Socratic Method II; Stumbling Upon Garlikov
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I have been wearing out my Stumbleupon button, reveling in complete access to the multimedia aspects of the Internet now that we have broadband. Most of the sites that I have put in my favorites section are little flash demos that amuse the kids for a minute or two. The most interesting of the substantive sites that I have stumbled over is by a philosopher slash photographer, Rick Garlikov. He is almost as prolific a writer as I, so I can only comment on those among his essays that I either strongly agree with or strongly disagree with. First, the essays that I agree with. This, the one I originally stumbled upon, is called,
The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling
<http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html>
Garlikov describes a remarkable experiment and demonstration of the Socratic method in action that he gave when he came in as a volunteer and taught to an ordinary grade three class an introductory lesson in binary number theory. Two professional teachers had predicted that only a few of these pupils would understand, but as it turned out almost all had "got it" by the end of the period. He lays out in this essay everything that was said in the complete Q&A session. The advantages of this method for a teacher, he concludes, are that it tends to raise the expectations of teachers while leveling out the various abilities of the students in a non-streamed class. Other benefits are "that it excites students' curiosity and arouses their thinking, rather than stifling it..." and that students,
"do not get bored or lose concentration if they are actively participating. Almost all of these children participated the whole time; often calling out in unison or one after another."
"It gives constant feed-back and thus allows monitoring of the students' understanding as you go. So you know what problems and misunderstandings or lack of understandings you need to address as you are presenting the material. You do not need to wait to give a quiz or exam; the whole thing is one big quiz as you go, though a quiz whose point is teaching, not grading..."
"It also makes teaching more interesting, because most of the time, you learn more from the students -- or by what they make you think of -- than what you knew going into the class. ... It is a very efficient teaching method, because the first time through tends to cover the topic very thoroughly, in terms of their understanding it. It is more efficient ... (than) lecturing to them is, though, of course, a teacher can lecture in less time."
"... by quizzing and monitoring their understanding as you go along, you have the time and opportunity to correct misunderstandings or someone's being lost at the immediate time, not at the end of six weeks when it is usually too late to try to "go back" over the material. And in some cases their ideas will jump ahead to new material so that you can meaningfully talk about some of it "out of (your!) order" (but in an order relevant to them)."
"... the Socratic method ... gives the students a chance to experience the attendant joy and excitement of discovering (often complex) ideas on their own. And it gives teachers a chance to learn how much more inventive and bright a great many more students are than usually appear to be when they are primarily passive."
But Garlikov is also frank about the costs, disadvantages and difficulties of the Socratic Method:
"It works for any topics or any parts of topics that have any logical natures at all. It does not work for unrelated facts or for explaining conventions, such as the sounds of letters or the capitals of states whose capitals are more the result of historical accident than logical selection."
"This method takes a lot of energy and concentration when you are doing it fast, the way I like to do it when beginning a new topic. A teacher cannot do this for every topic or all day long, at least not the first time one teaches particular topics this way. It takes a lot of preparation, and a lot of thought. When it goes well, as this did, it is so exciting for both the students and the teacher that it is difficult to stay at that peak and pace or to change gears or topics. When it does not go as well, it is very taxing trying to figure out what you need to modify or what you need to say. I practiced this particular sequence of questioning a little bit one time with a first grade teacher. I found a flaw in my sequence of questions. I had to figure out how to correct that. I had time to prepare this particular lesson; I am not a teacher but a volunteer; and I am not a mathematician. I came to the school just to do this topic that one period."
Which would seem to indicate that maybe it is a good idea to have more guests, as well as traveling and rotating specialist teachers in the primary grades, as is more often done at the secondary and university levels.
I think this is a wonderful experiment and I am very pleased to see Socrates, my hero, continuing to have an influence on practical teaching. I have only one quibble about another essay on his site, a broader one about teaching methods in general. Here Garlikov holds that the Socratic Method does not cover all teaching situations. He goes on to say that the main trick to teaching is to find out what the students know and to use that previous understanding as a bridge to carry them over to newer information. However, as I hope I made clear in my recent (March 22nd) essay about the Socratic Method, that too is an inherent part of the Socratic Method, every bit as much as his better known questioning technique. Xenophon, who was literally picked out of the gutter and made into a successful writer by Socrates, wrote later on of his former teacher that,
"His own -- that is, the Socratic -- method of conducting a rational discussion, of threading the mazes of an argument, was to proceed step by step from one point of general agreement to another: `Herein lies the real security of reasoning,' he would say; and for this reason he was more successful in winning the common assent of his hearers than any one I ever knew. He had a saying that Homer had conferred on Odysseus the title of a safe, unerring orator, because he had the gift to lead the discussion from one commonly accepted opinion to another." (Xenophon, Memorabilia of the Life of Socrates, Book IV, Chapter VI)
The next essay that I recommend highly from the large collection on his site is a startling one called, "Schools Are Not Places of Education,"
<http://www.garlikov.com/teaching/schools.html>
This reiteration of what Jane Jacob coined "credentialism" is all the more effective in that it does not use the word credentialism and simply argues from the logical assumptions of a philosopher rather than, well, whatever it was that Jane Jacobs was. I think of her as just a registered genius, someone who by definition defies categorization, the kind of person who doles out labels and cubbyholes but does not fall into them. Essentially what both Garlikov and Jacobs say it is that what keeps schools down is that old fallacy of confusing the map with the territory, or in this case the degree on paper with an actual education. Read it for yourself, what I will highlight here is Garlikov's positive suggestions for changing credentialized schooling. He gives three; here is the first:
"... academic subjects need to be taught in ways that bring them more to life for as many students as possible. This will require a way of looking at subject matter and teaching that is quite foreign to most teachers, even many who think they teach quite meaningful material now, but who don't teach it in ways that actually end up being meaningful to students."
In his Socratic Method essay, Garlikov made the point that the goal of "education is that the students are helped most efficiently to learn by a teacher, not that a teacher make the finest apparent presentation, regardless of what students might be learning, or not learning." The genius of Socrates was that he knew exactly where an argument begins, and he knew enough to bring his students precisely there. His more advanced students learned to do the same. Xenophon wrote of Socrates,
"By this method of bringing back the argument to its true starting-point, even the disputant himself would be affected and the truth become manifest to his mind." (Xenophon, Memorabilia, Book IV, Chapter VI)
Here is the origin of Plato's otherwise rather strange belief that all knowledge is recollection of what we knew in a previous life. If you know the exact place from whence the fountain of knowledge springs, then you can tap into it yourself. Since all beings derive life from this source, its power is beyond limit. The second point of Garlikov is,
(Meaningful lessons) "should be offered to students when the students are able to appreciate and learn from them. For some this will be when they are younger; others, when they are older."
This is true, the time of age segregation will have to end if we are ever to hope for education to progress. There is a time for every lesson that cannot be predicted or forced, and that lesson is lost if it is given at any other time than the right time.
As for Garlikov's third point, readers of this list will recall that I too have been advocating that cooperative apprenticeship programs be mixed into schools as early as Grades One and Two. I will conclude today with Garlikov's explanation of why this should be so. I have more to say about his other essays, but that will have to wait for now.
"... children who have access to educational opportunities outside of school that are better for THEM, should be allowed to take advantage of those opportunities even if that means not going to school full time or even at all."
"Currently there are few opportunities for children to apprentice or work in most businesses, and child labor laws even prevent it. Many adults would not want children or young teens in their places of business, or older teens in other than the most menial sorts of work. While apprenticeships and similar opportunities used to be common, it currently would be some time before significant numbers of opportunities could and would again be open to teens and others."
"The purpose of child labor laws, of course, is to prevent children from being forced to work or to earn a living, or extra income for their parents - particularly working in terrible conditions. The problem is that the laws as they currently stand don't distinguish between work that is a good opportunity for a child to learn and mature, and work that is stifling and laborious without much benefit. And the determining factor is often merely whether the child is paid or not, so that children can be forced to do deferential, laborious, unrewarding work (in some cases in not very good physical working conditions) with little liberty for no money (as in school), but are not permitted to do light, educating, enjoyable, maturing, work that fosters responsibility and dependability if they also earn money doing it.
"The overriding emphasis should be on producing the best educational opportunities for people, whether in or out of schools, where what is being learned is likely to lead to better personal, social (citizenship), and professional (job) knowledge and understanding."
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