FREE ESSAY ON SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY

SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy of Education
Learning is a complex process aquired through a variety of experiences. Cooperation
between a teacher and student facilitates the greatest growth in each student's
intellectual, social, emotional, and physical development. Cirriculum must be relevant to
the needs of individuals while enhancing both respect and communication within a
multicultural society. A supportive enviroment allows student's to develop a positive
attitude towards learning for life. Students do not get bored or lose concentration if
they are actively participating. If lesson plans permit, students will participate
actively in unison or one after another.
The Socratic method allows students to learn for themselves. As the educator, you produce
questions to the class that allow them to think and work together which also allows them
to learn together. For instance, without lecturing to the class, a lesson could be taught
in a health education by asking questions about their reading assignment. "What are the
benefits of not smoking?" In response, the class works in unison to piece together the
answers. This improves social skills, which stated before, will improve violence and
behavior issues. 
The chief benefits of this method are that it excites students' curiosity and arouses
their thinking, rather than stifling it. It also makes teaching more interesting, because
most of the time, you learn more from the students -- or by what they make you think of
-- than what you knew going into the class. Each group of students is just enough
different, that it makes it stimulating. It is a very efficient teaching method, because
the first time through tends to cover the topic very thoroughly, in terms of their
understanding it. It is more efficient for their learning then lecturing to them is,
though, of course, a teacher can lecture in less time. 
Finally, two of the interesting, perhaps side, benefits of using the Socratic method are
that it gives the students a chance to experience the attendant joy and excitement of
discovering (often complex) ideas on their own. And it gives teachers a chance to learn
how much more inventive and bright a great many more students are than usually appear to
be when they are primarily passive. 
Students do not get bored or lose concentration if they are actively participating.
Almost all of these children participated the whole time; often calling out in unison or
one after another. If necessary, I could have asked if anyone thought some answer might
be wrong, or if anyone agreed with a particular answer. You get extra mileage out of a
given question that way. I did not have to do that here. Their answers were almost all
immediate and very good. If necessary, you can also call on particular students; if they
don't know, other students will bail them out. Calling on someone in a non-threatening
way tends to activate others who might otherwise remain silent. That was not a problem
with these kids. Remember, this was not a gifted class. It was a normal suburban third
grade of whom two teachers had said only a few students would be able to understand the
ideas. 
The chief benefits of this method are that it excites students' curiosity and arouses
their thinking, rather than stifling it. It also makes teaching more interesting, because
most of the time, you learn more from the students -- or by what they make you think of
-- than what you knew going into the class. Each group of students is just enough
different, that it makes it stimulating. It is a very efficient teaching method, because
the first time through tends to cover the topic very thoroughly, in terms of their
understanding it. It is more efficient for their learning then lecturing to them is,
though, of course, a teacher can lecture in less time. 
It gives constant feed-back and thus allows monitoring of the students' understanding as
you go. So you know what problems and misunderstandings or lack of understandings you
need to address as you are presenting the material. You do not need to wait to give a
quiz or exam; the whole thing is one big quiz as you go, though a quiz whose point is
teaching, not grading. Though, to repeat, this is teaching by stimulating students'
thinking in certain focused areas, in order to draw ideas out of them; it is not teaching
by pushing ideas into students that they may or may not be able to absorb or assimilate.
Further, by quizzing and monitoring their understanding as you go along, you have the
time and opportunity to correct misunderstandings or someone's being lost at the
immediate time, not at the end of six weeks when it is usually too late to try to go back
over the material. And in some cases their ideas will jump ahead to new material so that
you can meaningfully talk about some of it out of your own order, but in an order
relevant to them. Or you can tell them you will get to exactly that in a little while,
and will answer their question then. Or suggest they might want to think about it between
now and then to see whether they can figure it out for themselves first. There are all
kinds of options, but at least you know the material is live for them, which it is not
always when you are lecturing or just telling them things or they are passively and
dutifully reading or doing worksheets or listening without thinking. 
These are the four critical points about the questions: 1) they must be interesting or
intriguing to the students; they must lead by 2) incremental and 3) logical steps (from
the students' prior knowledge or understanding) in order to be readily answered and, at
some point, seen to be evidence toward a conclusion, not just individual, isolated
points; and 4) they must be designed to get the student to see particular points. You are
essentially trying to get students to use their own logic and therefore see, by their own
reflections on your questions, either the good new ideas or the obviously erroneous ideas
that are the consequences of their established ideas, knowledge, or beliefs. Therefore
you have to know or to be able to find out what the students' ideas and beliefs are. You
cannot ask just any question or start just anywhere. 
It is crucial to understand the difference between logically leading questions and
psychologically leading questions. Logically leading questions require understanding of
the concepts and principles involved in order to be answered correctly; psychologically
leading questions can be answered by students' keying in on clues other than the logic of
the content. 
For the Socratic method to work as a teaching tool and not just as a magic trick to get
kids to give right answers with no real understanding, it is crucial that the important
questions in the sequence must be logically leading rather than psychologically leading.
There is no magic formula for doing this, but one of the tests for determining whether
you have likely done it is to try to see whether leaving out some key steps still allows
people to give correct answers to things they are not likely to really understand.
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 leads me to believe that answering most of these questions
correctly, requires understandingof the topic rather than picking up some external sorts
of clues in order to just guess correctly. Plus, generally when one uses the Socratic
method, it tends to become pretty clear when people get lost and are either mistaken or
just guessing. Their demeanor tends to change when they are guessing, and they answer
with a questioning tone in their voice. Further, when they are logically understanding as
they go, they tend to say out loud insights they have or reasons they have for their
answers. When they are just guessing, they tend to just give short answers with almost no
comment or enthusiasm. They don't tend to want to sustain the activity. 
Finally, two of the interesting, perhaps side, benefits of using the Socratic method are
that it gives the students a chance to experience the attendant joy and excitement of
discovering (often complex) ideas on their own. And it gives teachers a chance to learn
how much more inventive and bright a great many more students are than usually appear to
be when they are primarily passive. 
This was to be the Socratic method in what I consider its purest form, where questions
(and only questions) are used to arouse curiosity and at the same time serve as a
logical, incremental, step-wise guide that enables students to figure out about a complex
topic or issue with their own thinking and insights. In a less pure form, which is
normally the way it occurs, students tend to get stuck at some point and need a teacher's
explanation of some aspect, or the teacher gets stuck and cannot figure out a question
that will get the kind of answer or point desired, or it just becomes more efficient to
tell what you want to get across. If telling does occur, hopefully by that time, the
students have been aroused by the questions to a state of curious receptivity to absorb
an explanation that might otherwise have been meaningless to them. Many of the questions
are decided before the class; but depending on what answers are given, some questions
have to be thought up extemporaneously.