How Do Good Teachers Harness the Power of Questions?

Description

Everyone has known that one stand-out teacher who knew how to ask the best questions. Questions that challenged us fairly. Questions that made us think hard and discover new things just by trying to come up with an answer. How did they do it?

I won’t claim to have the single solution, but I have started to notice a few things that my noteworthy teachers have in common. Further, at this point in my life, I have accrued a decent amount of experience teaching and tutoring.

This recording is about what I think is the best way to use questions to teach. I’ll also highlight ways questions shouldn’t be used, and I’ll outline what an ideal “Socratic” question looks like.

Credits

Music used in this recording:

• “A Closing Statement” by Dexter Britain
• “Sunrise in F-Major” by dep

Text Notes

I want to discuss the effective teaching technique of the Socratic Method, because I find it to be often underused or misused.

In this recording, I’ll be speaking on the part of the teacher, and will shortly return to speak on the part of the Socratic student. This recording will have two parts. First, I’ll define what the Socratic Method ought to be. Then, I will discuss what I find to be a good Socratic question versus a bad one.

Ok, first, I’ll discuss what the Socratic Method is and ought to be. I never want to use particular terms without defining them, so when I say Socratic Method, what do I mean? I mean the process of learning through questioning. The teacher asks a question, and the student responds and learns from the response.

What’s the primary goal of using this method? Why not just state the facts and teach the material declaratively? Now, please own this. You ready? The Socratic Method ought to be used to teach the student to think like you do about a problem. That is the primary goal. When you first engage with a student about a problem, there’s an imbalance of knowledge about a problem. Not only do you know more about a problem, but you know how to approach the problem. You know how to guide your own thinking in order to solve a problem. You know the right questions to ask in order to solve the problem. Wait, you know the right questions to ask in order to solve the problem. That’s the key. These questions, the questions you ask yourself, these are what you ought to be asking students when using questions to teach. You’re passing on your intuition and experience about how to solve a problem by providing an framework for how to approach the problem to your student. But not only that, you force your student to engage with that way of thinking, more on that in just a minute. In my experience, questions are the best way to teach this kind of intuition.

And you can’t tell me, “Everyone thinks differently. It’s inconsiderate to tell other people how to think.” The Socratic Method is not about teaching people to restructure their thinking — if it was, you’d be right and no one would use the method. It’s about providing necessary and desired structure where there is none. Say we’re talking about movie soundtracks. If I show you a piece of music and then tell you, “This is a creative masterpiece. You must love this song because of it’s creative construction.” That would be bad, because you already have structured thinking in that area. You know what you like and don’t like, and my instruction is attempting to restructure your thoughts, where structure already exists. But instead, what if you tell your student, “To really appreciate this song, you’ll want to look at the chord progression. What do you notice?” And I don’t know, maybe the chord letters actually spell out the name of the character the song represents. Before hearing this, your student may not have any intuition of how to approach analyzing this song. Where do you even start? But after hearing your comment, they now know that as an analyst, one of the places you look is the chord progressions. So next time the student goes looking at a song, they’ll know to look there too. Through your statement, you’ve applied how you think to them. That’s not inconsiderate.

Ok, second, I want to talk about what makes a good question. So you’re studying Scripture in a class, and the passage is 1 Samuel 2. And in verse 25, the priest Eli is rebuking his wicked sons, and he says, “‘if someone sins agains a man, God will mediate for him, but if someone sins against the Lord, who can intercede for him?’ But they [that is, the sons] would not listen to the voice of their father, for it was the will of the Lord to put them to death.” Now, there’s a lot that can be asked about that one verse, but say the instructor asks this question: “So whose fault was it that the sons would die? Is it God’s or theirs?” After all, it says, “for it was the will of the Lord to put them to death.”

First off, I think this is a great question. And not necessarily because of its context and meaning, but rather its form and function. Here are three ways that question is a good question. As you hear these, think about how you see these used by other good teachers, and how you can use them to help others discover beautiful realities.

1) The question forces the student to commit. There are two very real options here. There’s not just one obvious option available, like in the question, “Did sin prove to have consequences here?” And there’s not an infinite number of options with many correct answers either, like in the question, “What do we know from the Bible about God’s will?” That question could be answered 100 different ways and they’d all be right. The best, hard questions that promote learning are ones that have a cap on the number of possible answers, but only one correct answer. You know, I really love it when my professors ask the question, “What will this computer code do?” We’ll be looking at a snippet of code, and they’ll ask, “So if I run this code, what will it do?” For any snippet of code, there are only a few options. Maybe it’ll either print a “1” on the screen, print a “2” on the screen, or it will error out and crash because the code is bad. But which is it? By forcing me to look at the code and then determine for myself, I’m learning to think about what each line is actually doing. Thinking this way, about “what is this line actually doing?” will help me to think more like a computer scientist when I write my own code in the future. I’m gaining structure in this area of thought, meaning that this question is accomplishing the primary goal of the Socratic Method. It’s a good question because it forces me to choose one answer out of a limited pool of one right answer and one or more wrong answers, and forces me to stick to my answer. I believe getting this commitment is so important, and I’ll talk about why in the next recording.

2) The question is centered on an important truth. Questions can appear deceitfully deep, but if they have no relevance to the student or their mental growth, they’re pointless. Questions should not be dogleg left turns leading away from answers that matter. A bad kind of question in this vein be, “How do you think the father tried to communicate with his sons?” This question might help to paint the story scene more vividly, but is that of benefit? Is that what we want to teach people to think about when they study the Bible? Please say no. So back to the original question: “Whose fault is it that the sons would die?” This question also makes you think, but now you’re wrestling with truths that matter. “Is it really the case that the sons had no choice but to die because God willed it? I believe that man is responsible for his own actions, but this doesn’t sound very much like that. But I believe the Bible is perfect and doesn’t contradict itself.” The student wrestles with truth. When teaching math, you want the student wrestling with why a proof is true, and not whether it was Proof 7-1 or 7-2 in the textbook. One’s important truth, the other doesn’t help the student think about the problem any better. When teaching knife skills in the kitchen, you want the student wrestling with the potential consequences of their grip on the food and knife, and not on keeping their workspace clean. Note that just like in every example here, the bad option is not wrong. It’s important to keep your workspace clean as much as it is to have a lively mental image of Biblical narrative or to know where to find resources in the textbook. But don’t lose sight of what you really want. If you’re teaching knife skills, you’re primary concerns are keeping fingers safe and cuts consistent. Cleanliness, like all secondary things, comes after.

3) The question causes the student to dig deeper. This is not a question that can be answered from mere intuition, like “Did Eli’s sons get what they deserve for their sin?” It’s not a question of exaggerated contrast, where the wrong option is bloated with hyperbole, like, “Is sin just a little, unimportant thing to God, or is it important?” Rather than all of that, this is a question that requires the student to draw on all of their resources and then some. They need to bring what they know and what they’ve experienced to the table and synthesize what they know to realize something new. The question is not one that’s so easy that it’s trivial. On the other hand, it’s not one that’s so hard that the student has no chance of knowing it. It doesn’t matter how many times I ask you, “How do you map a column of strings to upper case in a pandas dataframe with a lambda function?” If you aren’t familiar with data science, you won’t ever get the answer without looking up a lot of stuff. Questions that dig deeper are often not purely fact-based. The best questions involve what the student already knows and combining it with what they ought to know next.

So, in review, use the Socratic Method to help others to think like you do about a problem. Do this by asking questions that force the student to commit to their answer. Don’t get waylaid by questions that aren’t centered on important truths. And use questions that cause the student to synthesize what they know. And hey, that’s not easy. Obviously. It requires work on your end as a teacher. We’d have a lot more good teachers in the world if it were so easy, but as it is, we have a lot of bad teachers who aren’t willing to put in the work or don’t know how. Now you know how. So be thinking about how you can ask good questions that really help people. Good luck.