The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling
garlikov.com
garlikov.com
That's what bothers me about the article. It's about instructing a class, a way of going through motions, not about teaching any individual. What about the third grader who doesn't know Roman numerals? What about the one who can't read "ten"? What about the one who has only eaten a bag of Cheetos in the past 24 hours? Or the kid on the autism spectrum and the one who saw his mother beaten by her boyfriend last night and just about every other night for as long as he can remember?
How does this work when the 11 year old third grader hits Jamison in the back of the head with a book and the quiet girl wants to use the restroom because she is sobbing just like yesterday?
The reality of third grade isn't theoretical. Yeah there are little pods of protected well cared for children. There may even be a sweet spot where none are smart asses and love the call and response and each is equally bright and learns the same way. Just look for the full pony rack by the school front door and the M&M truck backed to the cafeteria loading dock.
The fount of well meaning amateur pedagogy is not the solution to the woes of public education. The lesson of the article is that kids can be incredibly kind and polite to adults.
[Edit: None of which is to say that I think trying to teach the ideas of boolean algebra to 3rd graders isn't a good idea. I'm all for pushing the limits of children's intellect.]
Some key things that are directly determined by the school system seem to be class size & learning pace. At the same time, children's attention spans and other complicated realities of learning and how it works in kids or not really in tune with the "industry" of teaching on a society wide scale.
Nine year olds in groups of 30 40 or even 20 are a handful when you put them together 6 to 8 hours every day and make them learn reading. Kids only have so much attention span, it varies, but 6 hours is far above the median in practice. A lot of the controversial learning related medication is used primarily to improve a child's ability to make it through a school day. Class size. School hours.
Learning pace is related to class sizes too. The reality is that the number of hours it takes to teach a 9 year old reading or multiplication varies, but it the vast majority of cases classrooms go at a pace much slower than could be achieved by a competent teacher 1-on-1. I don't know what the multiple is but I think it's reasonable to assume it's high. Call that the reference point for efficiency. That means the potential number of hours needed per child are lower, if the learning quality is higher.
Another "economic"issue other than cost and subsequent scarcity of teacher hours is parents' "babysitting" needs. Parents work. You can't work if you need to pick up an eight year old at 11:30 and an eleven year old at 12:45. I have heard interesting ideas here. All sorts of ideas that I don't really have the understanding to evaluate, but they sound interesting. If you don't need the kids to learn math for half the school hours, teachers don't need to be teachers. High schoolers can work at camps, youth clubs. They could also do it in after schools during school hours. They could spend time outside. There are a lot of options. An important note is that these hours are cheaper than classroom hours.
Anyway... technology could play an interesting role. If technology and pedagogy can figure out a formula that gives teachers a lever a lot of the economic problems become more solvable and a lot of new models are possible.
The reason for amateur pedagogy is that the professionals have completely screwed it up. Look at the controversy over "no child left behind" or "common core" or "STEM." The experts do not agree on anything, which means the body of knowledge is very weak. I think it is time for amateurs to step in.
In the case of Common Core, the amateurs have stepped in, in the form of politicians, parents and media who fail to realize that the standards were developed and agreed upon by a team of professional educators representing nearly every state in the country. Those same amateurs are stoking fear and paranoia with baseless claims about "the federal government deciding what my kid should learn". They even fail to recognize that the CC is not a curriculum.
Basically, I think it's gone a little to far by saying "how" something should be taught.
You're just distracting from the variable by mentioning constants. The method of teaching he sees in his classroom isn't going to stop little Timmy from seeing his mother beaten to a pulp every night, but you mention it anyway because... well, why did you?
It's evidence that pretending all the students in a classroom are one person (or a small handful of people) flies in the face of reality and is a bad abstraction that you should not use.
A good teaching method gracefully handles the problem that there are ~30 different individuals with different circumstances who cannot be reasoned about as a collective. The Socratic method is not that, because it engages a handful of people at a time.
You're arguing with the premise, which is unhelpful. You either accept the premise and engage in this topic, or you disagree with the premise and leave the rest of us alone.
> When the class period ended, I and the classroom teacher > believed that at least 19 of the 22 students had fully and > excitedly participated and absorbed the entire material. The > three other students' eyes were glazed over from the very > beginning, and they did not seem to be involved in the class at > all.
That's a very clear explanation that this method didn't work for every child in the class. In any class there will be children that are difficult to reach. This isn't necessarily an article about that.
`brudger was not agreeing with this premise. You are.
Welcome to the conversation.
I agree with you -- this works spectacularly when you're in a 1-on-1 or 1-on-few setting, but in front of a class it breaks down very quickly.
Which isn't to say that the method can't be used profitably in some settings. Just not general life. The moment where the people you're talking to have an epiphany and thank you for it is a fiction.
My boss has a great way of asking questions– he precedes them with "just out of curiosity...", and I always get the sense that he's really, genuinely curious. He's gotten me to think about things that I hadn't even considered before, and I'm very thankful for it. I've grown to adopt it myself, and I've found it helpful even in my marriage and in my friendships.
There are many different ways to say something like, "Hey, I notice that this happened– any idea why that is?"
With the right tone and body language, people just open up. It's wonderful.
Also, your boss might be genuinely curious. A lot of people who employ this technique precompute trajectory for arriving at their conclusion. They're often right, but the times when they're wrong are really interesting.
Bottom line - I agree with you. Don't be condescending, because you might learn something from the people around you. :)
If you start doing that stuff when people just want to chat, then you're being annoying.
But it is also used for intellectual/leadership coaching, called Protreptic. And if the one doing the coaching knows what he or she is doing, it should be very good.
You need two willing participants, otherwise it's a) annoying and b) immensely difficult. The only way I've been able to execute the socratic method against an unwilling/unwitting person is to basically corner them with questions, and people hate that. It's also difficult to craft the perfect question that a person can't weasel out of.
Give somebody who's socially savvy the socratic method, or something else, they'll do well. Give somebody who argues with people any method, they'll fail.
The key takeaway here is 'argue' - if you argue with people, you are not doing it right. There's really no situation in life where that's necessary or the optimal approach. Most people don't know this, so...
It is a lot like yelling at or hitting people - if you don't realize that if you stoop down to that level more than a couple of times a year, YOU are the asshole, no amount of socratic or otherwise is going to help. The standard for behaviour simply needs to change.
Once you raise the bar to 'talking down to people is not acceptable' - all of a sudden you'll find that arguments don't happen anymore, who is there to argue with? It is either a negotiation or a conversation that you are choosing to have.
Most teachers don't know this. The amount of talking down to kids is incredible, they just don't know any better.
I saw 'A most violent year' recently - it is a great example of how to handle stressful situations. Should be mandatory viewing for all adults really.
A great example of the method's use in teaching programming was/is the "Little Schemer" series (by Freidman and Felleisen). As a book for beginners it goes amazingly deep, if only the reader will follow. Once in a while I enjoy going down that path again, and it never fails to stir me to think and learn.
Isn't that what an excellent teacher or book is supposed to do? Sure, present it in a "sneaky", fun way, it's even better, and all the more dangerous.
That said, you need small class sizes for it to work. It's impossible for the professor to have a proper dialogue with 60 people in a room, much less the 100+ you might see in an introductory undergraduate course. Which is unfortunate because it's those introductory courses, where students are learning how to think in a new field, where Socratic dialogue is the most helpful. In my opinion, class sizes trends in higher education are backwards--massive lecture halls for freshman and small collegial classrooms for seniors.
You know why this is, right? It's because of massive attrition rates. In my CS class, only like 1 out of 5 stuck from freshman to graduation.
The point is, how do we bring that into books ? (And this is the wrong/easy way to look at the problem, the one that we cannot really solve, and will be pretty meaningless to solve anyway.)
Or even better, how can we apply the socratic method without a Socrate ? (where with Socrate I mean somebody who keep asking question)
Just because you were able to grasp it temporarily in class, does not mean you'll get to keep it when the excellent teacher is not around.
It is a lot like when somebody guides you through cooking something step by step with you doing all the work. It is definitely great because it inspires confidence in you doing new things. But when you are by yourself and you try to repeat the experience, you'll stumble and fumble quite a bit.
So in short - teaching anything using logical steps makes a lot of sense and is a great way to do it. Caveat: you still have to put in the work to solidify that knowledge.
Problem being: solidifying things is oftentimes tedious unless the task you're learning is intrinsically interesting/pleasing (solving math puzzles is just fun for some folks), so there is no revolution around the corner. People will put up with a lot if they have the natural dexterity for it, good teachers/methodology makes the whole experience more pleasant is all :)
I am not sure I agree completely, what you mean by "knowledge" ?
Let's suppose I don't know how to multiply numbers, however I do know how to add numbers and I also know what multiplication is... Do I know how to multiply numbers ?
The real caveat here is another one, the author prepared a sequence a question, for what I can recall from my philosophy class Socrate did not...
It was more a random exploration...
Finally we all know that some work is necessary to retain knowledge (again, what we mean by knowledge ?), but a logic, inductive work is way more enjoyable (read easier) than a mere mnemonic one.
He/she left out the part where you have to go home and solidify what you learned in class. That's where kids will struggle.
That home part is not solved by socratic method or otherwise. Nothing solves it, except doing the work.
All the socratic way of teaching in a classroom does, is make it more fun and interactive than a traditional lecture. If it gets people excited about learning, they may feel more inclined to put in the work at home.
Hence what you were proposing - putting the socratic method in a book, doesn't make sense to me. In a book, you want concise explanations. In a lecture, you do want more interactivity to get people excited to go home and look up the concise information.
That's my take on it anyway. I don't know where you were going with defining 'knowledge' - I don't find defining words useful, as long as we both know what we're talking about, we should be fine :)
And computers still do a lousy job in talking to people. Try to make people to answer a 10-question online survey. Harder to motivate than in face-to-face meetings.
Smart books. (Using something like an iPad.)
Not sure if your question was supposed to be a Socratic one... In general I'm skeptical of using the Socratic Method on people who have been shown capable of teaching themselves. It's a more engaging form of spoon feeding, but it's still spoon feeding and some people hunger for steak. I'm also skeptical about expanding the process as The Way beyond the legal field. (It's interesting to see law schools start questioning the method too: http://abovethelaw.com/2014/06/former-law-prof-says-the-socr...) Finally I think it would be less successful in engineering disciplines where there are clearly right answers you can get from calculation, not intuition. (It's also frustrating for the 'Socrate' and maybe amusing for the student when the student answers along a line the 'Socrate' doesn't expect, e.g. http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1879)
I think that is what a FAQ does to some extend. Of course, quesions do have to be asked frequently to be part of the FAQ but a lot of people don't have to ask any questions but consume the FAQ instead.
Basically, what you're supposed to do when you're actively reading material. I never really learned how to study until later in life but apparently this is how you're supposed to do it.
I think we don't see it a lot in many classrooms because of economy of scale. When I was in school, we had a professor who did this with his smaller class on computer networks but seems like maybe didn't in his larger classes. He'd ask questions but so many people trying to answer, less time for personal answers (which was fine with me since I was always the slowest person in the room).
The three science and geography teachers (overlap, in the most excellent fashion) were autodidacts who believed everybody else could be too - and proved it in shovels. I recall the phrase "now why do YOU think ...?" being almost percussion in lessons - almost everything was "you figure it out and then let's bash heads and figure out what's right".
Nothing beat first hand experience. If we were studying population density, we'd be taken to a nearby town and would spend a Sunday measuring frontages and documenting usage, to then graph the data and draw our own conclusions. The fascinating takeaway on that was that houses nearer water were usually poorer - rich folks could afford to live up hills and have water carried to them. Properties get rebuilt, frontages have a habit of staying the same, or in multiples of their original size. Stuff I would not know or even think about were it not for this experience. Chemistry was always "here's the thing you need to do. Here's a mystery bag of reagents and kit. Figure it out. I'll keep an eye in case you stray into danger." Two examples, but it was the core of how they taught sciences - make us do our own investigations, and ask us the right questions to precipitate the correct lines of thought. They nudged me into coding the same way - "there are some dusty old BBC micros and some magazines about how to use them in the basement. You guys figure it out.". We figured it out so well that we got the machine with the vocaliser to cuss at the teacher when he entered input into a fake basic prompt, and went on to make a "Hugo" clone set at the school. Also just recalled being taught normal distributions by being told to go count car colours outside the school gates.
Anyway, the upshot is that from that class, of those I've kept in touch, all still have a childlike curiosity about the world, myself included.
I think we were taught to think for ourselves in the most earnest way - something which is increasingly missing in education today. Fuck, we were allowed access to guns, a deep lake with floating islands, abandoned underground cool stores - all on trust alone - and if you violated that trust you lost it, and you were punished. The bog-eye. Shudder.
That said, I think the author's idea of 'only asking questions' is perhaps overly rhetorical. If you read the dialogue, he clearly injects statements without questions, and he also asks questions of the form, '<STATEMENT>, right?'. I have no problem with that, and found myself doing the same for the same reasons. My point is only that I think there is a 'truth' behind the approach which is better encapsulated than 'by only asking questions'. I think the more important consideration is that there be true dialog.
Just because it's such a completely weird coincidence, and because I think it demonstrates my point, I'm going to try to write out our conversation from memory. The whole thing probably took about ten minutes. As you'll see, it transitioned smoothly from questions my son was asking me. I think that's important, and it's why I think an asymmetrically 'socratic' emphasis on only asking questions is also stifling.
S: Why does the computer go faster after you restart it?
Me: The likely possibility is that there are memory leaks.
S: What is a memory leak?
Me: Imagine someone who got a new plate every time he had another serving of potatoes, instead of putting more potatoes on the same plate.
S: Okay.
Me: I guess he would make a lot more dishes than someone else.
S: I see that.
Me: Now imagine you had this guy over for dinner every day and you never did his dishes.
S: [Laughs]
Me: Pretty soon, you would run out of plates. You're supposed to reuse your plate within a meal, and you're supposed to wash the dishes between meals. But if you don't, you can run out.
S: So what does this have to do with computers?
Me: Computer programs are supposed to clean up after themselves too, but if they don't do it correctly, then they are like weird guests who make too many dirty dishes.
S: What are the dishes?
Me: Computer programs use memory. Remember we've talked about RAM, and different computers have different amounts of RAM? Well, when a computer program needs to hold some information, it asks for memory from the operating system. This is called 'memory allocation'. Asking for memory so you can store some information is like asking for a plate for your potatoes.
S: Okay.
Me: Normally a computer program doesn't ask for too many plates, and it lets you clean them up when it's done, but not always. That might be why restarting speeds things up. Sometimes you have to kick all the guests out and do the dishes.
S: Okay, so how much memory does a program ask for?
Me: That depends. How big are your files [that we were transferring]? A few K? K stands for kilobytes, so that's a thousand bytes. Actually it's 1,024 bytes -- but memory might be allocated in smaller units too.
S: What's a byte?
Me: A byte is eight bits.
S: What's a bit.
Me: It's a one or zero. Well, actually it's one piece of information, like a yes or a no. But it works out very well to call it a one or a zero, so we can do math with it.
S: How does that work?
Me: It's just like normal math, except instead of having ten numbers, you just have two: one and zero.
S: So you only have two numbers? What good is that?
Me: No, I mean you only have two digits, instead of having ten digits. You still have all the same numbers.
S: I don't understand how that works.
Me: Well, if you just have one bit, you have either a one or a zero. How many numbers can that be?
S: Two.
Me: What if you have two bits, or two digits, each of which is either a one or a zero. How many numbers now?
S: I don't know.
Me: Think about it. What if you have a one then a zero? [Note, we are in the car, so we can't write anything down.] What number would that be?
S: Ten.
Me: Yes, in base ten -- which is what we call it when there are ten digits. But we don't call it that in base two, which is what we call it when there are two digits.
S: What do you call it?
Me: TWO!
S: What!?
Me: Think about it.
S: I don't get it.
Me: How many two-digit numbers are there in base two?
S: Two zeros. Two ones. One zero. I'm not sure.
Me: What about one-digit numbers?
S: One and zero. Two numbers.
Me: Right, so can you combine those two?
S: I don't understand what you are asking me.
Me: Can't you create two-digit numbers by adding a digit onto all the one-digit numbers?
S: Sure.
Me: So can't you create two two-digit numbers for each one digit number? [I feel guilty for leading him so much, but hey, I'm arguing here against overly rhetorical socraticism.]
S: [Pause followed by evident lightbulb.] Yes, so it's four!
Me: Yep, you can represent two numbers with one binary digit, and four numbers with two binary digits. How many numbers can you represent with three binary digits? (Binary is another word for base two.)
S: Eight.
Me: Because eight is two to the third power.
S: No, four.
Me: What?
S: Two times two is four.
Me: Wait, let's go back. Two times two is four. That's two squared or two to the second power. Two times two times two is eight. That's three twos multiplied together. That's what 'to the third power means'.
S: Right, sorry, I got confused.
Me: So how many numbers can we represent in four binary digits?
S: 16.
Me: Because 16 is two to the
S: Fourth
Me: Right. What about two to the fith, five binary digits?
S: Thirty-two.
Me: And six binary digits, two to the sixth?
S: [Quickly] Sixty-four.
Me: And seven binary digits, two to the seventh?
S: [Quickly] One hundred twenty-eight.
Me: And eight binary digits, two to the eighth, which is one byte?
S: Oh! Let me figure this out. [Pause then triumphantly,] two hundred fifty-six.
Me: Correct. So a byte can be one of 256 numbers, expressed in base two.
S: I get it.
Me: Do you? Okay, so how would you write one?
S: One.
Me: What about two?
S: I can't.
Me: Why not?
S: Not enough numbers.
Me: But we just went through this. There are plenty of numbers.
S: But this part is too confusing.
Me: Normally you only have ten digits, but you can write numbers much larger than ten, right?
S: Yes.
Me: So when you write numbers down, there's a trick, right? [See, I'm doing this [<STATEMENT>, right?' thing too.]
S: Yes.
Me: Why is eleven eleven? It's a one in the ten's place plus a one in the one's place, right? You know about the ten's place, right?
S: Yes. So…
Me: So in binary, there is no ten's place because there are not ten digits. There are only two digits. So instead of the ten's place, we have a two's place.
S: Right! So it's one one.
Me: Yes! Instead of having a ten's, hundred's, thousand's place multiplying by ten every time, there's a two's place, a four's place, then what?
S: Eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four.
Me: Correct! So do you think you understand this now?
S: I think maybe I do.
Me: What is one one zero?
S: One in the four's place, plus one in the two's place equals six.
Me: Okay, how would you write seventeen?
S: [Long pause.] One in the sixteen's place plus one in the one's place.
Me: One, zero?
S: zero, zero, one.
Me: I think you do understand.
S: So how does the math work?
Me: You can add and multiply them just like normal numbers, but we probably need to write that down.
S: Okay.
Me: There's also a trick for negative numbers that computers use. It makes subtraction work like addition.
S: How does that work?
Me: It's called two's complement, but I can't remember the details well enough to explain it correctly in the car. Let's look it up later.
---
Although I quibble slightly on the value of what I'm calling rhetorical socraticism, my main point is agreement. It's just a remarkably weird coincidence that a fairly similar discourse (teaching binary to a third-grader through investigative dialog) would have come up in my daily life today. That's the real main reason I wrote it out while it's fresh enough that I remember most of the details.
I am not a school teacher, but I am a parent -- so I'm more concerned with the issues involved in communicating with a single individual (at a time). The reason I think a more symmetrical approach is probably most reasonable is that information needs to come from somewhere. Why not provide it in as appropriate a form as necessary, and exactly at the point of need? Otherwise the 'socratic' teacher has to be an outsider to the process who swoops in to work magic on the vessels which have been primed by the faceless dead fact-giving of the their non-socratic counterparts.
From that perspective an emphasis on the 'question-asking' side of what might be a more balanced whole is understandable, though. That orientation is a useful counterbalance to the usual approach, even if it can't possibly (even in theory) replace it completely.
Objection! Counsel is leading the witness, Your Honor.
Rhetorical questions are really statements in disguise: "The fact is such and such, don't you agree?"
The students should be given an opportunity to form their own hypotheses about why there are ten numerals, otherwise that particular element of the dialog is not genuine "teaching by asking".
By itself, a great way to start the discussion. The art is in knowing what NOT to say.
I raise my child with me all ways saying, "Are you asking or are you telling?" If they tell I ask for a re-do and than 90% of the time it is all set.
"An error occurred while processing your request.
Reference #102.a68e1402.1428827623.1ff08e60"
I'd argue that this is a form of coaching. From my experience and research (paper: "Self-organizing teams and the coach's adaptive role") the efficiency of Socratic methods depend on the mapping of past progress. Meaning that: by creating a system which is best at incrementally visualizing progress of the topic at hand, the efficiency of the method will be positively affected.
Even when you preface things with "I am not trying to get you to believe what's in textbooks, I'm trying to get you to _know_ what's in textbooks, instead of stuff like MY GRANDPA WAS A MONKEY".
Creationist educators and even publishers have developed a unique narrative about what they think science textbooks teach.
When I try this it often ends up in confrontation as the person who feels they are being asked for knowledge realises I am trying to teach them. These days I just flat out state my position and if they don't grasp the argument I forget the whole thing. This is a much better approach than attempting to subtly nudge people along a path to knowledge. It's a common problem for me as I look a 10 years younger than I am.