The Socratic Seminar in Detail

The socratic method is distinguished by its question-led approach to education. Rather than present students with information and ask them to respond to it through a series of application tasks, the teacher proceeds via a series of prompting questions which lead students to the desired understanding. What is important is that the students think for themselves and, with the aid of the teacher’s careful questioning and suggesting, advance themselves towards a deeper understanding of the text. This understanding is associated with grasping the relevance of the fundamental themes explored in the text, such as love, duty, friendship, or truth to the present time and how the text’s representation of the themes are situated in an ongoing historical dialogue. It is distinct from the understanding associated with the memorisation of facts and methods, though it aims in part to build upon the foundation of core knowledge which has been developed through earlier school years. 

Many specifications make reference to the need to assess student’s understanding of content through such things as application of knowledge in unfamiliar context or, in STEM, being able to interpret the significance of numerical results within a given context or to explain the limitations of a model or equation. Within the context of examination, however, this is a difficult skill to accurately assess, because even the form of these questions can often be memorised. For instance, a maths teacher may explain to students that any question which asks them to interpret data really requires them to make reference to the mean and the standard deviation. A student could perform this task repeatedly without it ever occurring to them why these pieces of data and not others are so important. This situation is not limited to STEM, but can be found in the way students are taught to respond to extended answer questions in history or philosophy papers. 

Because Eudaemonia is a purely enrichment-based curriculum with no formal assessment, the temptation to give students a set of strategies to memorise is diminished, and focus can be solely on understanding proper. This is where the socratic method excels. One reason understanding is more likely to come through the socratic method is that students make knowledge their own.

The aim of the seminar must be well defined for the socratic method to be effective. The understanding which is to be reached must be clear to the teacher and be able to be summarised for the students at the start of the seminar. For instance, the teacher may prime a discussion on Hamlet by explaining the core of Hamlet’s doubtfulness about the value of life and the possibility of authenticity, situating these doubts in the context of the radical religious transformations occurring during his day. The aim would be to get students to understand why such doubt as Hamlet’s would arise and how they may be overcome, why doubt would effect him as much as it did, and, crucially, what this tells us about the centrality of questions of identity and religious meaning in our lives.   

Secondary aims may be to explore the compositional strategies Shakespeare uses to communicate these ideas, biographical speculations such as whether Shakespeare himself had similar doubts to Hamlet, or similar ideas or patterns of living which are prominent in today’s culture. 

For those seminars which examine several shorter excerpts rather than one larger excerpt, it will be a primary aim to get students to realise a relationship between the excerpts and how this may point to a pattern of human experience which persists throughout history. A short excerpt of Hamlet could be compared with one from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Students would see how the problem of identity recurs throughout history through these two very different responses to it. Whereas Hamlet positively wrestles with his doubt and comes through it in a reckoning with Providence, Sartre embraces the nihilism attendant upon his doubt and with it a thoroughly relativistic view of identity. Students should discriminate between the effectiveness of these two responses. For example, they may perceive that the latter is founded upon a complete separation of mind and body, a problem they may already be familiar with from previous seminars. 

Besides the specific aim of each seminar with respect to content, there are general aims which should be kept in mind. These have to do with encouraging those habits which are most conducive to good intellectual and character formation, including: 

• Intellectual humility: openness to new ideas and perspectives, prioritising understanding and growth over 'winning arguments'; awareness of the complexity of problems, of their many dimensions and their relevance to many subjects;

• Analytical interest and curiosity: able to see what questions must be asked before a more complex one can be answered; willing to explore unfamiliar ideas, to analyse their presuppositions and anticipate their consequences; willing to 'test' ideas with examples and counterexamples; 

• Self-awareness: becoming aware of our ignorance and biases; recognising when we are motivated more by emotion than by reason; noticing when our suggestions lack foundation or substance; becoming sensitive to the intellectual territory we are reluctant to explore, as this might expose our weaknesses;

• Charity and attentiveness: listening to others with attention and respect; working to represent another's ideas with accuracy, seeking clarification where necessary, so that we always critique the best version of their argument; be willing to work with others to improve their arguments, even if we disagree with them; see each conversation and an opportunity for mutual enrichment rather than to put others down; be willing to abandon untenable ideas, and have faith that the common pursuit of truth in humility is good. 

• Courage: be willing to contribute ideas even if they are poorly formulated, because it is only this way that will we improve;  

• Precision and effective communication: developing the clarity with which we express our ideas, becoming more able to respond directly to questions; eliminating obfuscatory language; 

• Integration: finding time to reflect on the ideas discussed and the implications they have for other domains of interest and for our lives more broadly.

Drs Richard Paul and Linda Elder, who have written extensively on the have summarised some of these broader aims of the socratic seminar as follows: 

• Raise basic issues (meaning have some comprehension of the relevant problems and why they are problems);

• Probe beneath the surface structure of questions (be analytical);

• Pursue problematic areas of thought (be persistent); 

• Aid students in discovering the truth of their own thought (security and confidence in their ideas because they are well thought through); 

• Aid students in developing sensitivity to clarity, accuracy, relevance, and depth;

• Aid students in arriving at judgements through their own reasoning; and help students analyse thinking and thought including its purposes, assumptions, questions, points of view, information, inferences, concepts, and implications.

(From Richard Paul and Linda Elder, The Art of Socratic Questioning (Foundation for Critical Thinking, 2006))

Most seminars in Eudaemonia's student seminar booklet conclude with a list of questions which should be used to structure the discussion. The questions are characteristically open. For example, a seminar on excerpts from Thomas Nagel's famous paper, 'What is it like to be a bat?', lists questions which begin by challenging some of the assumptions of the paper,

Do bats have experience, as Thomas Nagel assumes?

If they have experience, do they have an inner life?

Is having an inner life the same as having a mind?

before drawing out the ethical implications of our answers to these questions, 

Should the way we treat animals depend on the nature of their inner lives?

Are dolphins more important than flees?

Do animals have rights? On what basis do you decide?

Depending on students' responses to these questions, teachers may ask for clarification of a point which has been made, expose a weakness in the student's reasoning, offer a counter-suggestion, or invite other students to respond. In a more active group, students themselves may be eager to respond to one another, and this should be encouraged, so long as the discussion does not stray from the main question at hand. 

In order that it is the students who in effect lead the seminar, the teacher's questions must strike a balance between being intelligible and being so transparent that they imply an expected answer. This is contingent upon many factors: how familiar students are with the text and its context; what the relative abilities of each student are, which should become apparent to the teacher through the course of the first seminar or so. 

Some of the ethical questions raised carry political connotations which already imply a correct answer. 'Animal rights' in the above example are a contentious issue today. The danger of political correctness is that it stifles critical thinking: we are pressured into assuming that society's opinions are correct. Even if they are, it is better that we understand why. Students must therefore be free to challenge these ideas. 

Helpful frameworks

PAPERCLIP Questions

Precision, e.g. Can you be more specific?

Accuracy, e.g. How could we test that?

Perspective, e.g., Is there another point of view we could examine? 

Equity, e.g. What conflicts of interest exist here?

Relevance, e.g. How does this relate to the problem at hand?

Complexity, e.g. What makes this a difficult question to answer?

Logic, e.g. Does this all make sense together?

Importance, e.g. What is the most important issue on which to focus?)

Perspicuity. e.g. What do you mean?

(Adapted from Drs Richard Paul and Linda Elder, The Art of Socratic Questioning (Foundation for Critical Thinking, 2006), pp. 10).

Though teachers using the socratic method are limited to a questioning role, it should be clear from the above that they are not passive. It takes a great deal of attention and thinking ahead to determine the questions which will most effectively advance the discussion towards a common understanding for the students present. Teachers must be sensitive to when a discussion is becoming dominated by one student, or when it is being sidetracked, or when disagreements are becoming too emotive; in both cases they should intervene to restore civil and mutual engagement, perhaps by turning to another student who has not contributed much, or by changing the subject entirely. 

The teacher may recognise a layer of meaning in the text which students are unconscious of or are struggling to penetrate. Here would be an opportunity for more active intervention in the discussion via a series of more precise questions to indicate the direction in which students should go without giving it away. There may be times where it is more appropriate for the sake of progression for the teacher to reveal an insight, but this should be avoided, otherwise students will become dependent upon the teacher.   

A productive discussion depends upon several factors. There should be a majority of students freely contributing throughout the discussion, and ideally everyone will have made some contributions by the end of the seminar. The teacher can use their questioning role to encourage individual students out of their silence, or to get other students back into a discussion which has been dominated by a minority of students for too long. Students should also be encouraged to respond to one another, not just to the teacher. 

Though the teacher should establish a clear scope for the discussion from the start, which makes reference to the content of the reading and to the questions which will be discussed, these terms should not be too restrictive. Part of what drives the discussion is the creative imagination and freedom of the students present. As a result, the discussion may take an unexpected but fruitful turn. What originally seems tangential may contribute something of value, by introducing a new way of thinking about a problem or pointing to a factor which has not yet been considered. Balance is required between enabling students the freedom to drive the discussion in a positive direction and keeping it within reason. Ultimately, the freedom students can exercise here should reflect the many dimensions a work or idea has. An idea may be analysed linguistically, psychologically, sociologically, etc. The 'intersections' of the tube map are a good indicator of the kind of alternative dimensions which may be explored during a seminar (see the programme in detail).

Perhaps the works or ideas under discussion are not resonating with the students. It might be good to ask students if they can think of the relevance the work or idea might have for them, for their community, and then for humanity as a whole. The teacher might use this as a kind of ladder towards the transcendental (that is, universal) aspects of a work or idea. The transcendent is only resonant if it resonates with us, however; this requires seeing the immediate relevance, which in turn requires openness. The teacher may also begin by asking what it is about the work that is most striking to them: this may be a word, a phrase, a sentence, or simply something which they were reminded of. Once the transcendence or depth of an idea has been understood, the discussion may proceed to identify ideas which are closely related to it.   

A critical destabiliser to productive discussion is a disagreement which starts to become heated. Students should be instructed from day one in the factors which make discussion and disagreement civil, including respect, attentiveness, openness to different perspectives, charity in interpreting the words and arguments of another (i.e. not reducing them to a 'straw-man'), and humility.  Any discussion which is starting to show a neglect of a common ethic should be paused, that which is lacking identified, so that a recommitment to civility established. 

Eudaemonia encourages students to think deeply about the foundations of ideas. Part of this will naturally involve asking questions about things which have always been taken for granted. This turns out to be an immense benefit, because our ignorance of where ideas come from, on what principles they are based, is of no help in defending them. However, there can be moments during our reasoning where relativism about ideas becomes attractive. We offer the following suggestions for moving through and beyond relativism:

• It has often been observed that it cannot be true that there is no truth, for to assert that proposition is to assert something as though it were true, contradicting the very proposition being asserted. Something similar may be said about ethics, too. To assert that there is no objectively right or wrong way to act is not a proposition which is empty of ethical content; it actually commits to a way of living in the world, albeit one which is incoherent, because it is unprincipled. So there are no getting away from absolutes in ethics, either. In general, relativism in any domain holds as an absolute that no absolutes can be found there, which is self-defeating. 

• Relativism can be a form of denial. It can be persuasive because it gets us out of moral or theological commitments which we find difficult to accept. It is sometimes worth directing attention to that difficult thing, rather than to the desire for relativism which is really symptomatic of it. 

• Relativism today often presents as what Alasdair MacIntyre has called 'emotivism'. This is the view that a moral utterance has authority because I myself utter it and I determine for myself what is right, wrong, rational, and irrational. The irony of this view can be shown by considering what it would be like to be the victim of an injustice. People will readily grant themselves the authority to self-determine but, when they become the victim of the self-determination of others, they will deny those individuals the very same authority that they readily gave themselves. 

The following are some pointers which students and teacher should be aware of to maximise the enrichment of the seminar. For teachers, they often point to 'bad habits' in communication which are worth bringing to the attention of students. Intellectual formation is driven by habit of reflection, not only on content, but on how one conducts oneself in the pursuit of knowledge. 

• Explain the concept of a worldview and why consistency in thought is important. Worldviews differ because of differences in axioms. People embody worldviews in their beliefs and actions, but they do not always do so consistently. A lack of consistency leads to a division between thought and action, which is often registered as a lack of integrity. 

• Explain that intellect is refined through practice and attention. Inconsistencies in thought are not always obvious to us. Students should develop a habit of careful study and reflection on the content of an argument and the clarity with which it is communicated.

• Worldviews can be informed by innate values or biases, and can in turn affect the arguments we present or the way we receive them. We can deliver arguments which are more founded on emotion than on reason, and this should be discouraged. This should form part of students’ habits of reflection. 

• Recognise the tendency to unconsciously repeat certain popular words and phrases. Part of students reflection should involve asking whether we fully understand the words and phrases we use to express our points and whether they are clear or relevant. 

• Distinguish inductive (hypothetical/statistical) and deductive reasoning. The mode of reasoning most associated with philosophy is deductive, beginning with principles and proceeding to deduce a series of conclusions. Students should be encouraged to reason about issues from ‘the nature of the case’ or from ‘first principles’. Statistics may inform their reasoning, but statistics can change, and for that reason are an inferior basis for an argument than a definitive proposition. 

• Cultivate a charitable ethic around discussion and debate and relate this to practice. Students should recognise that they gain more from a discussion when they enter in good faith, when they are there not merely to prove they are right or that someone else is wrong, but to learn from others. They should be generous in their explanations and clarifications of their positions and seek that from others. 

• Give students a variety of strategies for challenging opposing views. They should practice searching for faulty premises; question whether inferences really follow from premises; push ideas to logical and dissatisfactory conclusions; ask whether one idea is consistent with another which their interlocutor is known to hold.