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Socratic method to teaching by asking

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Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#91

Post by btbuildem »

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.

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#92

Post by jventura »

kaycebasques wrote: post #90
jventura wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 stud…

> 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 "…

> 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

I agree with you as my own approach is also more towards the step-by-step.

And you are right that I also have the luxury of my presence being helpful for when the students get stuck, although I try to make my tutorials so that they do not need much of my help. Also, some students cannot go to my classes as they work, and this approach allows them to do the lab assignments at home without much help from me.

Regarding the broken feedback loop, one possible alternative for web-based instruction is something that requires the user to insert solutions somewhere and have feedback on it. There's a SaaS that allows you to do programming assignments and you must submit it and run it in their servers. Perhaps you could explore something like that, although with JS you could run it in the browser directly?

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#93

Post by CGamesPlay »

keithnz wrote: post #59
noahdesu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the issue isn't the questions themselves, it's the interaction that results. Student: "why is my Java application crashing", "That's a stack trace. Does it say anything useful?", Student: "No I don't see anything.", It looks like we aren't seeing the whole trace. Have you scrolled up?" etc... the more this goes on, the more it feels quite awkward even if the result is positive. Maybe I'm bias having been…

I'd love to see an alt site called SocraticOverflow, where people answer everyones programming questions like this :) I know a lot of the time people on stackoverflow only have a problem because they haven't asked themselves the right question. Of course, there's still a lot where it's just a gap in knowledge that needs filling in.

This is interesting. Let's think it through.

For the teachers and students, it would need to be realtime. A teacher couldn't write out a string of follow-up questions in advance and hope the reader answers them in exactly the way you intend.

For the observers, you need them to be engaged with the content as well. I am imaging a sort of dialog tree would be useful here, where a new reader could add an alternative answer to a given question which would then be a candidate for other teachers to add follow-up questions. How would [1] look like if it were resolved using the Socratic method?

For programming in particular, building out an interface to encourage experimentation would be critical. Take for example [2], a recent question from StackOverflow. The questions I would ask to lead the student to the answer are: - What is the actual difference between iPhone and desktop for this code? - What nodes are being selected by the call to `$`? - What makes you confident that the call to `$` is even happening? - etc. The student's ability to even answer these follow-up questions will make the socratic method painful when conducted through a text-primary medium.

This raises another point that teachers need to already know the solution, or at the least have much better guesses than the students (and those guesses need to be generally correct for the site to provide value). This greatly limits the number of people who would be capable of being teachers on the site.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10059594/a-simple-explan...

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46570102/jquery-on-not-w...

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#94

Post by ihaveajob »

keithnz wrote: post #60
ihaveajob wrote: post #7

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 happe…

well, to be fair, the people of Athens god a tad annoyed with Socrates resulting in him being put to death.

You made me chuckle. Perhaps this should be a cautionary tale :)

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#95

Post by jancsika »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #80
jancsika wrote: post #29

> 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 be…

> 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

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#96

Post by almostarockstar »

nanny wrote: post #35
almostarockstar wrote: post #19

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.

Reader View in Firefox. Chrome has browser extensions for this.

Thanks

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#97

Post by almostarockstar »

lgas wrote: post #23
almostarockstar wrote: post #19

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.

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.

Will check them out. Thanks.

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#98

Post by adrianratnapala »

jancsika wrote: post #95
adrianratnapala wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

> 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…

Perhaps I am putting too much emphasis on Euthyphro, which does end at an impasse.

Or perhaps you are putting too much emphasis on things like The Republic, which I think everyone agrees is Plato expounding his own doctrine, without any real pretense at paraphrasing real events. We also don't have much evidence for the historicity of _Euthyphro_, but there is a good reason to think real events went more like it.

Socrates did not teach mathematics or other things where there is (sometimes) a single obviously right answer. A real-world Socrates would constantly be blindsided by valid but unexpected points made by his interloculators. Such nondeterminism is great for genuine dialogue, but not for maintaining an aura dialectic invincibility. But if he takes a deconstructionst troll strategy, he can always come out looking clever while honestly repeating that he himself knows nothing.

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#99

Post by jancsika »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #98
jancsika wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Perhaps I am putting too much emphasis on Euthyphro , which does end at an impasse. Or perhaps you are putting too much emphasis on things like The Republic , which I think everyone agrees is Plato expounding his own doctrine, without any real pretense at paraphrasing real events. We also don't have much evidence for the historicity of _Euthyphro_, but there is a good reason to think real events went more like it. So…

> Such nondeterminism is great for genuine dialogue, but not for maintaining an aura dialectic invincibility.

We were talking about the character, not the person the character was based on. That character is clearly not interrupting a topic to do a random walk through incisive questioning. His questions aren't low-effort questions. So he isn't a troll in any meaningful sense of the word.

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#100

Post by ouid »

quadrangle wrote: post #87
ouid wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 approp…

Socratic doesn't mean depth first.
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