The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling

The Socratic method as practiced by Socrates and described by Plato was used with a handful of interlocutors at most and often with only one. The responses were individual not collective. That's what bothers me about the article. It's about instructing a class, a way of going through motions, not about teaching any individual. What about the third grader who doesn't know Roman numerals? What about the one who can't read "ten"? What about the one who has only eaten…

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 creatures raise their young…

One day after a visit to the Computer History Museum, my SO and I got to see the live demo of the analytical engine they have there. We watched the gears turning and stopping to add up numbers, saw the complex mechanisms to handle carrying digits, and she asked me how this would work if it was binary and I just said "much more simply". Then she admitted that, even though she has been working as a developer and manager…

There is one professor at my course that used the socratic method. Those are some of the best lectures I've been to. A lot of professors think they're using the Socratic method, but their problem is they don't have the patience to wait for an answer. Posing questions rhetorically doesn't work, especially once the people you are teaching catch on and stop trying to come up with an answer. I've tried doing the socratic method when tutoring people - it's…