The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling

There is <i>one</i> professor at my course that used the socratic method. Those are some of the best lectures I've been to.<p>A lot of professors <i>think</i> 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.<p>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.<p>How does one gain the necessary patience for this?

The socratic method has an awful failure mode: you can't teach facts, and you can't teach anything derived from empiric data.<p>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.<p>Asking socratic questions about the effects of drugs on human bodies is useless.<p>Don't trust a socratic-trained engineer to build your skyscraper, or your pizza oven.

It is also a wonderful way to teach your own children, and more importantly discuss issues that frustrate them.<p>Spitting out answers without having an question makes the answer a useless fact. Understanding is acquired. Understanding can never be forgotten.<p>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.<p>She earned a full scholarship to Dartmouth, was a Intel Semifinalist (genetic research), and is now studying Biology with a course concentration in Neuroscience.<p>I only taught her how to think about things, never facts.

One should not forget, in the end everyone was so annoyed that they made him kill himself.<p>[Edit] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates#Trial_and_death" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates#Trial_and_death</a><p>"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."

Here's the previous submission: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2446316" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2446316</a>

This isn't really what I think of as the Socratic method, which pertains to a style of discourse (whether it be teacher-student or peer-peer) involving questions by one side and answers by the other to investigate nonfactual issues, and which attempts to keep the discourse grounded in solid reasoning.<p>Of course, eliciting information from students, regardless of what you call it, is a well known and essential aspect of <i>any</i> 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.

I've been in a math class at the college level which operated exclusively by the Socratic method of questioning. Within an hour or two it became obvious that the appeal to the crowd didn't work so well, as some people will understand the concept faster than others. As a result, we went around to each student. However, this did result in sometimes trying to get an individual student to say the "correct" thing in order to follow to the next sequence of questions. People were put on the spot, which isn't necessarily bad. Also the class moved as slow as the slowest person and it took a whole lot of preparation by the professor. We had about 20 people, and at that scale it wasn't necessary to concentrate on each question, but only to the general topic. Even at that scale the method was breaking down, both from previous reasons as well as introducing a small amount of "stage fright". However, everyone left the class knowing what was taught, with a minimum of confusion along the way.

There was a relatively recent article in Time about the socratic method not being so great: <a href="http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/14/why-asking-questions-might-not-be-the-best-way-to-teach" rel="nofollow">http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/14/why-asking-questions-might-...</a><p>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.<p>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.

The method might not be useful in every situation, but is an useful tool.<p>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.