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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.

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Further issues and challenges

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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

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Introducing modern Socratic Method into the schools

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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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Comments to
Win Wenger


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