The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling | Hacker News Reader

The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling

garlikov.com

67 pointsgraderjs5 comments

A real benefit of the Socratic method is that those magical moments of insight are all yours. You discover a new insight yourself, guided along the way.

It's more fun and exposes any weaknesses. It's easy for the student to say they know something when they actually don't. Drawing links themselves exposes everything. Then a quick detour can fix the foundation before continuing.

It's also very effective for large classes. You are forced to pay attention, because the teacher could call on you at any time.

My real problem with the Socratic method is that it only works when your recipient is generally in a relaxed environment which promotes an inquisitive, low-stakes interaction, as opposed to being under stress or pressure to understand.

It fails spectacularly when by the 3rd "What's a different way to write 'Ten'" the student starts huffing and puffing in frustration for you to move on and stop wasting their time with silly questions, (blanking out mentally if you do continue with the questions anyway), only for them to give up for 'not getting it' once you get to the 'real' stuff.

In other words, they feel too pressed with time to allow themselves to be patient and learn all the relevant material, but they're too frustrated from not being able to piece things together once they've forced themselves to skip all the important pieces out of perceived pragmatism.

It's a frustrating exercise for both teacher and learner.

So sometimes the best thing to do is match the student's needs and style, and swallow the fact that you need to do things backwards for a bit, until they manage to get to the desired point their way, and that this is going to take a while.

Ugh, this reminds me of the time my wife was taking programming classes and occasionally would come to me for help.

The only way it felt "right" for me to help her was to guide her into arriving at the solution herself.

So I would start asking questions to gauge where she was at and what she was doing next, then keep nudging her with ever more questions such as "what would you expect to happen if you do that" or "if your program is a series of steps and you want to arrive at step Y, what's the step X that comes before Y?"

It was hopeless. After just a few minutes both of us would get frustrated and give up. She'd often say she just wanted me to tell her what to do. I felt defeated and frankly narrow-minded for expecting her to think exactly like I do.

Exactly my experience too xD

Alternate take: The Socratic method does not work particularly well. Socrates was not able to convince his jurors of his innocence. And after he had pled for sentence, more jurors voted to have Socrates put to death than had voted to find him guilty in the first place. Think about that. Even some of the jurors who thought Socrates was innocent decided to put him to death anyway.

TLDR; Socratic method is not as useful as you might assume.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com