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Stan Skrabut: Thanks for taking the time to listen to this podcast. I know you could be doing other things, perhaps you are, but you’re still hanging out with me, and I really appreciate it. Over the course of this podcast, now 108 episodes, I have repeatedly stated that learning is about dialogue. Nothing typifies this more than the Socratic discussion method. Through well-crafted questions, the learner constructs their knowledge base, and you as an instructor, help them build it.
First of all, what is the Socratic discussion method? Socrates, I guess, began this over 2000 years ago. It’s been used for quite a long time. Plato was the one that really brought it forth by sharing the discussions of Socrates. What the Socratic method does is it flips the classroom instruction from one, where the instructor shares information on a topic to one where the students share what they know about a topic. This dialogue is achieved through open-ended questions. The Socratic method is also associated with the inquiry method.
According to the article, the Socratic method, what it is and how to use it in the classroom, the teacher or leader of the dialogue, ask probing questions in an effort to expose the values and beliefs, which frame and support the thoughts and statements of the participants in the inquiry. Basically, the Socratic method is used to help develop critical thinking skills, construct knowledge, and develop problem solving skills. It helps to move learners from the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy to the higher levels. It’s very much an active learning method.
The idea of discussion in itself is an active learning method that participants have to be participating or actively engaged in the learning event, the discussion in order to get benefit from it. As educators, we know the value of teaching others, the content that we have, helps to develop our own understanding of that material so by getting students to expound on the material, they will in turn learn the material better. By actively involving themselves they’re able to create that better understanding of the material.
There are some essential components to the Socratic method. These also were guided by that article, the Socratic method what it is and how to use it in the classroom. First of all, questions are at the heart of the Socratic method. Questions, help guide the discussion. Initially, questions may be focused on factual knowledge, the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, but what you then start doing is you start taking the answers, reframing them in follow-up questions to show relationships between those knowledge elements and thus, a deeper understanding.
You’re basically pulling out information from the learner of the student to have them think about this and how it relates, and what their understanding of that content is. You really want to elicit what students think about different contents, and what they mean from the individual who is providing the answers. That sits at the heart of it, that you’re using these questions to really find out what a student knows.
Going back to the classical Socratic method that it focused on moral education. According to that article, Socratic method, what it is and how to use it in the classroom, the Socratic method is used to examine values, principles, and beliefs of a student. The focus of the question is what the individual thinks about the topic at hand, and how they think about it in terms of their value set.
Another essential component is the fact that learning and comfort do not co-exist. True learning happens when the learner leaves their comfort zone, questions should cause the respondent to be uncomfortable but not in pain. You’re not trying to embarrass a student but you definitely want them to leave their comfort zone in terms of their belief system. You want to challenge them. You want them to be able to, I guess, explain themselves, have them rationalize why they believe a certain way, and not necessarily whether it’s right or wrong, but have them challenge themselves.
In a classroom where the Socratic method is used, cold calling is an acceptable strategy. It will help focus student attention to the ongoing discussions because they don’t know when they’re going to be called on. They have to be ready to answer at all times. When preparing students for the Socratic method, you should coach them into thinking about every question, and how they would answer that question because, in fact, they may be randomly chosen to answer that question. They need to take the time to answer each question in their mind and be ready, be prepared to be involved in that discussion.
The Socratic method is also really well-suited to address questions that do not have a definitive right answer. The objective of the question is that you’re putting out a hypothesis, and you are exploring possible solutions to come up with possible answers and working around that hypothesis. You’re using questions to get there. If you’re going to employ the Socratic method in your classroom, here’s some things that you definitely want to think about, some strategies that will help you.
The first is set conversational guidelines. Establish those rules of engagement. One, participants must actively contribute. They may not know the right answer, but they have to at least give an attempt. Being better prepared by reading the material ahead of time, giving them opportunities to think about it will help them be ready for the particular class. Overall, in terms of the conversation, you’re really looking at the overall concepts and the principles, and really trying to stay out of the weeds as much as possible. As an instructor, it’s your responsibility to help guide that discussion.
A way to do that is, another success tip, and that is to craft the questions ahead of time. You need to ensure that you’re prepared for the day’s lessons by crafting open-ended questions to be used throughout the class. The question should be probing in nature so it’s like peeling back the layers of an onion that you’re starting out maybe at a very factual level, and then you start peeling it apart to look at the relationships and look at the concepts from different advantage points.
Naturally, your follow-up questions are going to be maybe ad-libbed but you’re going to have prepared questions to make sure that you guide things as it’s moving forward because these questions really are just a tool to guide the discussion. Once the discussion is going, you can let the flow of the conversation dictate the direction of the discussion. Certainly, use follow-up questions, just like I said, peeling back the layers of an onion. You do this with the follow-up questions.
What you’re really trying to get is to this level of understanding of what the student understands, not necessarily having them recite factual information. The facts will be part of that. That’s that foundational knowledge that they’re going to provide, but you don’t want them just to memorize, and regurgitate what they memorize. You really want them to be able to explain how they understand this. That’s why you can continue with these follow-up questions to stretch it and really challenge a student, and you can quickly understand where they are just regurgitating what they read and when they start applying their own beliefs and values to the answers.
In order for this to be successful, students have to be prepared for the lesson. They have to give prior thought to the topic at hand. In my podcast episodes on getting students to read, I provided ideas to help prep for a Socratic discussion. Having that prior reading, or watching a video, or reading different articles, you can have them ready for the discussion. You may want to give these questions to the student ahead of time to help them think about the topic and their answers, especially if you’re just beginning.
If you’re just beginning this idea of a Socratic method in the classroom, you want to prime the pump. You want them to be somewhat ready when you start going in. Now, naturally, you have those follow-up questions that are going to help guide it. Especially with the students that are just new to college you may want to prime that pump a little bit.
Here’s one tip that I think is really important, is to be comfortable with silence. Silence is your friend. Silence allows students to put together their thoughts. Silence is uncomfortable. No one likes to be in a silent room where everybody’s staring at each other, but do not jump in to answer the questions because if you answer the questions, they will never answer you. Let silence work for you. It is uncomfortable. Somebody will jump up to fill the silence and that’s all you want. It may be kind of unusual or uncomfortable if you’re going for 30 seconds and nobody’s saying a word, but I can assure you that students will break before 30 seconds and somebody will try to answer the question. I did mention that the Socratic method, this idea of discussion is an active learning method, but you can use it in conjunction with other active learning methods.
For example, you may throw out a question and then you have your students work in small groups or in pairs before they share it with the rest of the class. The idea of pair and share, that is an active learning method and works very well with the Socratic method for discussions. I think it’s also important that you don’t know where this discussion is going so if you don’t know, it meant that you don’t know, right?
This is as much learning for you as it is for your students. The fact that you’re opening up, you’re being vulnerable, that you don’t know this a particular answer, you don’t know how to answer a question, put your students also more at ease to show them that you’re also a learner and that you’re willing to go out and learn. If you do this, the Socratic discussion method, you’re going to be learning as much as your students are going to be learning just in different ways.
As I noted, you’re going to be part of this discussion. Primarily, you’re going to be asking the questions, but the students may also start getting into asking questions and you’re going to be there to also answer questions. I would encourage you that the focus should be primarily on what the students are sharing and that you as an instructor are also part of the discussion but you should not dominate the discussion.
Your role is to continue the discussion with questions and occasionally summarize and clarify points, but really you try to stay out of it as much as possible. Additionally, set the right environment for these discussions. Create an environment that is conducive to interaction. The way normal classrooms are set up in rank and file, these are not great learning environments. I should talk really about this idea of learning environments, because most of our classrooms are not set up to be engaging learning environments.
If that was the case, then boardrooms would be set up in rank and file or our conference rooms at school, but they’re not. They’re set up entirely different. The reason they’re set up different is because they want to set them up for engagement. Well, don’t we want to do that in our classroom? Move the chairs around. Semi-circles work really well. If you have a conference room where you can sit on opposing sides of a table, that also works really well in this type of environment that you want to increase discussions.
Throughout the class while you’re asking these questions, also take notes so you can use them for review sessions. Part of it is you may want to use concept maps to help clarify what has been previously discussed. Make sure that you’re taking notes. Use ways that you can summarize the discussion using concept maps. I talked about concept maps in episode ITC 43 in length. I’ll put that in the show notes. Everything goes in the show notes. I put everything in the show notes. Periodically, through your class, take a moment to summarize the discussion up to that point. If you don’t have time to do that, definitely summarize the discussion at the end of the class. Those are some tips that will help move this idea of a Socratic discussion along.
Now, one other thing that I want to share is the Socratic discussion method is really well-suited for a face-to-face class, but you can also use it for an online class both asynchronous and synchronous. Doug Ward, who is a journalism professor, he provided some guidance that I’m going to share with you. In terms of an asynchronous class, this means that the discussion goes over a longer period of time. You may be discussing a topic over the period of a week. This is what I typically do and this is usually done on a threaded discussion board. Most learning management systems have a discussion board or a forum where you would pose a question to the entire class or you may start with just a few students and then open it up for additional responses.
When you are setting up your discussion, it’s important that you establish expectations ahead of time for how students are to respond and what their timeline is to respond. I typically give bonus points early in the week for discussions to make sure that I get the discussion up and going. Now, there’s other tools other than discussion boards that you can use, VoiceThread is one, Flipgrid is another. With these tools, you can use text, and video, and audio as part of the response. With these tools, I think they have certain limits on how much you can share so it helps to keep the responses brief, which you try to do anyways.
In a synchronous class, synchronous classes are really similar to just face-to-face classes but there’s a lot of synchronous tools to help you do this like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Collaborate. Those are all different tools that you can put into place to help us have a synchronous discussion so you would invite everybody in your class, in a virtual environment. Then I would say the Socratic method is very similar to a face-to-face class. You may want to, different ways to do it, is you could actually do this during your office hours and have one-on-one or small group discussions where you’re employing the Socratic method throughout the office hours.
Those are some thoughts on using the Socratic method. It’s very much discussion-based. It’s asking questions and following up on those questions with more questions, every once in a while, accenting it with a summarization, but launching into another question. You can focus on one student at a time and ask three or four questions to that student before moving onto a student or you can ask multiple students lots of different ways that you can do this, but it’s very much different than lecture. It’s basically 180 from a typical lecture.
I would encourage you to check it out. See if you can put it into place. I think it’s challenging, but take time. Craft out your questions ahead of time, decide how you want to approach it, and then just do it. That is a little more on the Socratic discussion methods. Before I let you go, here’s a quick plug for my book, Read to Succeed.
