socratic questioning

I had never heard of the Socratic Method, so I did my usual internet search. One of the first things I found was an article about a teacher who did an socratic experiment. I don’t think it confused the children, as long as it wasn’t used for every lesson and the information was taught other ways as well.

http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html

K.

Lu Lu,
After a student has some idea of the concept, you lead them to a correct answer by asking small questions that help them reason. This technique, like everything else, cannot *always* be used; however, it is a powerful memory tool when used effectively. Because students’ brains are firing and thinking, the information tends to get generalized.

What socratic questioning also allows we teachers to do is to recognize what is correct about a students response. (Yes, that is a dog. Now, what kind of dog has such short hair and floppy ears…yes, you are right, a beagle has short hair and floppy ears…now what kind of dog is smaller and lower to the ground…yes, you are right, a dachshund.) Then to lead them into being even more correct. Believe me, it is *easier* to tell them the answer and less time consuming. This technique takes skill—like most things, I think.

Socratic questioning teaches a person to think for themselves. In LMB you guide the student by responding to their responses, acknowledging what they said and asking more definitive questions to gain comprehension and understanding. Socratic questioning can be hard to master as a clinician but it is worth the effort as it is a wonderful asset to have as a therapist/teacher.

I found this interesting. I have been doing this with my son for the last six months without realizing what it was. Basically, I got tired of him asking me the questions, often the same ones over and over again. Many times he actually knew the answer. So then I would say Hmmm. Didn’t we talk about this the other day? And he would give me the answer.

I guess I came to recognize that my son’s constant questioning wasn’t necessarily intelligence—like I thought when he was younger—but rather a sign that he was dependent upon me to tell him about the world. By leading him step by step until he found the answer himself, I figured that I would be helping him to learn to think. And that someday I would be off the hook for answer machine!!!

I do think it has helped. I see him thinking through things more these days and able to make inferences better, although still not grade appropriate.

Beth

I didn’t realize this was a new ‘philosophy’ within schools.

I recently went to a management training seminar at my work where they were teaching us how to become better ‘coaches’ to our people. We learned how to ‘coach’ our people to get to their goals/issues vs. ‘telling’ them how to get there. By asking the right kind of questions, it’s much more meaningful, there’s more ownership and you remember better if a person is able to connect the dots on there own (with someone coaching, not telling) them how to get there.

The instructor said he used this technique with his daughter when she did her homework. She got thru Math this way and now that she is in college, she knows how to talk her self thru and problem solve better on her own.

I thought this made alot of sense and am trying to use it with my own kids (not just my employees). It’s very hard to do! I want to ‘tell’ how to do it. It takes alot of practice, if you are not a natural at it.

I do this when I teach so it isn’t a new skill for me, although it was new to parenting my LD son. I had tended to treat him like someone who could be “filled” up with facts, although I resist that approach with my students. I don’t think I was giving him enough credit.

Beth

I use it all the time when working with my kids. You are showing the kid how to walk their way through a chain of reasoning by making the way in which you reason evident to someone who might not be at the same level of analytic thought. You are also are encouraging them to figure the problem out themselves instead of leaning on you as a resource, and you are showing them that yes, they can work things out for themselves. For example, suppose your kid has the kind of elementary problem in which you have to figure out the amount of wallpaper needed to cover a wall which has two windows in it. I remember this one from last year. If you explain it to her that she needs to figure out the area of the wall, and then deduct the area of sum of the two windows, she will be ok for that problem, but she hasn’t strengthened her ability to figure out a similar problem. Socratic questioning goes like this.

YOU: Well, how would you figure out how much wall paper you would need if the wall didn’t have any windows in it?
KID: It would be the length times the width of the wall. (Calculates the sum)
YOU: Do you know how to figure out the area of the windows?
KID: That would be length x width of each of the windows, and then you add the two areas together. (Calculates the sum)
YOU: Okay, so you know how to get the area of the wall, and you know how to get the area of everything which is NOT the wall, right?
KID: Umm, yess..?
YOU: Do you want to have wallpaper over the windows?
KID: Sure! Just kidding.
YOU: So you need to have enough wallpaper to cover those parts of the wall which aren’t a window, right? Now what do you need to do figure out how much wallpaper you need to cover the wall?
KID: You subtract the second number from the first?
YOU: Bingo.
KID (indignant): But it will look horrible!
YOU: Huh?
KID: Suppose the wallpaper has stripes or something on it. If you cut up the wallpaper like that, the stripes will go the wrong way and it will look bad.
YOU: Your math teacher wants you to cover this imaginary wall with wallpaper. She didn’t say it had to look good after you finished doing it.

Socratic questioning is at the core of the elusive goal of creating a “lifelong love of learning”. It workls very well for those kids who are of higher than average intelligence and have a good sense of security in their person (how many people really are willing to volunteer an answer they are unsure of, and risk being wrong?)

The paradigm opposite of this nebulous instruction is of course direct teaching, which has been philosophically rejected by the educrats in power and paradoxically has been repeatedly demonstrated thru outcome studies to be at once more effective in imparting knowledge and consequently giving students a greater sence of confidence and esteem. (Nothing says “attaboy” like having the right answer at hand).

As we are moving more and more into a period of greater reliance on grades to “prove” the accountability issues of our schools, we are going to need to get away from the philosophical approach to thinking and learning and retrun to more direct forms of instructions so that our kids can clear the hurdles. The only other options is to continue watering down the curricula, continue social promotion, and accept that we are going to lose a great number of kids.

Socratic instruction isn’t the opposite of direct instruction. They can well be blended. Socratic can be a review technique and also used in guided practice after the concept has been modeled using direct instructional techniques. If the teacher observes in guided practice that the student hasn’t connected schema at the concrete level, then go back one space to direct instruction/ modeling of the concept before going to guided practice.

Neither are new to education.

I think socratic method works when kids already know pieces of something but don’t know how to put these pieces together. I thought Shirin’s wall paper example was a good example. Her daughter understood some parts of how to figure out the wallpaper but wasn’t able to figure out the sequence on her own. Direct instruction also has its place. I just saw with my own son that I was always in a direct instruction mode and so he was not learning to think. I haven’t totally dropped direct instruction now that I am using a more socratic approach. I agree with Susan, they can work hand in hand.

Beth

Well, Susan is right, Socratic questioning is certainly not new, as it goes back 2500 years to the days of Socrates.

Dad, I’m afraid you’re off base here. If all you do is learn given facts by rote memory, you don’t have have any education at all. A good encyclopedia can beat you every time. You have to be able to *reason* with those facts.
In the 1970’s there was a fashion for programmed learning — we would program students step by step like computers. After they memorized every step in every model reasoning problem, they were supposed to be able to reason for themselves. Big failure. One of the authors of those programs taught me in the 1990’s and apologized deeply and sincerely for a very mistaken approach, giving us published studies and reports showing just how bad it was.
You learn reasoning like every other skill, by working from simple to complex and by practicing.

An analogy: facts are like plain bread, and reasoning problems are like butter. Just bread without butter is dry and hard to swallow and pretty soon will gag you. Just butter without bread is far too rich and if you eat it straight will upset your stomach. But both together make a good food.

There have been programs that attempted to teach reasoning without any facts or groundwork (new math is a prime example, and many “whole-language programs that attempt to teach literary criticism before reading) and they are just as bad as the other way around.

I think Beth is absolutely right; what you are looking for is a balance, some questioning and leading the child to think, and some direct instruction especially of basic facts and skills that will give you some foundation to think with and about.