A Message to Educators
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
published in The Stream, October 2007
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Hard as it may be to believe on some days, and with some people: there is a deeper, wiser, more thoughtful aspect to almost every human being.
Conventional conditions, in the classroom and outside it, don’t give this subtler aspect much chance of emerging and coming into play. Teachers are very rare, and very wonderful, who can engage this even for one of those special moments that can be brought to bear now and then.
You have heard of Socratic Method. You may even know how, using it, throughout history, those privileged to experience it consistently generated higher, more effective intellectual performance. Over 2400 years it has been the most tested, best-demonstrated teaching method there has been among all those which have yielded positive results.
Socratic Method centers on eliciting insights and perceptions and understanding. When one engages in it, one BECOMES more perceptive, thoughtful and understanding…and articulate. People who engage much in Socratic processing develop high-quality language and reading comprehension skills.
Modern forms of the method enable Socratic processing to be used with many students or participants simultaneously, even hundreds at a time if need be, and still give everyone there the intensive, perceptual and insight-building experience and engagement of a one-on-one Socratic drawing-forth. Modern forms of Socratic method can be used with everyone at a time: the method is no longer the exclusive prerogative of a privileged elite only. To see part of how to focus “buzz-grouping” so that everyone can be a Socrates to everyone else so that all benefit, see Dynamic Format.
You can start trying it out a little at a time, and proceed as you gain confidence and enjoy the results. You don’t have to launch into a different system all at once.
Classic forms of Socratic Method required some pretty high skills to administer, and a really good knowledge of the subject you were teaching. Modern Socratic Method, by contrast, is far easier to use than the methods you are using now. The modern form, while your students “buzz” in focus on your question, challenge, topic, or key point in your lesson, allows you to regroup your forces from one topic and educational effort to the next. It enables you to observe and get to know your students in action. You are enabled to perceive directly what your students truly understand – and what they don’t understand – so you can go in and repair their cognitive and curriculum infrastructure. And, as their understandings do connect up with what you want of them, you will be blown away by the genius-level perceptions and insights even your unlikeliest-seeming students or participants will be showing you.
Meanwhile, consider this: Many of the more conventional classroom teaching methods you have experienced turn out to have little to do with human learning. Human learning is based in context, just as significance in physical reality is based upon relationships. How much change results in other things from a change in the one thing? That secondary change happens only through relationships. Any one thing is precisely as significant as it has relationships. Can you think of a single significant thing whose meaning does not obtain through its relationships? Human thinking and learning derives from the way the world works, and depends upon a context of meaningful relationships. Yet, most of the methods you have experienced were “validated” by slight differences in rates of memorization of unrelated nonsense syllables, and have nothing to do with human learning!
Meanwhile, in this century, we have come to understand what it is IN Socratic Method which leads to its extraordinarily powerful positive results. That has let us in Project Renaissance design new forms of it which are infinitely easier to use, and even more effective – and which can be used with even the largest groups of people in overcrowded classrooms, while getting everyone thoroughly and intensely involved with the key points of your lesson!
To Place a Major Resource Directly Into Your Hands
Here is a link, for free, containing key information about modern Socratic Method and about how to use it in your classroom.
Solving Diversity in the Classroom
Another key issue: Modern Socratic Method is a major solution to the problem of diversity in classrooms. No teacher can teach didactically to all her or his students, some of whom are auditory, some visual, some kinesthetic learners, some with high musical intelligence, some with high social intelligence, all with varying levels of formal intelligence and educational background. That means that some of the students necessarily fall outside the window through which the teacher teaches, their needs aren’t met, and their consequent restlessness erodes even the teaching going on well within the window.
But in response to proper Socratic challenge, every student draws upon His/her own unique strengths, stimulating and reinforcing these and beginning to build around them. Every student can be totally involved, optimally challenged, self-igniting, even crowded into the largest lecture-sections – while the TEACHER has an unbelievably easier time of it, gets to observe and know many of his or her students in action, and is freed up from most of the effort and the paperwork ordinarily used to herd along a reluctant band of cats.
For further details on this apparent solution to a very major problem, please see the article on South African education. While that paper was made up for schools in South Africa, it turns out its recommendations largely apply to key problems in most schools.