7 ms·

Socratic method to teaching by asking

211 points by mbparsa 9y ago

wahern 9y ago
If you're interested in pursuing this method consistently with children, see https://www.greatbooks.org/ https://www.greatbooks.org/. 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....
coffeemug 9y ago
Maybe I'm not clever enough, but I found that the Socratic method never worked for me. If you ask most people a question that makes them aware of a contradiction they don't generally say "that was such a clever way to have me see the flaws in my argument, thank you!" Instead, motivated cognition kicks in and they double down. 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).
- dmichulke 9y ago
  I use this mostly when people give investment advice
- smogcutter 9y ago
  Note that this problem is not unrelated to Socrates getting executed. The guy made a lot of enemies.
- deleted 9y ago
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unoti 9y ago
There’s a classic book called The Goal[1] which is an outstanding example of teaching using the Socratic method. The basic lessons of the book can also change the way you think about business in general and software engineering in particular, as a bonus. One important concept for example is to liken unreleased software to a big pile of inventory in a warehouse: the inventory doesn’t do the company any good until it is paid for by a customer. Similarly, software doesn’t do any good until it is providing value in production. 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/0884270610 https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0...
- nikofeyn 9y ago
  i just learned about the goal a few days ago. there's also a graphic novel version of the book: the goal: a business graphic novel https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Business-Graphic-Novel/dp/0884272079 https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Business-Graphic-Novel/dp/088427...
  - BraveNewCurency 9y ago
    There is also an IT version called The Phoenix Project. Same story, but in a computer biz.
- gnat 9y ago
  The Goal also inspired my favourite tech business book, The Phoenix Project[1]. As in The Goal, the protagonist has a mentor who asks pointed questions that are the slow-burning fuse which later unlock understanding. Easy to read, wise, and useful at work. I've caused at least ten people around me to read it, and they've all been grateful. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business-ebook/dp/B00AZRBLHO https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Busine...
ryanb23 9y ago
Seems like this should be the standard.
- devmunchies 9y ago
  This was done be a guest teacher. The author was not the classroom teacher. This means that the students were more curious and interested to begin with. To maintain this type of rigorous style throughout the year would be almost impossible. It could be used more, but not exclusively.
  - ihaveajob 9y ago
    Precisely this. Please don't read this and apply it to every conversation. If the other party is not particularly driven to learn about the topic, you'll turn them off completely.
anton_tarasenko 9y ago
The previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9362252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9362252 A cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v36n9t1rVDsJ:www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk 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.
ihaveajob 9y ago
To counter the positive feedback about this technique, I'd like to point that when the person on the learning side (answering the questions) has not asked to be taught anything, the teacher (asking questions) can come across as a condescending prick. This is especially true if the content is a matter of opinion, not statements of fact. I have become sensitized to this and it makes my blood boil when I notice it happen.
- robbles 9y ago
  That's true regardless of the teaching technique though, isn't it? Having someone lecture at you because they assume your knowledge is lacking is the part that makes it condescending, IMO.
  - miceeatnicerice 9y ago
    Well, yes - but being speculatively questioned is more infuriating because it's pretending to be the exact opposite of what it really is, as long as the questioner is happily taking a position of authority on the issue - which they are, as they're the one who's set the question in the first place. It's like a fly looking at a quivering piece of silk and imagining the worst, even if the spider's miles off. What you want, instead of questions, are themes - and the willingness to make yourself ridiculous through positive speculations.
  - jbclements 9y ago
    No, I think that the socratic method can be much more intensely infuriating because it's clear that the teacher is withholding the answer from you. (FWIW, I use the socratic method a lot... so I'm definitely familiar with students getting mad at me.)
- keithnz 9y ago
  well, to be fair, the people of Athens god a tad annoyed with Socrates resulting in him being put to death.
  - ihaveajob 9y ago
noahdesu 9y ago
I was a graduate student advised by a dedicated practitioner of the Socratic method. My experience showed me that this method is incredibly powerful, both to teach students to think, and later as an educator in our research lab, as a method for honing my own understanding. 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.
- ismail 9y ago
  how would one go about learning this effectively?
  - teachrdan 9y ago
    How have you tried learning about the Socratic Method so far?
    - deleted 9y ago
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  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
    oh very funny. Edit: Have you ever seen the question game on Whose Line Is It Anyway?
  - ddebernardy 9y ago
    Basically never take any explanation as a given (and acknowledge and embrace not knowing). 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.
agumonkey 9y ago
Dan Friedman books The little lisper/schemer, The reasoned schemer etc all follow this kind of questioning dialog. It's a bit annoying at times, but it really drives the point at the end. The method should be used more often.
- jimhefferon 9y ago
  When I looked into them, I did not find these books were Socratic/Inquiry-based. My perception is that a typical question-answer would not be of the kind I see in such a classroom. 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.
  - Jtsummers 9y ago
    I think a benefit to asking a question a student can't answer yet ("What is an atom?") is that it gets students accustomed to saying "I don't know". Which every student (whether young or old) needs to be able to say. By admitting a lack of knowledge, and not feeling self-conscious about it, the next step is to fill in the gap. In the Schemer books that's what the next series of questions (almost?) always seem to do, with a final question ("What is an atom?"). And now the student can answer it. 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.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    You're right that a good chunk of the questions were a bit rhetorical and sometimes impossible to guess. And I approve that leading students to come themselves with intuitions is very important. But I believe the goal was to emphasize the notion of chaining succint and precise predicates to construct a larger abstraction.
hnrodey 9y ago
I really like the Socratic method as it resonates with the way my brain processes information and I think it's effective to hopefully get people to think for themselves. 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.
ohdrat 9y ago
If you're Dad, dumb questions are the only way to get a word in edgewise. 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"? :)
jimhefferon 9y ago
People on HN are often interested in Math and in education. I'll mention the Journal of Inquiry-Based Learning in Mathematics http://www.jiblm.org/ http://www.jiblm.org/. (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 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.)
almostarockstar 9y ago
Slightly off topic, but when a page with minimal styling like this comes by, how do you typically view it? I usually do something like this in the inspector: body{ width: 601px; margin: auto; font-size: 1.3em; color: #483f3f; line-height: 1.5em; } But that's a pain to write out each time. I'm not against un-styled websites at all, but I wish they were more readable by default.
- lgas 9y ago
  You could make a bookmarklet that injects that CSS when you click on it and then leave it in the bookmarks bar. There used to be a couple of these that were good, Clear Read and Readable were the two I remember, but they all seem to have stopped working over time.
  - almostarockstar 9y ago
    Will check them out. Thanks.
- nanny 9y ago
  Reader View in Firefox. Chrome has browser extensions for this.
  - almostarockstar 9y ago
    Thanks
rdtsc 9y ago
I use this with my kid - she asks me a question and I often ask her the same question to see what she would think or even guess before I tell her the real answer. It's a great way to also develop verbal skills as well not just reasoning I noticed. Gradually through some new words and concepts at her. 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?"
pmoriarty 9y ago
This reminds me of the style of The Little Schemer[1] which a lot of people love but which I found to be plodding and insufferably condescending. [1] - https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0262560992/ https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0...
jancsika 9y ago
> Further, in the case of binary numbers, I found that when you used this sequence of questions with impatient or math-phobic adults who didn't want to have to think but just wanted you to "get to the point", they could not correctly answer very far into even the above sequence 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.
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  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?
  - jancsika 9y ago
    > Which is what the Socrates character in Platos dialog seems to spend all his time doing. 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
    - adrianratnapala 9y ago
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quadrangle 9y ago
It's complicated. 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.
- StanislavPetrov 9y ago
  I would argue that is it far, far more important to teach kids how to think critically and equip with them with the tools to explore the world and learn on their own than saturate them with a bunch of facts and figures that they lack the capacity to intelligently comprehend and likely won't retain.
  - rtpg 9y ago
    But if you present them with a small, easy-to-understand example before going into pondering mode, maybe you just saved yourself an hour. It's the difference between having API documentation and having a quick start + API documentation.
viraj_shah 9y ago
Can you use the Socratic method on yourself to develop better ways of thinking?
- abecedarius 9y ago
  Yes. When you're reading, don't rush ahead to the author's answer; stop and think whether you can say what it should be. Maybe close the book and go for a walk. (This didn't come naturally to me, at least for well-written works.)
kaycebasques 9y ago
Does anybody have examples of the Socratic method applied to technical writing? 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/javascript https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/java...
- jventura 9y ago
  > One problem with this, though, is that I'm still just telling my readers what to do. 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.
  - kaycebasques 9y ago
    > my approach for my lab classes is to write what I call "guided tutorials" 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.
twblalock 9y ago
In many of the Socratic dialogues, the person Socrates is talking to ends up frustrated and finds some excuse to leave. They did that because the method is annoying in large doses.
- noncoml 9y ago
  Completely. Reading Plato's Republic I imagine Socrates as a huge troll of his time.
smogcutter 9y ago
I've spent a good amount of time tutoring elementary and high school students, and I've found that the current focus on metrics and testing really hamstrings the socratic method. 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.
joshuaheard 9y ago
I am familiar with the Socratic method from law school, where it is generally used by the professors. I found it painfully slow, but engaging and insightful. I think a mix of lecture and Socratic method would be optimal, where the teacher begins by lecturing the structure of the lesson, then uses Socratic dialog to hone the fine points.
- dctoedt 9y ago
  Agreed about a mixture being better than pure Socratic method. (Lawyer and part-time law professor here.) In my own courses I've been experimenting with 1) asking students to read what amounts to a FAQ about the relevant material — then in class, 2) posing a question orally, often a variation on one of the FAQs, 3) having the students discuss the oral question in small groups, and finally 4) calling on a student to report out his group's answer to the oral question. The students seem to respond well. (Sadly, I have no actual data to measure comparative pedagogical efficacy.)
songzme 9y ago
I run my coding camp to teach adults how to code. Although not entirely similar to the Socratic method, we focus on asking questions to teach because it is the most effective and it scales incredibly well (so far). 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/ http://bootcamp.garagescript.com/
- sigstoat 9y ago
  > Teaching by asking questions scales really well in 1-1 interactions. This quickly disintegrates in a group setting though... in what sense does something that only works 1-1 "scale"?
  - songzme 9y ago
    If a person has 3-5 kids, you might think his/her reproduction doesn't scale. But what if their kids went on to have 3-5 kids, and so on and so forth. Population grows healthily. IMO, that's scaling with high quality. The other alternative is: one person learns to reproduce and has 1 million kids. That person dies, population dies. That doesn't scale.
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hacker0705 9y ago
Tarka sastra -> I believe was ancient Indian way of teaching. Vedas as written in this manner which I think predates Socrates.
sergj 9y ago
Saw this on HN a while back. It also uses the socratic method to teach electronics, but student are supposed to look up the answers to these questions to deepen their understanding and progress from there. http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/socratic/ http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/socratic/
yosito 9y ago
I'm a bit skeptical of saying that the teacher only asked questions and didn't "tell" the students anything. Many of the questions were prefaced with statements and many included new information that was worked into the wording of the question. This was an impressive and well thought out teaching session. And while it was punctuated with constant questions and answers from the students, it definitely was not "only" questions.
easytiger 9y ago
I'm a collector of antique Natural History and science books. 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.
btbuildem 9y ago
Some of my coworkers tend to keep their heads buried in details so intently, I find it very difficult to talk to them about the big picture. It is quite frustrating, as the big picture tends to inform / change the details. We often end up building things up to the strictest technical standards with the most appropriate frameworks etc, but hopelessly miss the general requirements. 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.

211 points by mbparsa 9y ago

If you're interested in pursuing this method consistently with children, see https://www.greatbooks.org/ https://www.greatbooks.org/. 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....

coffeemug 9y ago

Maybe I'm not clever enough, but I found that the Socratic method never worked for me. If you ask most people a question that makes them aware of a contradiction they don't generally say "that was such a clever way to have me see the flaws in my argument, thank you!" Instead, motivated cognition kicks in and they double down. 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).

dmichulke 9y ago
I use this mostly when people give investment advice
smogcutter 9y ago
Note that this problem is not unrelated to Socrates getting executed. The guy made a lot of enemies.
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unoti 9y ago

There’s a classic book called The Goal[1] which is an outstanding example of teaching using the Socratic method. The basic lessons of the book can also change the way you think about business in general and software engineering in particular, as a bonus. One important concept for example is to liken unreleased software to a big pile of inventory in a warehouse: the inventory doesn’t do the company any good until it is paid for by a customer. Similarly, software doesn’t do any good until it is providing value in production. 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/0884270610 https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0...

nikofeyn 9y ago
i just learned about the goal a few days ago. there's also a graphic novel version of the book: the goal: a business graphic novel https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Business-Graphic-Novel/dp/0884272079 https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Business-Graphic-Novel/dp/088427...
- BraveNewCurency 9y ago
  There is also an IT version called The Phoenix Project. Same story, but in a computer biz.
gnat 9y ago
The Goal also inspired my favourite tech business book, The Phoenix Project[1]. As in The Goal, the protagonist has a mentor who asks pointed questions that are the slow-burning fuse which later unlock understanding. Easy to read, wise, and useful at work. I've caused at least ten people around me to read it, and they've all been grateful. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business-ebook/dp/B00AZRBLHO https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Busine...

ryanb23 9y ago

Seems like this should be the standard.

devmunchies 9y ago
This was done be a guest teacher. The author was not the classroom teacher. This means that the students were more curious and interested to begin with. To maintain this type of rigorous style throughout the year would be almost impossible. It could be used more, but not exclusively.
- ihaveajob 9y ago
  Precisely this. Please don't read this and apply it to every conversation. If the other party is not particularly driven to learn about the topic, you'll turn them off completely.

anton_tarasenko 9y ago

The previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9362252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9362252 A cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v36n9t1rVDsJ:www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk 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.

ihaveajob 9y ago

To counter the positive feedback about this technique, I'd like to point that when the person on the learning side (answering the questions) has not asked to be taught anything, the teacher (asking questions) can come across as a condescending prick. This is especially true if the content is a matter of opinion, not statements of fact. I have become sensitized to this and it makes my blood boil when I notice it happen.

robbles 9y ago
That's true regardless of the teaching technique though, isn't it? Having someone lecture at you because they assume your knowledge is lacking is the part that makes it condescending, IMO.
- miceeatnicerice 9y ago
  Well, yes - but being speculatively questioned is more infuriating because it's pretending to be the exact opposite of what it really is, as long as the questioner is happily taking a position of authority on the issue - which they are, as they're the one who's set the question in the first place. It's like a fly looking at a quivering piece of silk and imagining the worst, even if the spider's miles off. What you want, instead of questions, are themes - and the willingness to make yourself ridiculous through positive speculations.
- jbclements 9y ago
  No, I think that the socratic method can be much more intensely infuriating because it's clear that the teacher is withholding the answer from you. (FWIW, I use the socratic method a lot... so I'm definitely familiar with students getting mad at me.)
keithnz 9y ago
well, to be fair, the people of Athens god a tad annoyed with Socrates resulting in him being put to death.
- ihaveajob 9y ago

noahdesu 9y ago

I was a graduate student advised by a dedicated practitioner of the Socratic method. My experience showed me that this method is incredibly powerful, both to teach students to think, and later as an educator in our research lab, as a method for honing my own understanding. 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.

ismail 9y ago
how would one go about learning this effectively?
- teachrdan 9y ago
  How have you tried learning about the Socratic Method so far?
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- 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
  oh very funny. Edit: Have you ever seen the question game on Whose Line Is It Anyway?
- ddebernardy 9y ago
  Basically never take any explanation as a given (and acknowledge and embrace not knowing). 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.

agumonkey 9y ago

Dan Friedman books The little lisper/schemer, The reasoned schemer etc all follow this kind of questioning dialog. It's a bit annoying at times, but it really drives the point at the end. The method should be used more often.

jimhefferon 9y ago
When I looked into them, I did not find these books were Socratic/Inquiry-based. My perception is that a typical question-answer would not be of the kind I see in such a classroom. 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.
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  I think a benefit to asking a question a student can't answer yet ("What is an atom?") is that it gets students accustomed to saying "I don't know". Which every student (whether young or old) needs to be able to say. By admitting a lack of knowledge, and not feeling self-conscious about it, the next step is to fill in the gap. In the Schemer books that's what the next series of questions (almost?) always seem to do, with a final question ("What is an atom?"). And now the student can answer it. 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.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  You're right that a good chunk of the questions were a bit rhetorical and sometimes impossible to guess. And I approve that leading students to come themselves with intuitions is very important. But I believe the goal was to emphasize the notion of chaining succint and precise predicates to construct a larger abstraction.

hnrodey 9y ago

I really like the Socratic method as it resonates with the way my brain processes information and I think it's effective to hopefully get people to think for themselves. 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.

ohdrat 9y ago

If you're Dad, dumb questions are the only way to get a word in edgewise. 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"? :)

jimhefferon 9y ago

People on HN are often interested in Math and in education. I'll mention the Journal of Inquiry-Based Learning in Mathematics http://www.jiblm.org/ http://www.jiblm.org/. (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 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.)

almostarockstar 9y ago

Slightly off topic, but when a page with minimal styling like this comes by, how do you typically view it? I usually do something like this in the inspector: body{ width: 601px; margin: auto; font-size: 1.3em; color: #483f3f; line-height: 1.5em; } But that's a pain to write out each time. I'm not against un-styled websites at all, but I wish they were more readable by default.

lgas 9y ago
You could make a bookmarklet that injects that CSS when you click on it and then leave it in the bookmarks bar. There used to be a couple of these that were good, Clear Read and Readable were the two I remember, but they all seem to have stopped working over time.
- almostarockstar 9y ago
  Will check them out. Thanks.
nanny 9y ago
Reader View in Firefox. Chrome has browser extensions for this.
- almostarockstar 9y ago
  Thanks

rdtsc 9y ago

I use this with my kid - she asks me a question and I often ask her the same question to see what she would think or even guess before I tell her the real answer. It's a great way to also develop verbal skills as well not just reasoning I noticed. Gradually through some new words and concepts at her. 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?"

pmoriarty 9y ago

This reminds me of the style of The Little Schemer[1] which a lot of people love but which I found to be plodding and insufferably condescending. [1] - https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0262560992/ https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0...

jancsika 9y ago

> Further, in the case of binary numbers, I found that when you used this sequence of questions with impatient or math-phobic adults who didn't want to have to think but just wanted you to "get to the point", they could not correctly answer very far into even the above sequence 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.

adrianratnapala 9y ago
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?
- jancsika 9y ago
  > Which is what the Socrates character in Platos dialog seems to spend all his time doing. 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
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago

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quadrangle 9y ago

It's complicated. 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.

StanislavPetrov 9y ago
I would argue that is it far, far more important to teach kids how to think critically and equip with them with the tools to explore the world and learn on their own than saturate them with a bunch of facts and figures that they lack the capacity to intelligently comprehend and likely won't retain.
- rtpg 9y ago
  But if you present them with a small, easy-to-understand example before going into pondering mode, maybe you just saved yourself an hour. It's the difference between having API documentation and having a quick start + API documentation.

viraj_shah 9y ago

Can you use the Socratic method on yourself to develop better ways of thinking?

abecedarius 9y ago
Yes. When you're reading, don't rush ahead to the author's answer; stop and think whether you can say what it should be. Maybe close the book and go for a walk. (This didn't come naturally to me, at least for well-written works.)

kaycebasques 9y ago

Does anybody have examples of the Socratic method applied to technical writing? 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/javascript https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/java...

jventura 9y ago
> One problem with this, though, is that I'm still just telling my readers what to do. 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.
- kaycebasques 9y ago
  > my approach for my lab classes is to write what I call "guided tutorials" 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.

twblalock 9y ago

In many of the Socratic dialogues, the person Socrates is talking to ends up frustrated and finds some excuse to leave. They did that because the method is annoying in large doses.

noncoml 9y ago
Completely. Reading Plato's Republic I imagine Socrates as a huge troll of his time.

smogcutter 9y ago

I've spent a good amount of time tutoring elementary and high school students, and I've found that the current focus on metrics and testing really hamstrings the socratic method. 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.

joshuaheard 9y ago

I am familiar with the Socratic method from law school, where it is generally used by the professors. I found it painfully slow, but engaging and insightful. I think a mix of lecture and Socratic method would be optimal, where the teacher begins by lecturing the structure of the lesson, then uses Socratic dialog to hone the fine points.

dctoedt 9y ago
Agreed about a mixture being better than pure Socratic method. (Lawyer and part-time law professor here.) In my own courses I've been experimenting with 1) asking students to read what amounts to a FAQ about the relevant material — then in class, 2) posing a question orally, often a variation on one of the FAQs, 3) having the students discuss the oral question in small groups, and finally 4) calling on a student to report out his group's answer to the oral question. The students seem to respond well. (Sadly, I have no actual data to measure comparative pedagogical efficacy.)

songzme 9y ago

I run my coding camp to teach adults how to code. Although not entirely similar to the Socratic method, we focus on asking questions to teach because it is the most effective and it scales incredibly well (so far). 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/ http://bootcamp.garagescript.com/

sigstoat 9y ago
> Teaching by asking questions scales really well in 1-1 interactions. This quickly disintegrates in a group setting though... in what sense does something that only works 1-1 "scale"?
- songzme 9y ago
  If a person has 3-5 kids, you might think his/her reproduction doesn't scale. But what if their kids went on to have 3-5 kids, and so on and so forth. Population grows healthily. IMO, that's scaling with high quality. The other alternative is: one person learns to reproduce and has 1 million kids. That person dies, population dies. That doesn't scale.

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hacker0705 9y ago

Tarka sastra -> I believe was ancient Indian way of teaching. Vedas as written in this manner which I think predates Socrates.

sergj 9y ago

Saw this on HN a while back. It also uses the socratic method to teach electronics, but student are supposed to look up the answers to these questions to deepen their understanding and progress from there. http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/socratic/ http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/socratic/

yosito 9y ago

I'm a bit skeptical of saying that the teacher only asked questions and didn't "tell" the students anything. Many of the questions were prefaced with statements and many included new information that was worked into the wording of the question. This was an impressive and well thought out teaching session. And while it was punctuated with constant questions and answers from the students, it definitely was not "only" questions.

easytiger 9y ago

I'm a collector of antique Natural History and science books. 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.

btbuildem 9y ago

Some of my coworkers tend to keep their heads buried in details so intently, I find it very difficult to talk to them about the big picture. It is quite frustrating, as the big picture tends to inform / change the details. We often end up building things up to the strictest technical standards with the most appropriate frameworks etc, but hopelessly miss the general requirements. 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.