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/
Socratic method to teaching by asking
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Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking
#72There’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…
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-Busine...
Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 soc…
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.
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.
Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking
#74It'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…
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
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
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 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.
Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking
#75I'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.
Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking
#76Maybe 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.…
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Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking
#77It'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…
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.
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.
Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking
#78It'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…
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.
Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 soc…
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.
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.
Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking
#80> 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 o…
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?