The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling
garlikov.com
garlikov.com
A lot of professors think they're using the Socratic method, but their problem is they don't have the patience to wait for an answer. Posing questions rhetorically doesn't work, especially once the people you are teaching catch on and stop trying to come up with an answer.
I've tried doing the socratic method when tutoring people - it's extremely frustrating and most of the time I can't pull it off.
How does one gain the necessary patience for this?
It's tough to put yourself so throughly in your audience's headspace that you can pull off the right kind of leading questions consistently. Sometimes you get an audience that you just can't seem to model effectively enough to pull this off with.
Most of the time the biggest stumbling block is actually getting the audience to actively participate. A lot of (most?) people are used to the standard I'm-going-to-stand-here-and-spray-at-you method of lecturing so getting past that can take some work.
Well it works for me, even if there's only time to think: Now that's an interesting question, what would be the answer to that?
The periodic table of the elements has a lovely underlying theory based on the physical properties of electron orbitals. This cannot be elicited from students who don't know it.
Asking socratic questions about the effects of drugs on human bodies is useless.
Don't trust a socratic-trained engineer to build your skyscraper, or your pizza oven.
Of course you can't give students a periodic table and Socratically enquire how this came to be. What you can do is, through the Socratic method, elicit an understanding of the lovely underlying theory. That's far more valuable than being able to parrot the table from memory without understanding it.
I'm not sure what you mean by not being able to teach from empiric data--experiments seem to me to be a practical implementation of the Socratic method.
So you're right, sometimes you can't teach the facts. But you can definitely teach anything derived from empiric data... how was it derived in the first place? I think you can provide the data (in class experiments, a trip to the library, real research papers, etc), and then elicit discussion about what it means.
You could ask students which material is used to build planes, and then discuss which material would be better. At some point, you'll need to introduce the exact figures, but that's a small portion of the lesson. There's a reason why the back page of a textbook can hold most of the facts that the other 300 pages teaches - information and knowledge are mutually inclusive.
Spitting out answers without having an question makes the answer a useless fact. Understanding is acquired. Understanding can never be forgotten.
I would never have gotten through my teenage daughter's high school years without it. I am a single father so relying on other traditional methods don't work as well as reasoning directly.
She earned a full scholarship to Dartmouth, was a Intel Semifinalist (genetic research), and is now studying Biology with a course concentration in Neuroscience.
I only taught her how to think about things, never facts.
I remember wanting to learn everything when I was younger, but was frustrated by teachers' attempts to 'make us think' about things, asking the class questions (most of which I knew the answer to already), and requiring tons of 'coursework'. I came to school to learn, not to work! If I want to design something, it'll be something useful for the world, not something that is being done at the same time by other students in my class, and likely by students in other classes and at other schools too.
I'm pretty Socratic in my approach but find it breaks down without elemental factual data to build the enquiry upon. Indeed I find it best for approaching assumed knowledge in order to build an ethos of enquiry.
Why does the moon 'shine' can be deduced by the student in part by the teacher first recalling associated facts; even if these are to be assumed true as part of the enquiry.
I was reading Laches recently - [Plato as] Socrates enquiring as to what children should be taught (fighting,duh!) - and Socrates destroys the others attempts to logically promote their views. Ultimately though they're left with nothing and have to come cap-in-hand and say 'alright bighead, how do you propose we educate our kids'. Sorry, I'm wittering ... I think the point is that I find it lacks as a constructive method, one needs experiment and axiomatically held data to support it.
[Edit] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates#Trial_and_death
"But perhaps the most historically accurate of Socrates' offenses to the city was his position as a social and moral critic. [...] insofar as he irritated some people with considerations of justice and the pursuit of goodness. His attempts to improve the Athenians' sense of justice may have been the source of his execution."
Of course, eliciting information from students, regardless of what you call it, is a well known and essential aspect of any good lesson plan. It is a real challenge to ask the right questions and stick with it when students aren't making the discoveries you want, and it's tremendously rewarding when it works. But it's not the whole story, and I think it's tempting to get excited when it works and lose sight of the longterm goals for you students. For many topics, it must be followed at some point with practice, and a LOT of it. It can leave some students totally behind. In fact, it's actually still quite teacher-centric, and should be used in short segments and (when possible) replaced by student-centric activities.
Basically, they recreated one of Socrates' lessons. The students gave similar answers to the 50 questions, but only half figured out the task at the end of the lesson. The students didn't understand the importance or goals of the questions and answers.
That's not to say the socratic method doesn't work. If you read enough research and anecdotal stories about education, you'll come to realize that everything works and nothing works. For every idea in education, research will eventually show that it is ineffective and a waste of time and resources.
A static list of questions is just an ordinary lecture, reworded. The OP's article shows how precious the Socratic method is in giving you an immediate feedback from the students. In this sense it is crucial that questions are formulated based on the previous answers.
The author does that in the article: prepared questions are important to guide the general line of reasoning, but improvised questions are just as important to navigate along this line.
As Plato/Socrates wrote, the problem with books is that they can't talk back and react to you.
It brings your audience in the middle of the learning process and, by making the right questions, allows tutor to gather information about tutored's line of thinking.