Socratic Teaching

The Socratic method involves some complications. Ideally, it would be the method I always used, but I find myself sometimes lecturing, sometimes doing the group activities that the students like, sometimes using Socratic questions but not doing so well with them. I think if I outline the problems I am having maybe I will find a solution.

The instructor in this method either does not know the answers to the questions or pretends not to know, or knows but isn't saying yet. The Socratic method for a discussion often becomes a guessing game or fishing expedition rather than a true discussion. Socrates himself badgered his interlocutors until they came up with his own conclusions. The Socratic method is ineffective if the results are those reducible to matters of fact. It only works when the true aim is to teach the students to think better than they do, and where the students could conceivably come up with answers surprising to everyone in the room.

Students sometimes don't have enough to say. They need the questions in advance. Even graduate students, who you would expect to be able to discuss a text just by virtue of having read it, need a lot of initial prodding or advanced preparation.

The gap between the professor and the students can be too great. There has to be way of finding a middle ground, taking the students beyond the kind of answers they would typically give by prodding them a bit.

Finally, the language issue. Students don't feel that they can express their ideas in Spanish. What they say is often unclear, simplified, or otherwise modified by a process of interior translation.