*

In what might be considered the inciting incident of the movie, Steve accidentally kills the leader of the boy group's dog. By "accident," I mean the group of boys intimidate and get physical with him, and one pulls a knife and Steve goes to defend himself, and in the extreme closeup scuffle, the dog gets killed. You can watch the scene here, but I'd warn that it's NOT for the faint of heart.

After the dog dies, the boys relentlessly pursue Steve and Jenny, brutally terrorizing and torturing them in ways that are terrifying to think teenage boys would be capable of. One of the final scenes of the film features the dog's owner, Brett, with sunglasses on, and I'll never forget the way he looked in the mirror and then put the sunglasses on - readying for his final "battle".

His eyes are dark, it's game clearly over for his empathy and humanity. We've just watched an entire film of brutal torture because this character has been driven by his grief to avenge his dog's death and exact the amount of physical pain that must be proportional to his emotional pain that he doesn't want to personally deal with.

For me, when we learn Kingpin's backstory about why he's trying to access the multiverse, this is what came to mind.

I'd find a villain driven by grief even more scary than one driven by ambition. For me, grief-fueled villains hit harder—they’re unpredictable, emotional, and often past the point of reason.

But then, when I tried to imagine a villain driven by ambition, Nathan (the brilliant AI creator in Ex Machina) quickly came to mind. While he is a drunk that's eventually murdered in the movie, his high intelligence coupled with his isolation from real human life and his god-complex from having created a life-like AI robot make him a terrifying person. Like Brett in Eden Lake, Nathan doesn't seem to have any empathy. His isolation, power, and total lack of empathy make him a different kind of monster—one that builds something capable of ending the world, just because he can.

If my mind could quickly get excited coming up with these ideas in response to one discussion question - imagine for your students?

Scaffolding a Socratic Seminar with Higher and Lower-Order Thinking Questions

Every question in the Socratic Seminar pack can be paired with scenes from the Guided Viewing Notebook, but some also point students to specific visual or narrative details to get them started. This gives struggling students a low-stakes entry point into the discussion—and lets their classmates build on those observations to analyze deeper themes, character arcs, and genre conventions. The lower-order thinking questions are designed to support students that may struggle to come up with higher-order thinking answers.

For students that struggle with big concepts and heady, philosophical discussion questions, if you start them off with concrete details to look for, they can participate in discussion by answering these lower-order thinking questions, and then their classmates can help push the discussion further by connecting specific details from one scene to another, or perhaps talking about how a detail in contrast with another illustrates character or theme development.

Using the Socratic Seminar Discussion to Pre-Assess for Future Learning

I also like to include questions that get at larger topics that we may not have explicitly covered yet.

If I include one or two that ask about genre or cultural media studies and my students bring those questions up in the seminar...

• but no one knows the answer, and that conversation dies quickly.
  • Then I know there's little interest in that topic.
• If some students try to answer, I'll know based on their response if I want to bring in more activities to meet their level of interest.
  • Because they are demonstrating curiosity, but may need more scaffolding to support their learning.
• And if the students spend a lot of time excitedly answering one of these questions and demonstrate they have a lot of knowledge, then I can also prioritize these kinds of activities for them following the socratic seminar discussion.

The students that demonstrate a lot of knowledge and enthusiasm might enjoy genre studies projects and be ready to jump right into them (ex: the Cultural Media Studies Research Project or the Origin Story Narrative Project). And I've also found that with Into the Spider-verse, your amazing illustrators and comics/graphic novel loving students will emerge. Bringing Into the Spider-verse into the classroom is an opportunity for these students to teach me more about comics and graphic novels, and I've found they're ecstatic to make their own (ex: Comic Identity Diptych Project).

The Socratic Seminar isn’t just a one-off discussion. It’s a diagnostic tool. It reveals who’s engaged, who’s curious, and who’s ready to level up.

Ready to spark dialogue in your classroom with Into the Spider-Verse?

You can get my Socratic Seminar and Guided Viewing Notebook as a bundled discount if you click on the button below. Add the Socratic Seminar to cart and you'll see your Guided Viewing Notebook discount 😄