Socratic method to teaching by asking • Hacker News Board

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#41

Post by qznc » Tue, Oct 03, 2017, 6:48 PM UTC

ddebernardy wrote: post #32

ismail wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how would one go about learning this effectively?

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…

There is a variation:

- Why?

- [Explanation] Why did you want to know?

- You are not allowed to ask questions. [Asks different question]

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#42

Post by viraj_shah » Tue, Oct 03, 2017, 6:49 PM UTC

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

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#43

Post by smogcutter » Tue, Oct 03, 2017, 6:54 PM UTC

coffeemug wrote: post #28

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.…

Note that this problem is not unrelated to Socrates getting executed. The guy made a lot of enemies.

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#44

Post by kaycebasques » Tue, Oct 03, 2017, 6:55 PM UTC

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/java...

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#45

Post by bo1024 » Tue, Oct 03, 2017, 6:58 PM UTC

quadrangle wrote: post #39

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…

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.

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#46

Post by twblalock » Tue, Oct 03, 2017, 7:18 PM UTC

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.

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#47

Post by smogcutter » Tue, Oct 03, 2017, 7:27 PM UTC

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.

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#48

Post by jventura » Tue, Oct 03, 2017, 7:32 PM UTC

kaycebasques wrote: post #44

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 c…

> 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.

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#49

Post by adrianratnapala » Tue, Oct 03, 2017, 7:41 PM UTC

quadrangle wrote: post #39

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…

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.

Re: Socratic method to teaching by asking

#50

Post by joshuaheard » Tue, Oct 03, 2017, 7:47 PM UTC

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.