Socratic Pedagogy Research Articles

Not for profit: why democracy needs the humanities

Foreword by Ruth O'Brien ix Acknowledgments xiii Chapter I: The Silent Crisis 1 Chapter II: Education for Profit, Education for Democracy 13 Chapter III: Educating Citizens: The Moral (and Anti-Moral) Emotions 27 Chapter IV: Socratic Pedagogy: The Importance of Argument 47 Chapter V: Citizens of the World 79 Chapter VI: Cultivating Imagination: Literature and the Arts 95 Chapter VII: Democratic Education on the Ropes 121 Notes 145 Index 153

Using Student-Centered Cases in the Classroom

This article addresses the concern that business schools are not adequately developing the practical leadership skills that are required in the real world of management. The article begins by discussing the limitations of traditional case methods for teaching behavioral skills. This approach is contrasted with an alternative case method drawn from action inquiry (AI) that uses ongoing student cases to develop more effective leadership behaviors. The student-centered case approach is distinguished from traditional case teaching by tracing an important similarity between AI and Socratic pedagogy. A leadership workshop for evening MBAs that uses AI pedagogy to help students improve their leadership behaviors at work and in the class is also described. The article concludes with a discussion of the significant benefits and challenges associated with helping students develop new leadership behaviors.

Changing the Education System with CALM: Computer Assisted Learning Method

OVER THE past decade, at both the university and high school levels, chemistry instructors have become keenly aware of an increasing number of students who are proving to be unable to solve complex problems. Today's students have grown up with technology, and most would prefer to do their homework using a digital tool rather than pencil and paper. Those students who do try to work out pencil-and-paper problems can become easily frustrated if they encounter difficulties and are unable to get immediate, useful feedback. To address this problem, chemistry department faculty members at Indiana University, Bloomington (IUB), developed a novel online learning tool called CALM (Computer Assisted Learning Method). CALM was initially developed for use in the general chemistry curriculum at the university, where introductory courses typically enroll between 200 and 600 students. But CALM has since made the transition to high schools, crossing one of the most formidable boundaries in U.S. education and demonstrating the potential of a P-16 system to foster highly productive cross-level cooperation. The story of CALM's beginnings is instructive. In 1996, the first author decided to introduce online homework into a large undergraduate chemistry course at IUB. The idea behind this change was simple: science involves problem solving, and to master concepts in science requires practice in solving problems and answering questions. The advantage of an online system was clear: it could provide instant feedback to the students on the correctness of their responses. Moreover, an ideal system would challenge students according to their individual strengths, so that all students would be appropriately challenged. But in the mid-1990s, online homework systems were in their infancy, and none possessed all the desired features. Consequently, it was decided to develop a system from scratch. Because developing high-quality instructional materials is both time- and resource-intensive, from the outset those of us at IUB wanted to create a system that could be broadly disseminated so that materials developed at one institution could benefit students at multiple institutions. The result of our effort is the Web-based learning tool known as CALM (http://calm.indiana.edu). Early in the development of CALM, the IUB chemistry department decided to share this learning tool, free of charge, with any high school teacher willing to be trained to use it. The training required to start using the program builds important connections between the university faculty and the high school teachers and so is in harmony with the P-16 philosophy. At the same time, high school teachers throughout Indiana have made important connections among themselves. As a result, the use of the program has dramatically increased within the state, and it has yielded some amazing outcomes. DESCRIPTION OF CALM A faculty member using CALM presents students with a set of questions to answer. These questions can be associated with review material, subject matter recently taught in the classroom, or even untaught material so as to gauge the level and abilities of the class in advance. The architecture of CALM is based on Socratic pedagogy. When a question in CALM is answered incorrectly, the architecture allows a new leading question to be posed. Thus a student can be led, step by step, through a complex problem requiring multiple steps. Since the student's responses to this unfolding series of questions can be tracked, common stumbling blocks encountered by multiple students can be brought to the attention of the teacher. Questions in CALM are generated by an algorithm, and different students in the same class will encounter different though similar questions. This algorithmic generation of individualized questions is a key feature of CALM. Not only may the question differ in numerical values, but chemical reactions or graphical images can change as well. …

Behaviorism, Constructivism, and Socratic Pedagogy

This paper examines the relationship among behaviorism, constructivism and Socratic pedagogy. Specifically, it asks if a Socratic educator can be a constructivist or a behaviorist. In the first part of the paper, each learning theory, as it relates to the Socratic project, is explained. In the last section, the question of whether or not a Socratic teacher can subscribe to a constructivist or a behaviorist learning theory is addressed. The paper concludes by stating that while Socratic pedagogy shares some similarities with each learning theory, ultimately it is fundamentally incompatible with both.

How Socratic Pedagogy Works

What critical thinking is, how it is defined , and whether or not it can be measured are topics that are hotly debated in the philosophical and educational literature, What is not debated, however, is the urgent need to teach thinking skills at all levels of :::ducation (Carr, 1990). The current literature on Socratic pedagogy frequently addresses why it is important to give reasons for one's positions, and why thinking critically is beneficial for individual students, communities and society. The gap that now needs to be filled is to show the relationship between critical thinking and Socratic pedagogy. To do so it is necessary to first clarify how the Socratic method achieves its epistemological ambitions. Once this is clear, I will go through a step-by-step method explaining how indi· vidual educators can implement this in their classrooms, Thus, I will first explain how Socratic pedagogy works and then provide some general guidelines for conducting a Socratic seminar . .

Socratic Pedagogy, Race and Power

Rud (1997) wrote in this journal: " Leaving aside the blatant (to my eyes at least) problems of power and dominance of an elderly Greek citizen teaching a slave boy, this example [the Meno] of teaching has always left me cold." Garlikov (1998) addressed Rud's criticism of the Socratic dialogue. The present article addresses and extends Garlikov's response to cover general notions of power, and shows how these may affect Socratic discourse. Socratic pedagogy is not merely an illusory exercise where participants acquiesce to notions of truth because of power differentials. But power relations play a role in all communicative contexts. However, in Socractic pedagogy the adverse effects of power are greatly reduced and the focus is shifted from people to propositions.

Bakhtin's Socrates

No one in the history of philosophy and the history of rhetoric, not even the sophists, has been more abused than Socrates.1 The sophists were merely scorned and maligned.2 was quite eliminated, his voice appropriated by another.3 As consequence, has traditionally been read as mere point of origination of Platonic/Aristotelian philosophy and rhetoric, and both he and the so-called method have been sharply dismissed from contemporary and composition studies. Vitanza, for example, characterizes Socratic dialogue as search for generic concepts-concepts that can be transferred to and acquired by another human being-and describes Socratic pedagogy as a series of questions [from teacher] that force an interlocutor [a student] to always give the desired answers, thereby leading the interlocutor to arrive at the predetermined conclusion to the inquiry (162, 166). Sosnoski, deploring the teacher/student relationship implied by such pedagogy, says simply Socrates Begone! from the and composition classroom (198). Nonetheless, has enjoyed revival in contemporary scholarship, most strikingly in the works of Jacques Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin but also in the works of numerous contemporary historians and philosophers.4 This revival has potential interest for and composition studies, for it reveals different from the one handed down through the Western tradition: who speaks and listens to many voices, not just one; who is more concerned with living than he is with knowing; whose rhetoric is means of testing people and ideas rather than means of imposing his ideas upon others.5 Derrida's dramatic portrait of writing is at once characterization of the traditional way of reading and an invitation to imagine different Socrates. Bakhtin's is more detailed sketch of what such different might be. This different is figure with many voices, central figure in Bakhtin's dialogism, which has brought these many voices to contemporary and composition studies.6 This is also the less familiar figure who lives in Bakhtin's carnivalesque world of everyday experience. Finally, he is figure with links to the rhetorical tradition, the figure who appears in the early Platonic dialogues, whose is means of testing people and ideas, not means of persuading others to accept his ideas, thus imposing his ideas upon them. This has potential interest as an