South African Education – Win Wenger Archives

A Partial Solution to Part of Its Greatest Problem

Photo courtesy of Elan Sun Star

The following article was written in and for South Africa, but much of it also applies to schools in other developing regions of the world.

The greatest problem of South African schools and classrooms, most levels and places, is the great variety among their students. There is tremendous commitment to bring all the benefits of education to the greatest number and variety of people, but it has proven difficult to do so and simultaneously to sustain the highest academic standards.

The problem seems parallel to one this writer has observed in the United States. In American education there has been some effort made to respond to the recognition of variety in its students, involving multiple intelligences (per Howard Gardner) and various preferred learning styles.

Teachers are now urged to teach the same lesson, point by point, to each of the main preferred learning styles and to each of the main multiple intelligences. So far, this task has proven to be beyond the ability or disposition of American teachers to perform.

Despite considerable bodies of well-accepted and authoritative evidence concerning such variations among students, the actual practice has spread very little and seems unlikely even to remain where it is now in use.

Thus, standard classroom teaching, both in the States and elsewhere, aims at only a narrow window of convenient, accepted abilities and behaviors. Students outside that window, no matter how many there may be, are deprived of the opportunity to develop their potentials or to gain a meaningful education.

Pointing toward part of a solution

Socratic Method draws directly forth from each student. Moreover, each student tends to come from his or her own strengths, preferred cognitive and learning style, and best intelligence, and thence to build effectively around these.

With modern forms of Socratic Method, which can be used with even large numbers of students at a time, all or nearly all students can develop instead of only those who are within focus of the standard teaching window.

Thus we see use of (modern forms of) Socratic Method as a basis toward solving the difficulty posed by the great variety among students, cited widely as the greatest problem of South African schools and classrooms, most levels and places.

Relevant aspects of Socratic Method

For thirty-some years, Project Renaissance has been researching Socratic Method, analyzing its dynamics, determining the main reason why its use so consistently has resulted in genius-level intellectual performance through 2400 years of history, and devising modern forms of the Method which have all of its strengths and few or none of its weaknesses.

Project Renaissance, also involved in researching methods of creativity and of creative problem-solving, has found that every form of creativity technique, except for the “incubation” process, is at least mildly Socratic. This is because “the active ingredient” in Socratic Method is that persons being “educated” or drawn out have to examine their own first-hand awarenesses and to struggle to make responses based upon what they discover there. Persons doing brainstorming, Osborn-Parnes sequences, or other procedures based upon programs current in professional creativity practice, also examine their first-hand awarenesses, searching for better and further responses to the situation laid before them.

Responding in some specific or concrete way to one’s own first-hand awareness reinforces not only that particular awareness but the behavior, the trait, of being aware. Reinforcement powerfully shapes future behavior. This main law of Psychology, after nearly two centuries of sustained scientific study and research, is the Law of Effect. No organism, now or at any time in history or prehistory, survives except by discovering what works and adapting accordingly. Not only every human being, but every living thing, “obeys” that natural law, much of which can be summed up in the statement that “you get more of what you reinforce.”

Socratic Method as part of the proposed solution

It is only in didactic teaching that one really needs to meet the variety of needs in the classroom by teaching to visual intelligence, auditory intelligence, emotional intelligence, motor intelligence, social intelligence, and various of the other types, cognitive styles and sensory modalities.

If one teaches Socratically, the students perforce make response naturally from their own strengths (reinforcing thereby those strengths), and build upon them. The organic nature of their growth indicates that if Socratic practice is sustained, eventually the students also associate and bring into use those areas in which they had been weak, strengthening those as well, though cultural expectations often interfere with that stage of development.

This writer now believes that a similar solution may apply to the problem of variety among students in the classroom and in the educational system. The problem: Even highly gifted teachers have great difficulty teaching directly to all the different students, types of students, levels of education, levels of commitment, and levels of cooperative behavior now represented in many classrooms.

Some students are not reached; the effort to reach more too often means that the main track of education suffers and the highest standards of outcome are not met. The great commitment South Africa has made to full educational opportunity for all is badly compromised when passing tenth grade or getting a given college degree no longer means quite what had once been promised for and associated with that level of proficiency.

Application of Socratic Method

Teachers and schools and school systems do not have to plunge entirely into a formal different system of methods, nor to do so overnight. The Method can be tried on piecemeal. As teachers find their results improving and their work and efforts finding much easier going, they can try on additional bits.

As their comfort levels and confidence rise, they can readily become full masters of Socratic practice. For some gentle examples of this aspect, please examine the article on Dynamic Format. This article also answers the next major question:

How can one effectively use Socratic Method not with one student at a time but with dozens or even hundreds at one time?

Traditional versions of Socratic Method could be used effectively with only 1 or 2 students at a time. In larger classrooms, while the teacher was drawing out one or two students, the other fifty-eight would get restless. So how can one possibly use Socratic Method in modern situations?

Dynamic Format shows how one can not only use the method to provide a fully Socratic and intense learning experience for any number of students at a time up into the hundreds, but to establish and maintain groundrules which have everyone in that classroom fully engaged with the subject being taught, fully and continuously on task until the given task is accomplished.

Morale rises as students discover that they are actually accomplishing and assimilating high success levels of intellectual, artistic and/or social content.

Also on this website is a monthly Winsights column of articles, some of which incorporate elements of modern Socratic Method. Please examine articles Nos. 33, 55, 72, and 52 to discover a few of the many applications.

There are also hundreds of creativity methods in professional use around the world today, some of which work extraordinarily well. Each of these can be turned into another specific, Socratic-like technique for improving the teaching and learning of curriculum content.

What if, from as early in the school program as possible, teachers, parents and volunteers were trained and supported in Socratically drawing out every student in depth, at length, in detail, on their subtlest and deepest awarenesses in context of each topic of study?

What if, from as early in the school program as possible, all students were trained and supported in Socratically drawing out their fellows — and themselves — in depth, in detail, at length on their subtlest and deepest awarenesses in context of each topic of study?

Characteristic gains

Throughout history, use of even the older forms of Socratic Method consistently yielded such seemingly miraculous gains that practitioners became convinced of the idea that all information and understanding are somehow already inside each student, needing only to be “drawn out.” So consistent were these high results that “education” itself was named after the concept.

We, ourselves, do not have to believe that all information and understanding are already within each student. Psychology has demonstrated, however, that a great amount of such actually is within each of us, far more than is ever conventionally at our conscious disposal — including the contents of all those lessons which appeared to be falling on deaf ears!

Shift the focus, from stuffing information didactically into students, to drawing it up from within them. The dynamic then changes most remarkably, and far more of this once “lost” information becomes available and engaged.

Aside from the formal academic gains to be made in understanding and in intellectual mastery of each subject taught via this method, student language skills and even reading comprehension skills also and rapidly become surprisingly proficient. Instead of passivity, students gain immense active experience in thoughtful, perceptive, deliberative use of language.

This gain, in turn, can feed into further gains in other subjects, including even those not being Socratically taught. This gain can be perhaps best understood in terms of the findings by noted researchers that learning and growth result mainly, not from stimulus, not from genes, not even from nutrition, though those things all help, but from feedback on one’s own activities.

Support for the thesis that learning and growth are mainly via feedback upon one’s own activities

1890 — John Dewey, one of many educators and philosophers who advanced the theory that one should “learn by doing.”
1900 — Maria Montessori, Spontaneous Activity in Education, as applied to learning basic skills from math via Cuisinaire Rods to such basics as shining shoes without messing.
1919 — Santiago Ramon y Cajal, father of neurology, publisher and main author of Histologie of the Brain, showed that individual brain cells, brain circuits, and the overall brain itself physically grow and develop mainly from sensory feedback derived from one’s own activities.
1960 — Omar Khayyam Moore, sociologist at University of Pittsburgh and inventor of the Edison “Talking Typewriter” for teaching two-year-olds to read, write and type, used Montessori’s principles of letting the environment do the teaching.
1990+ — current leading neurologist, Marion Diamond, in her lab studies re-demonstrated Cajal’s key principle above. Rats maintained in a stimulating environment but not part of it, having to look over the shoulders of the other rats, so to speak, had brains and behaviors fully as shriveled as those of the rats raised in deprived environments.
- Finding: One has to play directly with the toys, oneself, for one’s brain and behavior to gain their benefits.
- More general finding: Not only learning but raw sheer physical brain growth and development proceed best as feedback upon one’s own activities — a corollary of the Law of Effect.

By extension, students digging in their own first-hand awareness and expressing what they discover there, thereby reinforce not only that particular awareness but their awareness generally.

They also improve their ability to function — even their physical brain grows and develops in response to their externalizing their awarenesses, especially their deeper and subtler awarenesses which seldom make it to consciousness in conventional situations.

Bottom line is that standards of academic achievement can fully rebound and climb much higher than ever before, while educational opportunity is fully extended to everyone.

Recommendation

For most subject matter, a mixture of two-thirds Socratic to one-third didactic is envisaged as optimal.

The didactic is used mainly to set the provisions for an interactive learning session, including the “house rules,” ensuring that students stay on the topic, remain focused in what they are doing, and remain on task.

Didactic, with brief pointed lectures, can set the conceptual context within which the students are to interactively process and arrive at answer or resolution of the matter placed before them.

Further issues and challenges

Infusing Socratic Method into South Africa’s local schools, or into some schools elsewhere, faces these four challenges, among others:

Some local groups and cultures are highly loquacious. The challenge will be to keep their students, as well as others, focused on task while they are interacting in buzz-groups and teams.
It will also be a challenge to maintain dedicated, disciplined studies actually relating to and carrying out the curriculum, while rendering these meaningful also to students of various backgrounds and cultures.
A considerable challenge is the sheer range and extent of the great variety in the classroom which Project Renaissance’s modern forms of Socratic Method are meant to serve, and which this brief is attempting to address. A very firm adherence to some appropriate structure, such as Dynamic Format, is required to keep all students focused in a learning mode. Giving each varied individual an optimal and equal opportunity to learn will be a challenge even with Socratic Method well in place, but not nearly so difficult a challenge as it is now for didactic teaching into one Procrustean mold.
A huge majority of the schools are rural, and literally dirt poor.

Regarding Challenge #1: Not only do the group control methods of Dynamic Format seem adequate and appropriate for this level of control and group direction, but the same principles can be reinforced by further and similar such house rules and agreements. Most of the successful creativity programs have some comparable group-directing practices.

Regarding Challenge #2: Once the other challenges are resolved by adapting modern Socratic Method, this curriculum issue becomes the most serious remaining challenge. Today there are some dedicated students and some dedicated teachers, but it is hard for these to find each other to make good things happen — and under classroom conditions where those good things can happen. Replacing much of the didactic teaching with Socratic Method frees up considerable teacher time, attention and energy, making observation of each student possible and making planning possible. As use of Socratic Method makes the possibility of good educational outcomes more real to both students and faculty, all begin to see and relate to the value of school as a way to express and develop, instead of suppress, the rich variety of cultures present among the students.

Regarding Challenge #3: Not only the above briefing but still more of the case is offered in the Socratic articles referenced at the end of this article. These further underscore the facts that a draw-forth method will engage widely different students in their respective strengths, where didactic method unnecessarily forces many students to operate from their weaknesses and to perform poorly thereby. All students on their own relate to the buzz-group topic in their own way, learn through and contribute effectively with their own sensory and mental or cognitive references and culture. They find thereby the most meaning and most significant meaning for themselves, and they develop more effective foundations upon which they can go on building further understandings.

Show me any teacher who can teach to the various Gardnerian “multiple intelligences” plus to the various preferred learning styles plus the various educational levels, all at once in the classroom or even in a sequence! None can do all that; few can do much of that; few would if they could.

So long as the method is didactic, many of the various students are not and cannot be educationally served. Many, indeed, are literally forced to fail and to never actualize their potential high contributions to society and culture and to the economy.

Socratic Method — especially with everyone wielding it on each other and on themselves, not just the teacher throwing questions — can be made to draw virtually everyone, whatever the variety, usefully into the context of the topic of study and, by engaging everyone in focus, to develop everyone.

With a Socratic program one can build upon, and build with, individual and cultural differences instead of having to dismiss these differences as “noise” and an encumbrance. Use modern Socratic Method instead to engage the rich diversity of cultural backgrounds and traditions, especially in mutual problem-solving and especially in the immigrant communities.

Engage those cultural foundations instead of putting them aside, and you will find that students’ tools for understanding the contents of the westernized school curriculum are amazingly already in place. Let a rich, level-by-level continuity of basic understandings extending all the way back to the most fundamental sensori-motor concepts (see Jean Piaget) in each student extend from the womb to current time.

Currently schools have to lop off most of each child from another culture, in order to force-fit what remains of that child into the standard curriculum. Individual teachers and schools may, by extraordinary effort, identify and relate a little content to a few specific various cultural elements, but in no way can even the best of them get around to encompassing and engaging much of the rich resources which are really there.

Anyone familiar with cognitive psychology knows that it is impossible to overstate the importance of a continuous chain of concepts through which further concepts are understood.

With Socratic drawing-out, the students do that work for you, and are engaged — engaged and developing with sound understanding, not just rote memorizing, not just going through other people’s motions until their own classroom-accumulated rootless experiences finally begin to drift into some sort of recognizable pattern.

What if all the children of this land had all of their understandings and powers of understanding online as they developed?

Regarding Challenge #4: In poor rural schools no less than elsewhere, the same principles apply. Educationally they may be needed there even more than elsewhere. A school which cannot afford chalk for its chipped and weathered chalkboards can nonetheless “afford” focused, guided Socratic dialog with and between its students. The rural schools could be South Africa’s seedbeds of genius, rather than a sea of difficulties to struggle through as best one can. They could be key to South Africa’s engaging productively its incredible wealth of diverse human contexts, and they could be rich foundations for future edifices of great progress economically, socially, culturally, and in human terms.

Introducing modern Socratic Method into the schools

We would like for some of the nation’s leading educators and educational researchers to directly experience a demonstration of current modern methods of Socratic process. This demonstration experience would enable them to arrive at an informed decision as to whether to proceed further in introducing and applying Socratic Method to South African schools, and to develop an optimal strategy for such an introduction.
We also suggest a pilot project, working through supervised and supported local teachers, as part of a general research process to optimally adapt such methods to varying local cultural and socio-economic conditions.
The pilot project’s results would be reported back to some authoritative body established from the original body of leading educators who had directly experienced the Method, to make plans and recommendations as appropriate to South African schools and school systems at various academic levels.

Respectfully submitted by
Win Wenger, Ph.D.
President, Project Renaissance
October 2, 2004

References

The author is preparing a book on Socratic Method. In the meantime, some basic aspects of modern Socratic Method are treated here in this website, in the following articles:

The group-control process, Dynamic Format, enables every member of even the largest classrooms and groups to fully experience Socratic effects in depth and at length.
The Mutual Lives article details an easy method for teaching practice of Socratic Method to teachers. This method is further described in Mutual Listening.
The Feed-the-Loop article contains some further concepts and understandings about why Socratic Method is so astoundingly effective.
Final Exams describes a remarkable Socratic technique for end-of-term review of a course before final tests.
Windtunnel and Effective Problem-Solving detail how the Windtunnel method can readily be turned into a profoundly accelerative Socratic learning technique, rapidly and profusely drawing up into consciousness nearly everything that students already know or understand about a topic, even when they think they know nothing about it.
Freenoting is the pen-and-paper counterpart of Windtunnel and can even more readily be used to profoundly improve and accelerate learning, and also the effective study of texts.
The Socratic Continuum provides a broad overview of several different types of modern Socratic Method, ranged along a continuum.
Ask Better Questions helps toward developing the art and science of asking the most effective questions for Socratic purposes.

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