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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 muc

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.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  I happen to agree. My post and my whole perspective comes as a teacher who has believed primarily for years that rote-learning stinks and critical-thinking and creativity should be the focus etc. And after years of pushing against the trends, I came to realize that the optimal balance is somewhere in the middle. So, most of my students need me to be totally focused on critical thinking because so many other influences neglect it. But I still find there are times where it's just not the right approach. Consider statistical learning and exemplar theory. Instead of learning principles, there's a strong argument that we learn by large quantities of examples until we naturally pick up the general patterns…
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    Also, dividing by ability levels. No one likes being constantly outdone, and will soon turn away from a subject they can't progress as fast on their own..
bo1024 9y ago
That's a good point and I think also gets to the difference between an effective in-person lecture and one that would be just as good videotaped.
adrianratnapala 9y ago
Yes, and I suspect the main complication is the learner. I instinctively teach socratically, even when I don't mean to. But when I was a post-doc, I had a student who usually couldn't answer my questions or make any progress no matter how much I tried to break a problem into bite sized pieces. Then along came the proffessor, who would just calmly and simply tell the guy the thing that I had been trying to explain socratically. And the student had no trouble understanding.
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  > And the student had no trouble understanding. But did he still understand it a week later?
- flukus 9y ago
  Did he really understand or could he just parrot an answer? Generally I find if you can't step through with someone taking the socratic approach then you don't truly understand it. Not to say there's not room for facts, particularly at the boundaries of our knowledge, but from the description I get the impression that you were trying to teach and the professor wanted someone to recite.
  - groby_b 9y ago
    For some, understanding grows with reciting. There's nothing wrong with memorization iff it is followed by understanding. And if you "step through", it's not a socratic approach any more. It's a test.
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago
    There is no question of parroting, as these was not classroom exercises, but discussions between grown-ups trying to grapple with something difficult in the laboratory. After the Professor's explicit explanations, the student was able to carry on intelligently with the discussion and did not get stuck as he did with my Socratic explanations. That still leaves the possibility that he only understood things in a rote-ish way. But if so, that was enough to get him unblocked and thinking about the other related stuff we were talking about. That's valuable in itself, and will contribute to his understanding of the original sticking point.
ouid 9y ago
I don't believe that there's any way you can have any evidence for the statement > 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. I would even accept anecdotal evidence
- jacobolus 9y ago
  The main problem is scaling the teachers. Individual 1:1 tutoring with largely Socratic-style dialog with a world-class expert is definitely the most effective and efficient way to learn just about anything. e.g. see http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf The expert can figure out precisely what the student’s weak points are and can nudge the conversation in a productive direction while allowing the student to feel like he/she is making the conceptual breakthroughs, and the expert will know what misconceptions are common and how to dispel them with pointed counterexamples or logical contradictions, which again the student can be guided through. The expert will know when to offer new topics, when to offer practice problems, when to call back to previous material from a few months before, when to drop the question–response and just give a quick explanation or show a bit of tricky logic/proof that the student is unlikely to ever come up with independently, or when to spend time on hands-on projects. Student-centered individually-tailored instruction works well if you have <5 students per teacher (and 1:1 or 1:2 is best). When you get to 30 students per teacher, it starts to fall apart, and you need to fall back on lectures, textbooks, handouts, pre-recorded videos, pre-made computer explorations, or the like, and on individual homework and paper quizzes and exams for assessment, because there’s just no way for the teacher to be simultaneously working directly with every student. The students in a large class can spend some time reasonably productively in small group discussion and the teacher can then visit groups in turn helping dispel misconceptions or nudging the discussion around. Then back in a whole class discussion, the teacher can try to discuss the most common points of confusion. This can’t possibly be perfectly directed at every student at once, but given motivated students and a good teacher with enough out-of-class preparation and grading time, it’s usually the best we can do as a society.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  Contrived anecdote: imagine a doctor going through med school being taught to socratically think about how and why various drugs have various effects. It will end up sidetracking you into the depths of microbiology to the extent that you'll never get out of that rabbit hole. At some point, a doctor needs to learn things like "X drug is recommended for Y condition" and just use that rote knowledge, trusting the appropriate authorities. Sure, they can and should be skeptical and critical-thinkers and learning to think socratically is super valuable, but you just can't do it all the time. No doctor can possibly understand all the actual medical details of everything they prescribe, and if they do, there's near-zero chance they still have time to practice all the social skills needed to be an effective practitioner and so on.
monk_e_boy 9y ago
OPs essay is one of the reasons I got into education. I teach computer science, but boy, asking these questions to a class.... I'm just left with them shouting out random answers, wrong answers, dabbing, checking phones... Maybe this method works occasionally, but for a big class of students - not so much.
- ACow_Adonis 9y ago
  To be fair, when you've got a big class of students, learning is very rarely the top priority...so it's not that surprising it's hard to implement in such an environment.
Dalex0 9y ago
Which David Attenborough documentary you are referring to?
- quadrangle 9y ago
  Well, all of his are that way when compared to the typical documentary. Anything he wrote (not just narrated) is superb, and if you compare the percentage of minutes that provide real value, you'll see it much higher than most documentaries. Note: I haven't actually done measurements, but I've watched nearly all of Sir David's originals and many others by other presenters/filmmakers. The prototypical (actually extreme) example is in the original Life on Earth where he is at the bottom of the grand canyon and says something close to "these rocks are too old to have any fossils" and almost immediately cuts to a new scene where he says "Here in Lake Superior, we have rocks slightly newer, and these show the first fossils!". All the other documentary folks would have bullshit where they say, "so, we need to go to a different place…" and images of travel crap before they get to the point.

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.
quadrangle 9y ago
I happen to agree. My post and my whole perspective comes as a teacher who has believed primarily for years that rote-learning stinks and critical-thinking and creativity should be the focus etc. And after years of pushing against the trends, I came to realize that the optimal balance is somewhere in the middle. So, most of my students need me to be totally focused on critical thinking because so many other influences neglect it. But I still find there are times where it's just not the right approach. Consider statistical learning and exemplar theory. Instead of learning principles, there's a strong argument that we learn by large quantities of examples until we naturally pick up the general patterns…
- Chris2048 9y ago
  Also, dividing by ability levels. No one likes being constantly outdone, and will soon turn away from a subject they can't progress as fast on their own..

bo1024 9y ago

That's a good point and I think also gets to the difference between an effective in-person lecture and one that would be just as good videotaped.

adrianratnapala 9y ago

Yes, and I suspect the main complication is the learner. I instinctively teach socratically, even when I don't mean to. But when I was a post-doc, I had a student who usually couldn't answer my questions or make any progress no matter how much I tried to break a problem into bite sized pieces. Then along came the proffessor, who would just calmly and simply tell the guy the thing that I had been trying to explain socratically. And the student had no trouble understanding.

kwhitefoot 9y ago
> And the student had no trouble understanding. But did he still understand it a week later?
flukus 9y ago
Did he really understand or could he just parrot an answer? Generally I find if you can't step through with someone taking the socratic approach then you don't truly understand it. Not to say there's not room for facts, particularly at the boundaries of our knowledge, but from the description I get the impression that you were trying to teach and the professor wanted someone to recite.
- groby_b 9y ago
  For some, understanding grows with reciting. There's nothing wrong with memorization iff it is followed by understanding. And if you "step through", it's not a socratic approach any more. It's a test.
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  There is no question of parroting, as these was not classroom exercises, but discussions between grown-ups trying to grapple with something difficult in the laboratory. After the Professor's explicit explanations, the student was able to carry on intelligently with the discussion and did not get stuck as he did with my Socratic explanations. That still leaves the possibility that he only understood things in a rote-ish way. But if so, that was enough to get him unblocked and thinking about the other related stuff we were talking about. That's valuable in itself, and will contribute to his understanding of the original sticking point.

ouid 9y ago

I don't believe that there's any way you can have any evidence for the statement > 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. I would even accept anecdotal evidence

jacobolus 9y ago
The main problem is scaling the teachers. Individual 1:1 tutoring with largely Socratic-style dialog with a world-class expert is definitely the most effective and efficient way to learn just about anything. e.g. see http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf The expert can figure out precisely what the student’s weak points are and can nudge the conversation in a productive direction while allowing the student to feel like he/she is making the conceptual breakthroughs, and the expert will know what misconceptions are common and how to dispel them with pointed counterexamples or logical contradictions, which again the student can be guided through. The expert will know when to offer new topics, when to offer practice problems, when to call back to previous material from a few months before, when to drop the question–response and just give a quick explanation or show a bit of tricky logic/proof that the student is unlikely to ever come up with independently, or when to spend time on hands-on projects. Student-centered individually-tailored instruction works well if you have <5 students per teacher (and 1:1 or 1:2 is best). When you get to 30 students per teacher, it starts to fall apart, and you need to fall back on lectures, textbooks, handouts, pre-recorded videos, pre-made computer explorations, or the like, and on individual homework and paper quizzes and exams for assessment, because there’s just no way for the teacher to be simultaneously working directly with every student. The students in a large class can spend some time reasonably productively in small group discussion and the teacher can then visit groups in turn helping dispel misconceptions or nudging the discussion around. Then back in a whole class discussion, the teacher can try to discuss the most common points of confusion. This can’t possibly be perfectly directed at every student at once, but given motivated students and a good teacher with enough out-of-class preparation and grading time, it’s usually the best we can do as a society.
quadrangle 9y ago
Contrived anecdote: imagine a doctor going through med school being taught to socratically think about how and why various drugs have various effects. It will end up sidetracking you into the depths of microbiology to the extent that you'll never get out of that rabbit hole. At some point, a doctor needs to learn things like "X drug is recommended for Y condition" and just use that rote knowledge, trusting the appropriate authorities. Sure, they can and should be skeptical and critical-thinkers and learning to think socratically is super valuable, but you just can't do it all the time. No doctor can possibly understand all the actual medical details of everything they prescribe, and if they do, there's near-zero chance they still have time to practice all the social skills needed to be an effective practitioner and so on.

monk_e_boy 9y ago

OPs essay is one of the reasons I got into education. I teach computer science, but boy, asking these questions to a class.... I'm just left with them shouting out random answers, wrong answers, dabbing, checking phones... Maybe this method works occasionally, but for a big class of students - not so much.

ACow_Adonis 9y ago
To be fair, when you've got a big class of students, learning is very rarely the top priority...so it's not that surprising it's hard to implement in such an environment.

Dalex0 9y ago

Which David Attenborough documentary you are referring to?

quadrangle 9y ago
Well, all of his are that way when compared to the typical documentary. Anything he wrote (not just narrated) is superb, and if you compare the percentage of minutes that provide real value, you'll see it much higher than most documentaries. Note: I haven't actually done measurements, but I've watched nearly all of Sir David's originals and many others by other presenters/filmmakers. The prototypical (actually extreme) example is in the original Life on Earth where he is at the bottom of the grand canyon and says something close to "these rocks are too old to have any fossils" and almost immediately cuts to a new scene where he says "Here in Lake Superior, we have rocks slightly newer, and these show the first fossils!". All the other documentary folks would have bullshit where they say, "so, we need to go to a different place…" and images of travel crap before they get to the point.