Sampling of Socratic Method Gives Students a Boost

One Monday last month, Dennis Gray rearranged chairs in a Patrick Henry High classroom so that the students in the business education course would be sitting in a circle.

The initial attitude of the roughly 30 students toward their classroom guest was that of disinterest, in part due to Monday morning blues and in part resulting from Gray’s rumpled appearance and soft-spoken voice.

But after an hour-long group discussion with Gray, the students filed out of the room with great reluctance, hungry for more give-and-take about the ideas that Gray had just shared with them.

With an unpretentious but probing manner, Gray had engaged the entire class--not just a few high achievers or verbal whizzes--in how the tenets of Machiavelli’s “The Prince” apply to employer-employee relationships of the sort that the students might soon experience for themselves. At times he cajoled them to explain themselves in greater detail, to listen more carefully to what a fellow student said, or to defend their view as he played devil’s advocate.

Gray’s success in motivating the Henry students to think rigorously about ideas was duplicated in more than 60 San Diego city schools classrooms during April and May as part of his effort to reorient educational instruction.

Rather than continuing to train teachers to stand in front of students and wait for the correct recall of facts from a textbook, Gray advocates giving students occasional readings to use as the basis for teacher-led discussions on issues important for students, their school and society.

‘Wouldn’t Things Be Different’

“Wouldn’t things be different if every child had one seminar like this every week all the way through school?” Gray asked top administrators of the San Diego school district last month after leading them through a one-hour seminar on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address during their weekly cabinet meeting.

Gray, deputy director of the Washington-based Council for Basic Education, was invited by San Diego officials for the month-long visit after having conducted briefer seminars for teachers last year. San Diego schools Supt. Tom Payzant chairs the governing board of the Washington education interest group this year.

Now, Payzant is hoping to bring Gray to San Diego for the entire school year beginning this fall if a private foundation will agree to sponsor all or part of the expense.

Gray suggested a concentrated year-long emphasis so that his “Socratic Seminar” will become a sustained method for teaching in the district rather than simply being used by a few teachers at isolated schools.

“What we accomplished in the past month was to get five schools poised to make a commitment to go forward on a school-wide basis,” Gray said. “But to move an entire district along requires a lot of help for teachers who want to change, up to 50 or 60 hours of concentrated effort for each teacher.

“What I need is to get 25 or so teachers in San Diego who can be like me, to model my work, and then work teacher-by-teacher at their own schools.”

Gray sees his work as having major potential for advancing a cherished goal of educational reformers at both local and national levels: getting children to think and apply what they learn, rather than simply recalling information and showing improvements on standardized achievement tests.

“My program, which is not mine alone, of course, is a powerful level because it is more than just another arrow in the teacher’s quiver of teaching techniques,” Gray said. “At its best, it amounts to a realignment of relationships between teachers and students, and between students and the curriculum.”

Gray said that some teachers have always emphasized discussion of ideas as well as mastery of information in their classes. But during the past two decades, he said that “a decline in discourse” resulted from the pell-mell rush to cover as many skills as possible during a school year to be then measured by achievement tests. Today, the seminar method is restricted largely to classes for advanced and/or gifted children, and the majority of teachers have been trained only to lecture and encourage recall of facts, he said.

Kermeen Fristrom, director of basic education for San Diego schools, used seminar methods extensively when he taught English 20 years ago. “But those (instructional) methods were never recognized as valuable then, they never became a critical mass, because we were not in a crisis situation that we are today.

“Now the whole country is aware of the need for change, that it is absolutely essential for the country to change the schools.”

For teachers, using weekly seminars as part of their teaching strategies is not easy because weekly seminars require more preparation than simply giving students a list of questions to answer.

“I have to select a reading, or painting, or whatever is appropriate to the academic subject for the students to go over beforehand, and then I start with an opening question about a strong idea or value contained in the material,” Gray explained about his methodology.

“But then I have to consider all the possible ideas that students may come up with and think about how to keep the discussion anchored on the text. That isn’t easy, but while I may feel tired at the end of the day, I also feel exhilarated at the excitement that students go away with.”

Payzant said that such teaching, whether at the elementary or secondary level, requires the instructor to be a careful listener, to understand group dynamics, to know when to let an idea drop, and when to expand on a particular argument.

“You can’t wing it, even though it may appear you are doing so,” Payzant said. “It requires a strong knowledge base.”

Gray tells teachers that the seminar method is not mutually exclusive from knowledge mastery, and that in the short-term, it will sharpen their skill as questioners even when merely following the textbook.

“It’s rather a merging,” he said. “There is a lot of practice and attention to close reading, attention to speech and to detail, and to vocabulary, which are all basic skills. You can’t engage in thought, in a consideration of ideas, without competence in what look like basic skills but which are part of highly sophisticated discussions.”

Individual teachers at Mann Middle, Memorial Junior High, Jerabek Elementary and Hoover High schools have been experimenting with seminars for regular classes and tell Gray that their students respond positively in almost all cases.

“It’s a form of questioning kids and getting them to stretch their minds rather than asking for ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers,” Mann Principal Maruta Gardner said. “Dennis did a seminar with regular eighth-grade kids talking about Euclid’s theories of geometry and the 25 teachers who were observing could not believe what they saw.”

Feeling of Satisfaction

In Gray’s estimation, students learn quickly that preparation for and participation in a seminar bring the same feelings of satisfaction as hard practice on a basketball court or baseball field.

During his Patrick Henry demonstration, several students who initially struggled with their thoughts were visibly beaming after they later made points that their peers accepted as the basis for further discussion.

“One of the hardest things for many students to do is to listen well,” Gray said. “I tell the kids to count to three after every answer so that they have time to think about what they just said. . . . We are not in a competition of ideas but are here to generate discussion and support points with reference to the readings and to other knowledge.”

Some students are “militantly apathetic” at the beginning, Gray concedes. “But that’s natural since we’ve raised a generation of kids who go through school trained to sit like passive lumps,” he said.

And even after the seminars, he encounters those students who are more comfortable with regurgitating information and not having to defend ideas.

Gray has encountered criticism that seminars can turn into free-flowing “bull sessions” where students feel no responsibility beyond the immediate discussion.

“That’s where evaluation comes in, but I’m not talking about standardized testing, which leave no room for thoughtfulness on the part of students,” Gray said. “Rather, you provide writing opportunities which will come off successfully because the kids will be steeped in the ideas they have discussed.

“We have to become more satisfied with evidence of achievement other than what computers print out on endless data sheets with results from fill-in-the-bubble multiple choice tests. . . . People will only be content when school graduates are literate and thoughtful in their discourse, and able to more readily learn new things with employers.”