Socratic method to teaching by asking
garlikov.com
garlikov.com
I teach for living, and I want to do this all the time. But too often, we cover a tenth of the material in the same time because it takes much longer. Things sink in better, and this teaches the students how to think, but still…
Watch a David Attenborough documentary where there's little hinting and foreshadowing, he just knows that he's got 50 minutes to tell you all about the way, e.g., different creatures raise their young. It jumps to just sharing the most valuable core insights. It's superb, much less waste of time than most other approaches (all that crap about here's some researcher, let's watch them walk the hall to their office while we hint about the cool insight they are going to tell us…)
Sometimes, just telling students some insight gives them the understanding and you jump to Socratic stuff later based on that foundation. Just like the example of binary numbers is built on the kids learning all this other stuff. Try to use Socratic method to get the kids to count at all in the first place, and you're up for quite a long process. One that is worthwhile but where you might just need the kid counting sooner so they can participate in the soccer game and keep score or whatever and not have to Socratically understand everything.
There's this idea of competitive vs enhancing technologies. Teach kids Socratically and then take the teacher away and you're left with kids who are better learners. Teach kids by rote and take the teacher away, they are more helpless. But refuse rote and do everything Socratically and you get students who have better mental processes but don't have enough lifetimes to go through understanding the world. Sometimes, they just need to be given the facts so they can move on. A good teacher makes these judgment calls based on their particular circumstances.
I instinctively teach socratically, even when I don't mean to. But when I was a post-doc, I had a student who usually couldn't answer my questions or make any progress no matter how much I tried to break a problem into bite sized pieces.
Then along came the proffessor, who would just calmly and simply tell the guy the thing that I had been trying to explain socratically. And the student had no trouble understanding.
But did he still understand it a week later?
And if you "step through", it's not a socratic approach any more. It's a test.
That still leaves the possibility that he only understood things in a rote-ish way. But if so, that was enough to get him unblocked and thinking about the other related stuff we were talking about. That's valuable in itself, and will contribute to his understanding of the original sticking point.
> But refuse rote and do everything Socratically and you get students who have better mental processes but don't have enough lifetimes to go through understanding the world.
I would even accept anecdotal evidence
Individual 1:1 tutoring with largely Socratic-style dialog with a world-class expert is definitely the most effective and efficient way to learn just about anything. e.g. see http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf
The expert can figure out precisely what the student’s weak points are and can nudge the conversation in a productive direction while allowing the student to feel like he/she is making the conceptual breakthroughs, and the expert will know what misconceptions are common and how to dispel them with pointed counterexamples or logical contradictions, which again the student can be guided through. The expert will know when to offer new topics, when to offer practice problems, when to call back to previous material from a few months before, when to drop the question–response and just give a quick explanation or show a bit of tricky logic/proof that the student is unlikely to ever come up with independently, or when to spend time on hands-on projects.
Student-centered individually-tailored instruction works well if you have <5 students per teacher (and 1:1 or 1:2 is best). When you get to 30 students per teacher, it starts to fall apart, and you need to fall back on lectures, textbooks, handouts, pre-recorded videos, pre-made computer explorations, or the like, and on individual homework and paper quizzes and exams for assessment, because there’s just no way for the teacher to be simultaneously working directly with every student.
The students in a large class can spend some time reasonably productively in small group discussion and the teacher can then visit groups in turn helping dispel misconceptions or nudging the discussion around. Then back in a whole class discussion, the teacher can try to discuss the most common points of confusion. This can’t possibly be perfectly directed at every student at once, but given motivated students and a good teacher with enough out-of-class preparation and grading time, it’s usually the best we can do as a society.
I teach computer science, but boy, asking these questions to a class.... I'm just left with them shouting out random answers, wrong answers, dabbing, checking phones...
Maybe this method works occasionally, but for a big class of students - not so much.
The prototypical (actually extreme) example is in the original Life on Earth where he is at the bottom of the grand canyon and says something close to "these rocks are too old to have any fossils" and almost immediately cuts to a new scene where he says "Here in Lake Superior, we have rocks slightly newer, and these show the first fossils!". All the other documentary folks would have bullshit where they say, "so, we need to go to a different place…" and images of travel crap before they get to the point.
It's the difference between having API documentation and having a quick start + API documentation.
So, most of my students need me to be totally focused on critical thinking because so many other influences neglect it. But I still find there are times where it's just not the right approach.
Consider statistical learning and exemplar theory. Instead of learning principles, there's a strong argument that we learn by large quantities of examples until we naturally pick up the general patterns…
However... there is a lot of effort that must be put into the style of its application. My mentor didn't know when to turn it off, and never seemed to get the timing quite right when explaining that we were involved in this uncommon methodology. This may be less of an issue for certain categories of content being taught, but we were working on low-level kernel concurrency control mechanisms. It was a challenge.
When I started as an educator in our research lab, I realized that I had completely internalized this methodology. And as time went on I realized that the method allowed me to easily fall into a trap where I felt and acted superior to others, didn't inform people about the methodology, and likely came off as an asshole.
I continue to use this method with success. Students generally develop a lot of independence quite quickly, but it has been a challenge knowing when to turn off, and remembering to let everyone involved know that it is a teaching style rather than my own weird behavior.
Edit: Have you ever seen the question game on Whose Line Is It Anyway?
One could argue that kids know the method quite well when they're around 4 years old and subsequently unlearn it:
- Why?
- [Explanation]
- Why?
- [Explanation]
- Why?
- [Explanation]
- Why?
[Starts ripping hair out.]
- [Explanation]
- Why?
[Rips more hair out.]
- [Explanation]
[More of the same until adult loses patience or kid runs out of questions. If kid never gives in...]
- Why?
- Just because!
^^^ This is how you unlearned it.
- Why?
- [Explanation] Why did you want to know?
- You are not allowed to ask questions. [Asks different question]
I think it would make a big difference to the child's worldview, that we as a species are still pretty much new to figuring everything out, and that adults aren't infallible know-it-alls, not to be questioned.
Cultivating "doubt without helplessness" may actually turn out to be beneficial to overall society.
I've changed my approach by not letting things get out of hand. If I notice that the process is taking a long time or someone gets frustrated, I either let them know about the process or just take a different approach, like just answering the question. The challenge is that, at least in the research setting, I often don't know the answer either. So if the student thinks I know the answer, and I'm just asking them questions, it comes off poorly. So I'll let them know I don't know the answer either, and that we are working through it.
I know a lot of the time people on stackoverflow only have a problem because they haven't asked themselves the right question.
Of course, there's still a lot where it's just a gap in knowledge that needs filling in.
This is a brilliant idea and it would like to see it.
If the Socratic method get stuck, ask a different question.
Can questions so implicitly contain the answer that one can practically make a statement with a question ?
For the teachers and students, it would need to be realtime. A teacher couldn't write out a string of follow-up questions in advance and hope the reader answers them in exactly the way you intend.
For the observers, you need them to be engaged with the content as well. I am imaging a sort of dialog tree would be useful here, where a new reader could add an alternative answer to a given question which would then be a candidate for other teachers to add follow-up questions. How would [1] look like if it were resolved using the Socratic method?
For programming in particular, building out an interface to encourage experimentation would be critical. Take for example [2], a recent question from StackOverflow. The questions I would ask to lead the student to the answer are: - What is the actual difference between iPhone and desktop for this code? - What nodes are being selected by the call to `$`? - What makes you confident that the call to `$` is even happening? - etc. The student's ability to even answer these follow-up questions will make the socratic method painful when conducted through a text-primary medium.
This raises another point that teachers need to already know the solution, or at the least have much better guesses than the students (and those guesses need to be generally correct for the site to provide value). This greatly limits the number of people who would be capable of being teachers on the site.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10059594/a-simple-explan...
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46570102/jquery-on-not-w...
I get pretty annoyed at it when someone asks me questions they clearly know the answer to. It's patronizing and manipulative.
Although it is a business book, The entire book is written as a novel. The author talks in the intro about how showing the Socratic method in practice is one of his key goals.
It’s also excellent on Audible. The follow-up book, The Critical Chain, is about project management and is also life-changing with its awesome concepts.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0...
https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Business-Graphic-Novel/dp/088427...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Busine...
(Just from my personal experience: I teach the Intro to Proofs course in this way, and use a book on proofs that I wrote in this style http://joshua.smcvt.edu/proofs. It has a lot of advantages. One is that at the end of the semester everyone, even those on the lower half of the bell curve, is still highly involved and understanding everything that is happening. That's important to me; for instance some of the folks in the room will go on to be teachers, either in high school or in elementary school.)
The Great Books Foundation is primarily known for developing curriculum material utilizing the so-called great books of Western science and philosophy--mostly curated chapters and excerpts, actually. Perhaps less well known (or at least less appreciated) is that the material is intended to be taught in discussion groups where discussion leaders (aka teachers) utilize the Socratic method. To that end, the discussion guides include example questions to help the leader guide the discussion. Traditional teachers' materials also include questions to ask of students, but the Foundation's material (both the readings and the teachers' aids) is singularly focused on applying the Socratic method and is much more useful to that aim. I believe they also provide guides to help discussion leaders learn how to apply the Socratic method, which can very taxing, especially if you haven't experienced the style as teacher or student.
Law schools in the U.S. have used the Socratic method for the past 100 years, though that's unfortunately beginning to change. It's arguably easier for professors to apply this methodology in law school because failure is still an option--it's still the students responsibility to learn the material, whether or not it was presented in class. I'm not surprised that as law schools have succumbed to grade inflation and sought to minimize attrition rates that the Socratic method is being pushed out. In any event, it's much more taxing for the teacher if you must present every minor detail (however briefly) of a topic in order to test on it later, especially in light of all the mandatory testing; so taxing that the Socratic method simply isn't practical in most school environments. It's a real shame because rigorous Socratic instruction teaches one how to learn, and it pays lifelong dividends. People always say kids need to be taught how to learn. Well, there's a proven, millennia-old methodology for doing that....
A much better way is to ask how much money people would be willing to bet on their argument. That immediately aligns their motivations with getting a correct prediction-- a much better way to get people to see the flaws in their argument (including your own).
What you want, instead of questions, are themes - and the willingness to make yourself ridiculous through positive speculations.
The problem is that the kids have been trained to never give wrong answers. They don't see a question as part of a dialogue, they see it as a quiz. So when they don't know the answer they either shut down completely, or take a guess that's unhelpful because there's no reasoning behind it that you can push further.
For it to work, the students really need to understand your expectations right from the jump. Once they get that you don't care whether answers are right or wrong, but only that they're thoughtful, you can do great things.
On a side note, I believe the "Socratic method" is often mislabeled, or at least misunderstood. It's not simply asking a series of leading questions. Broadly, Socrates didn't set out to teach people things he knew, but that they didn't know the things they thought they did. The assumption is that the student has a base of knowledge that the teacher is going to interrogate.
That could be because the effectiveness of the Socratic method depends on the students' ignorance of the Socratic method. The more familiar one becomes with the technique, the less patience one has for being relegated to receiving end of a Socratic lesson.
Also, adults must contend with the added work of differentiating a good faith Socratic method from a bad faith Socratic bomb. If I want to hide my ignorance, spread my ideological, or even merely troll you, I'll just keep repeating the low-effort pattern of deconstructing your position with more incisive questions, none of which I have answers for myself.
Which is what the Socrates character in Platos dialog seems to spend all his time doing. If he is such a troll even in the friendly retellings, can you imagine what a prick he must have been in real life?
But that is a ruse. The character of Socrates knows the answers ahead of time, or at least most of the possible paths the dialogue could take. Otherwise he couldn't achieve the 100% success rate of guiding his partner to reveal the essence of whatever the original topic was.
If he was hiding his ignorance there would have been fruitless digressions. If he was an ideologue his incisive questioning would be the hypocritical response to his partner pointing out a fallacy in his own reasoning. If he was a troll he would have added nothing relevant to the discussions he interrupted.
Edit: typo
Or perhaps you are putting too much emphasis on things like The Republic, which I think everyone agrees is Plato expounding his own doctrine, without any real pretense at paraphrasing real events. We also don't have much evidence for the historicity of _Euthyphro_, but there is a good reason to think real events went more like it.
Socrates did not teach mathematics or other things where there is (sometimes) a single obviously right answer. A real-world Socrates would constantly be blindsided by valid but unexpected points made by his interloculators. Such nondeterminism is great for genuine dialogue, but not for maintaining an aura dialectic invincibility. But if he takes a deconstructionst troll strategy, he can always come out looking clever while honestly repeating that he himself knows nothing.
We were talking about the character, not the person the character was based on. That character is clearly not interrupting a topic to do a random walk through incisive questioning. His questions aren't low-effort questions. So he isn't a troll in any meaningful sense of the word.
It's a bit annoying at times, but it really drives the point at the end.
The method should be used more often.
In a classroom I might ask "What should be the precedence among these arithmetic operators?" Then there would be some discussion, leading eventually to a sensible answer.
But in the little books (I don't have one to hand so I'm making this up) a question would be more along the line of "What is a frame?" This would be the first question in the section introducing the topic. There is no way students could answer that, or ask it.
That is, what I find compelling about this way of instruction is that it leads students to the point. It is as if they discovered it themselves, in a way. (It is sometimes called Discovery method.) They see the wrong stuff as well as the right and that gives a better understanding of why right is right.
I don't know how Prof Friedman handles it in class. Possibly the in-person process is quite different than I felt reading the book. But reading the book I just felt it was a tortured way of telling me the facts.
A secondary benefit is that, should you already have some basics, you can often figure out which portions you can skip over by how well your answer matches the one in the book.
I write the Chrome DevTools docs, and my big focus is to make the docs as interactive as possible. For example, in my JS debugging tutorial, I give you a demo with a bug, and then you actually follow along and use DevTools to debug the demo. One problem with this, though, is that I'm still just telling my readers what to do. I'd like to challenge them to figure it out for themselves. But I need to do it in a structured manner. I don't have the luxury of seeing their responses in realtime, or being able to alter my content, like the author did in the classroom.
Link to JS debugging tutorial, if anyone is interested: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/java...
I would advise you to not write tutorials based in questions. But I've read on the diagonal your JS debugging tutorial, and it seems quite "dry" because you are really telling the users to "do this, do that, etc.".
I'm a CS teacher, and my approach for my lab classes is to write what I call "guided tutorials", i.e., I guide my students to the answers (as a sequence of steps) but I do not give them the answers. It is a kind of middle thing between something based on questions and a step-by-step tutorial, and it works very well for me.
I can send you an example that I gave to one of my classes on network sockets, if you want to check it out (in portuguese though). My email is in my profile.
I think I'm familiar with the approach. One of my favorites is The Elements Of Computing Systems (nand2tetris.org) which gives you the foundational knowledge you need for each chapter, and a spec on what you need to build, and gives you freedom to create it as you see fit.
Presumably, though, since you work in lab classes, you also have the "luxury" of being able to talk to your students, and detect if they're stuck... just by watching them. With docs, I don't have that.
When it comes to my docs, my current stance is that it's worse to create something that's too open-ended than too closed / dry. If it's too open-ended, readers may get stuck and leave and learn nothing, whereas if it's too closed / dry, my readers may be bored, but at least they'll learn something, or at least have something that they can use when they really need it.
Ultimately it really just boils down to a broken feedback loop. I think open-ended approaches are the best way to learn, but I need to know when and where my readers fail, and I need a channel of communication to be able to get them unstuck. So maybe I just need to build a MOOC community around the open-ended docs.
I agree with you as my own approach is also more towards the step-by-step.
And you are right that I also have the luxury of my presence being helpful for when the students get stuck, although I try to make my tutorials so that they do not need much of my help. Also, some students cannot go to my classes as they work, and this approach allows them to do the lab assignments at home without much help from me.
Regarding the broken feedback loop, one possible alternative for web-based instruction is something that requires the user to insert solutions somewhere and have feedback on it. There's a SaaS that allows you to do programming assignments and you must submit it and run it in their servers. Perhaps you could explore something like that, although with JS you could run it in the browser directly?
They did that because the method is annoying in large doses.
A cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v36n9t1...
Most schools follow Socrates, sort of. Tests and textbook exercises are a conveyor version of "teaching by asking". Just like grades, they works in a perverse way until someone patiently explains the child what's the real purpose of the whole affair.
Here's a glimpse of how our teaching system works, hope it helps someone: 1. Each lesson starts with a maximum of 5 definitions and concepts: (What is a function, how to pass parameters into a function, how to add, etc.) It takes about 10 minutes to go over these. 2. The rest of the lesson would be going one example after another (recursion, callbacks, etc.) 3. When the lesson is done (having worked through some examples together), the student will get more practice problems as well as notes for the lesson (the definition and concepts and examples we went over) 4. The student is now responsible for teaching that lesson for all incoming students.
In our lessons, all interactions are 1-1. Teaching by asking questions scales really well in 1-1 interactions. This quickly disintegrates in a group setting though, because everyone draws different analogies and has a different pace of understanding.
On weekends, our students pair up with engineers to teach engineers what they learned and also get insight on how engineers ask questions: http://bootcamp.garagescript.com/
in what sense does something that only works 1-1 "scale"?
The other alternative is: one person learns to reproduce and has 1 million kids. That person dies, population dies. That doesn't scale.
But I went to far, now she caught on and is doing the same to me. "Have you done you homework?", "Maybe, what do you think Daddy?"
But it's not a silver bullet. I've recognized that there's times you just need to dictate information and hope the receiver catches it. I find myself needing information in this form sometimes. Literally just tell me the stuff and I'll learn it this way.
I've also noticed this pattern with my children. I ask questions to get them thinking for themselves and hopefully discover their own answer but alas, it doesn't always work. Maybe they are still too young but I don't really know. So I then resort to just dictating the information and that works too.
One of my favorite volumes, of which i have multiple editions, are some books called "Joyce's Scientific Dialogues". They cover a large variety of areas and originate in the very early 19thC but were kept updated. In the form of a teacher in confrontational and productive discussion with the student.
In the 19th C this became a very common mode for educational publications. It was an ancient form of educational dialogue, modeled and illustrated in the Ithaca interaction in Ulysses (different Joyce!). It is narrated in the third person through a set of 309 questions and their detailed answers, in the style of a catechism (impersonal) or Socratic dialogue.
I've found asking questions to be the most effective approach to help them "look up". Where lecturing, writing specification documents, or trying to describe a problem tends to fall on deaf ears - a few carefully worded questions manage to broaden the focus enough to pull attention away from the details.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0...
They definitely do not want your input, they don't want your experience, or any of your thoughts or reflections... but it can be surprisingly effective to just ask dumb questions.
Isn't official title "facilitator"? :)
I usually do something like this in the inspector:
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width: 601px;
margin: auto;
font-size: 1.3em;
color: #483f3f;
line-height: 1.5em;
}
I'm not against un-styled websites at all, but I wish they were more readable by default.