“The soul, because it is immortal and has been born many times and has seen everything … it has learned everything that is … so that when a man calls up a single piece of knowledge – he has learned it, in ordinary language – he is not the more reason why he should not learn all the rest… for seeking and learning are really nothing else than remembering.”
— “Meno,” Collected Dialogues of Plato, Bollingen Series
The Socratic method is personal and usually involves small group discussion. Because it is interactive, it takes time: time spent listening to ideas and formulating and asking questions that should lead students to think and rethink their underlying assumptions, the importance and implications of those ideas, and whether others should be considered ideas. Answers to questions become the focus of new questions, a process that continues until the group reaches clarity and consensus. The process is not unlike the preparation, review, response and revision of a scientific manuscript.
The goal of the Socratic method is to remove illogical, inconsistent, irrelevant and unsupported claims and ideas, thereby revealing the truth. People who hold illogical or empirically unsupported beliefs may find Socratic discourse uncomfortable. Some find the Socratic approach antagonistic and undesirable, especially for students who already feel uncomfortable within the academic community. When we asked the students, “Why was Socrates annoying?” many said he was arrogant, sure he knew the answers to the questions he asked, and unwilling to accept alternatives. Some have said that Socratic questioning leads to competitive and potentially awkward situations—a form of struggle to determine who belongs in the class and who doesn’t.
According to published research, children begin to notice and care about the audience’s reaction as early as age six. Children may be hesitant to ask questions for fear of being judged or looking stupid. The Socratic approach can make a student who already has concerns about their place in a class or discipline feel like an impostor, and such feelings are a major reason why students drop out of degree programs and careers.
As I was leaving the classroom recently, I overheard one of my students complaining that I always answered his questions with another question. “I hate this. I just want to know the answer.” What I Thought Was Good Teaching Practice Disturbed My Student The Socratic method is over 2,000 years old, but does it have a place in today’s science classrooms?
However, in our experience, working scientists often come up with silly ideas and ask questions (sometimes over beer and popcorn) to clarify their understanding. We’d rather clear up the confusion from the get-go than build projects (or answer test questions) based on false or irrelevant assumptions. Building trust to test ideas in public and understanding what determines whether they work is critical to the scientific thought process.
Can the Socratic approach be used in a way that minimizes its potential negative aspects, helps students arrive at mechanistic explanations, and reflects how scientists actually talk to each other? Can it boost students’ confidence and help them see themselves as part of a process that identifies relevant principles and resolves uncertainties? Can it be used to transform education into a creative and constructive process rather than a system that requires students to memorize and repeat facts?
How does the Socratic method mirror the scientific process?
The sciences differ from philosophy and religion in many ways. Rather than Truth with a capital T, science seeks to develop working and testable mechanistic models for natural phenomena. This may interest you : Crash Course Trailer: This Amazon Prime Video Series Has a Kota Factory Hangover. Robert T. Pennock, philosopher and professor, wrote: “Science never guarantees absolute truth, but strives to find better ways of evaluating empirical claims and achieving higher levels of certainty and confidence in scientific conclusions.”
Building and testing a model is a creative and social process that involves playing with ideas, considering the evidence that supports the model, and whether simpler or more accurate models are possible. These models assume a physical world independent of the observer. They also give science direction – explanatory models become more precise and explain more over time; the range of plausible models diminishes as scientific understanding improves.
While false ideas do arise, the scientific community rarely remains disturbed for long by unsupported speculation or false ideas.
The goal of the Socratic approach is to help students work productively with and apply disciplinary ideas, discarding those for which there is no evidence or which are contradictory. We believe that such an understanding is particularly useful in the biological sciences, where closely related organisms (such as mice, Neanderthals, and modern humans) can show significant mechanistic differences as a result of their evolutionary history. Without understanding the basic principles, the student can only memorize the required answer.
How can we build an inclusive Socratic community in a science course?
Given the reality of many modern college classrooms (and Zoom sessions), creating a Socratic environment can be challenging, in part due to students’ previous experiences with science education. In the age of Googling, memorization is far less important than coming up with and testing plausible models for various phenomena. This may interest you : Access to campus food directly improves student health. To become Socratics, we need to rethink the challenges we pose to students, the problems we ask them to solve, the phenomena we ask them to explain, and the ideas we expect them to apply. .
“It is too common for even advanced students to answer complex questions with a single word or phrase; it’s almost as if they never had to argue based on assumptions and mechanisms, but were trained to recognize repetitive phrases.”
All too often, especially in the biological sciences, students encounter problems that can only be solved by memorizing the correct answer. In contrast to physics and chemistry, the behavior of a biological system cannot be predicted even in theory from first principles (this was explicitly pointed out by Ernst Mayr, who drew attention to the role of historical and often unknowable stochastic and environmental events that influence evolutionary processes). At the same time, physics and chemistry constrain fundamental molecular and cellular processes. By focusing on these common processes, we can help students analyze new situations and propose and think critically about the likely mechanisms that may cause them. We recognize and value the creative process that reflects what scientists do. We can focus on the importance of understanding the mechanisms of coupling reactions rather than memorizing the steps in the Krebs cycle.
We have to deal with important practical considerations. Socratic interactions traditionally involve small groups of people. How do you adapt them to an introductory science class, which is usually anything but intimate? There are strategies that can be used in large classes and smaller sections similar to recitation, provided instructors are trained in how to create scenarios that elicit student responses and how to respond in turn. This means avoiding the almost reflexive approach of correcting the learner and providing an answer. We want to ask students to articulate their assumptions; these are skills that both instructors and students must develop. We must emphasize that we do not expect a perfect response from the students, but an authentic one. This is not a trivial challenge, especially since it can mean that students have to recall and return to ideas and ways of thinking that they were exposed to weeks or months earlier. Time for recursive reexamination of core ideas must be built into course design.
“In a recent developmental biology class, I was struck by the students’ inability to consider how the anterior-posterior axis of the gastruloid could be revealed, even though Hox gene expression, a classic marker of this process, had been covered in depth earlier in the semester.”
This is likely to lead to a reduction in content, so we need to carefully consider what we present and what we expect students to do with it. Do we require rote learning or application of general discipline-specific principles and concepts? Have we trained students to construct and evaluate models and explanations? Do we present them with tasks that are complex enough to allow for multiple solutions that can focus on Socratic feedback, leading students to rethink and correct their answers? Do our questions require students, working alone or in groups, in class or asynchronously, to express their assumptions? In such a context, we can take advantage of asynchronous interactions mediated by software systems that enable extended conversations within groups of students along with Socratic feedback from instructors.
Whether the group is large or small, Socratic exchange requires that those leading the conversation be skilled in encouraging students to consider the implications of their assumptions and consider what they may be overlooking. Departments could hold short workshops and encourage classroom observation to teach instructors how to do this. The instructor’s role is not to judge the correctness of the final answer, but to catalyze the discussion. Ideally, other students in the class will take on the role of instructor.
The goal is to show that scientific progress does not depend on extraterrestrial geniuses, but is the result of a social and collaborative process, a process in which everyone who is willing to participate can contribute.
