Socratic teaching

Thus, this interpretation of Meno (and analysis of Socratic teaching) is that we do not come to know about the natural world through divine inspiration or by conjuring memories of an earlier life. Rather, we come to know because of deliberate and guided experiences with the world, including specific testing of theories and predictions.1... 

Caffeine occurs in tea leaves, coffee beans, and cola nuts. Morphine is obtained from unripe opium poppy seed pods. Coniine, extracted from hemlock, is the alkaloid that killed Socrates. Fie was sentenced to death because of unconventional teaching methods teacher evaluations had teeth in them in ancient Greece. 

Socrates You see, Meno, that I am not teaching him anything, only asking. Now he thinks he knows the length of the side of the eight-foot square. 

Socrates This knowledge will not come from teaching but from questioning. He will recover it for himself. 

David E. Presti, Ph.D., is a neurobiologist and clinical psychologist who teaches in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California in Berkeley. He has doctorates in molecular biology and biophysics from the California Institute of Technology and in clinical psychology from the University of Oregon. He can be contacted at presti socrates.berkeley.edu. 

The problem, as Aristotle recognized, is that certain practical choices cannot, even in principle, be adequately and completely captured in a system of universal mles. He singled out navigation and medicine as two activities in which the practical wisdom of long experience is indispensable to superior performance. They were metis-laden activities in which responsiveness, improvisation, and skillful, successive approximations were required. If Plato can be credited, Socrates deliberately refrained from writing down his teachings, because he believed that the... 

In addition, there was strong link between the Socrates Erasmus Organized Mobility activity carried out by our university and the curriculum development projects. All our CD projects activities were combined with student or/and teaching staff mobility, as complementary inputs and feedback of the CD projects results. 

FIGURE 284. Conversations on Chemistry was actually authored by Mrs. Jane Marcet. It is a beautiful teaching text that uses Socratic dialogue involving a Mrs. B. and two adolescent girls, Caroline and Emily. It inspired the young Michael Faraday s interest in chemistry and appeared in a number of editions over almost 50 years and sold over 160,000 copies. 

Heeren, J.K. (1990). Teaching Chemistry by the Socratic Method. Journal of Chemical Education, 67(4), 330-331. 

Questions. Students go on the plant trip, and the first job is to learn what the project is, what has been tried, what critical sources of data and theory exist, and what vendors have been helpfiil in solving related problems. Unfortunately, most student teams have trouble asking cogent questions. We call this a failure of Socrates 101 in recognition of that philosopher s role in teaching the world to ask. 

Stop I, educational philosophy, resulted in a very clear stance in favor of also considering other approaches such as the teach by questioning mode, a variation of the Socratic approach, minus its slightly condescending overtone. It starts from a question asked by a student, who is then guided through a series of intermediate questions to come full circle and answer the initial question themself... 

Equally as important as a solid understanding of plant, microbial, and soil biology was an appreciation of the scientific method. The importance of the scientific method as a tool for studying biological systems was instilled within me by EL Rice, my PhD mentor at The University of Oklahoma, and was reinforced by my teaching of botany courses using the Socratic Method at both the University of Oklahoma and at North Carolina State University. 

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