TBers, 

First, happy New Year everyone. Remember the Teaching Breakfast Group's Web
site can be found at: http://www.oneonta.edu/academics/teachingbreakfast.
Bookmark the site so you can find it easier.  Posted there are dates for get
togethers, postings of materials discussed at past meetings and other
information relevant to teaching and learning.

The posting below (a bit long) is an editorial by James Rhem on the work of
Michale Strong on the Socratic method.   It is number #25 in a series of
selected excerpts from the National Teaching and Learning Forum newsletter
reproduced here.   NT&LF has a wealth of information on all aspects of
teaching and learning. Much more about the Socratic method is described in
the October, 2004 issue NT&LF. If you are not already a subscriber I urge
you to consider becoming one. You can check it out at [http://www.ntlf.com/]
The on-line edition of the Forum--like the printed version - offers
subscribers insight from colleagues eager to share new ways of helping
students reach the  highest levels of learning. National Teaching and
Learning Forum Newsletter, Volume 13, Number 56 © Copyright 1996-2004.
Published by James Rhem & Associates, Inc. (ISSN 1057-2880) All rights
reserved worldwide. Reprinted with permission.

I will be ordering two copies of this book for the TLTC library.  If you
want to borrow it please let me know.  I will post back to this list when
they come in and see that a copy makes its way to you.




              THE HABIT OF THOUGHT
            James Rhem, Executive Editor

Michael Strong's The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic
Practice remains unknown to most faculty and to many faculty developers.
It's a small book published in 1996 by a small publisher in North Carolina
(New View). Limited marketing may account for the book's low profile in
higher education circles, or perhaps the fact that much of Strong's work has
been in the K-12 world. Whatever the reasons, the book deserves wider
exposure among faculty not because it offers a "magic bullet" for improving
teaching - it doesn't - but because in clear, no nonsense language it sounds
a call to the most noble stance any teacher can take with students, that of
"an honest, open, inquiring mind."

Most faculty believe they understand Socratic practice or "Socratic method,"
and most believe they practice it at least some of the time. Indeed, some
teachers argue that Socratic practice is simply another name for class
discussion. However, Strong reports:

"Teachers trained in Socratic Seminars . . . believe that they are radically
different from conventional classroom discussions, or from any conventional
pedagogical technique. Many trained teachers, some with twenty years of
experience, talk about how leading Socratic Seminars has caused them to
question their entire approach to teaching. Some claim that the contact with
Socratic Seminars has caused them to become angry at their own previous
teaching and their own educations." (p. 47)

Though he encourages it at every turn and never waivers in seeing it as
doable, genuine Socratic practice as Strong describes it seems very
challenging, to say the least. But it works, and committed teachers at every
level can and do practice it with success.

Strong's own devotion to Socratic practice began early. He'd heard of St.
John's College (with campuses in Maryland and New Mexico) and visited there
and liked what he saw. Still, he first enrolled at Harvard, but there he
realized he wasn't finding the dialogue through which absolutely everything
is taught at St. John's. He transferred.

No "Paper Chase

Early in my interview with Michael Strong, I shared with him my
long-standing disgust with the association of Socratic practice with the
kind of student abuse portrayed so well by John Housman as Professor
Kingsfield in the 1970s film "The Paper Chase." He laughs. Law schools have
been describing this kind of thing as "Socratic" for so long, he says, that
we're not likely to get them to give it up. He compares Kingsfield's
approach to the violent martial arts versus the more philosophical or
"softer" ones - Karate versus Tai Chi. Strong sees Socratic practice as
essentially "softer." While some see an aggressive devil's advocate in the
Socrates of Plato's Dialogues, Strong sees a playful imp committed to
teasing out the implications of thought, to seeing the unseen assumptions
and implications of what we say we think. "If the Dialogues were staged, I
can imagine Socrates being played either way depending on the passage," says
Strong.

Students do follow their leader. In classes conducted according to Strong's
model, groups often start out enjoying aggressive argumentation, but over
time it becomes tedious and they begin to value constructive dialogue
instead. In "The Paper Chase" world, combat never evolves. Why? Because the
teacher never questions his own assumptions, only those of his students.
Though he asks questions, he's not staging a genuine dialogue, an honest
conversation in which he too might learn ?something.

"A hostile sort of Socratic social interaction may be the de facto result of
teaching students to 'question assumptions'," Strong writes. When one thinks
of questioning assumptions, he says, one almost always thinks of the
assumptions of others. "I maintain," he writes, "that it is most important
to question one's own assumptions." Certainly, it's harder than questioning
those of others, and, says Strong, while questioning is an essential part of
the intellectual integrity Socratic practice seeks to develop, it leads to
something even harder, the necessity of making judgments. "One could
'question assumptions' constantly and never recognize a gap in one's
understanding," he observes.

More Than Cognition

Strong's emphasis on judgment, independent judgment cultivated through a
sharpening of awareness, shouldn't be confused with a simple emphasis on
developing cognitive skills. "Cognitive ability is not an overriding
determinant of intellectual genius," he writes in discussing Einstein (p.
74). Understandings of teaching students to "think for themselves" often
take an excessively cognitive focus, he says, while the kinds of insights
and judgments that show genuine intellectual development involve intuitive,
creative and social skills, all of which Socratic seminars develop. Strong's
"ready for work" rubric for students (see ancillary materials at
http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/suppmat/index.htm) includes not only five
academic skills (textual understanding, speaking, listening, knowing how to
learn, critical thinking) but social skills (teamwork, sensitivity/good
manners) and personal skills ( honesty and integrity, willingness to accept
criticism, responsibility and initiative) as well.

Also early in our interview, I share with Strong both my frustration and my
delight in the process of reading The Habit of Thought. The first half of
the book is filled with clear, emphatic presentations of the solid
philosophical grounding of Socratic practice, but as we are so used to books
on teaching that focus on telling us "how" to implement this or that
approach, I found myself impatient for exactly that, more nuts and bolts. In
the second half of the book, Strong does explore the specific roles and
strategies essential for Socratic practice, and it's a delight to read his
descriptions precisely because, even there, he infuses the discussion with
the philosophical importance of each. His nuts and bolts actually appear
throughout in examples illustrating larger ideas. He gives specifics, but
they are never far removed from the all-important "whys" of the practice. On
"trust," for example:

"Obtaining trust is crucial to developing a group, and trust is founded on
mutual respect. It is necessary to respect [students'] sincerely held
opinions, no matter how false or abhorrent they seem to be. The leader is
guiding their understanding, not imposing an understanding from the
outside."

Roles and Paths

Leaders/teachers expect followers/students to end up where they (the
leaders) thought the group should go, but in Strong's view the key to
Socratic practice lies in keeping the discussion open, centered on the
authority of freed thought. To do it well leaders must have more confidence
in their own intellectual and social skills, their "fluency in reasoning,"
than in their positional authority.

Strong describes five main roles of the Socratic practice leader:

*  Justifier of the activity
*  Socratic questioner
*  Provider of summary, synthesis, and clarification
*  Process coach
*  Genuine participant

Strong has led many workshops teaching the dynamics of true Socratic
practice. When we talk I ask him which roles people find the most difficult,
admitting I thought I'd have trouble with the last two. "It really depends
on the individual," he says. "Some have trouble coming up with questions,
others have trouble not getting angry, others with not being dogmatic, but
remaining truly open. Each leader has a unique path to follow just as in
becoming a great musician. Socratic practice is a 'path' and one will not
move far down the road if they don't see that."

Socratic Seminars and Socratic practice differ. The seminars center on the
close study of prescribed texts. Ideas spin out of, around, and back into
discussion of the texts. Seminars utilize Socratic practice, of course, but
with the text always acting as a governing point of reference. Socratic
practice itself need not center on a text, but merely take off from a
question or an idea. Texts act as a very useful brake. Personalization
through anecdote and personal story acts as an accelerator. In Strong's view
"reason" or the capacity for the kind of sound independent judgment we need
to develop in students transcends mere logic. Citing research by Leda
Cosmides reported in Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, he writes: "Our
minds, in the evolutionary circumstances in which they were created,
developed a sophisticated ability to 'reason,' when the object of our
reasoning involved basic human relationships: love, power, trust, betrayal."
Hence, once again, the importance of creativity, intuition, and social
skills in addition to cognitive ability in developing a capacity for
independent judgment.

Good for Women Especially

If our evolution affects how we think and learn, so does culture and
acculturation. Female gains via Socratic practice were 26% greater than male
gains in one study, Strong reports. In a four month trial, female students
at an urban middle school gained the equivalent of two years of critical
thinking skills from Socratic practice. Minority female students gained four
years. When I asked Strong why this should be, he replied, "The American
norm is against men talking." Socratic discussions often come back to ideas
of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, he says, and "the social norm is
against talking about these things these days, but people are hungry for
it."

Coverage, Math & Science

So what about "coverage," and what about math? "Socratic practice does take
leisure," says Strong. "It's about exploring, clarifying, but when it comes
to coverage, it depends on how you conceptualize content. I understand the
problems in the sciences, and I admit it's perhaps easier in the humanities
to deal with these problems. The question is whether you are going for depth
or breadth. In art history for example, will you teach more with 1,000
slides or with 40?" A good argument can be made, he says, that introductory
science courses would teach more if they offered students an immersion in
scientific method and thinking rather than flooding them with a sea of
information. In the same way, Strong - who likes math and is good at it -
believes that Socratic practice should be a prerequisite for all math
education. Why? Socratic practice, whether it traffics in discussions of
trust, love and betrayal or other ideas equally remote from square roots and
tangents, improves students' facility with abstract concepts, and abstract
concepts are the basis of mathematics, which is at root a way of thinking
rather than a body of knowledge.

"Socratic questioning," writes Strong, "is an endlessly sophisticated art.
It is the engine that drives Western thought forward. Socratic questioning
is not a technique, it is an approach to conceptual understanding which
contains within it an intrinsic craving for conceptual refinement at every
level of understanding." (p. 149).

*  Michael Strong, The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic
Practice (Chapel Hill, NC: New View, 1996).

Available from:
New View Publications
Post Office Box 3021
Chapel Hill, NC 27515-3021
Telephone: 1-800-441-3604
http://www.newviewpublications.com

 Michael Strong welcomes email from readers interested in discussing
Socratic practice at [log in to unmask]

Strong will be speaking at the American Creativity Association international
conference in Austin, Texas March 30 - April 2, 2005

© Copyright 1996-2004. Published by James Rhem & Associates, Inc.
(ISSN 1057-2880) All rights reserved worldwide.
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