On teaching more like Socrates

A few months ago, I enjoyed a lovely child-less vacation with my wife. Besides sleeping in and eating long leisurely meals out at nice restaurants, one of the joys of those days was getting to read.

Given hours to while away beside a pool, I brought along a book of Plato dialogues to see what I could make heads or tails of. I spent most of a day reading and re-reading Meno, one of the collection’s shorter dialogues.

The dialogue contains a famous episode of Socratic teaching, where Socrates attempts to illustrate the theory of recollection—the idea that all knowledge is innate and that the process of teaching is more about leading someone to an answer that they already have.

This episode includes a boy in Meno’s household, who Socrates leads through a geometry problem. Now, it’s debatable how much Socrates leads the boy on with his questions—there isn’t a strong conclusion in favor of Socrates’ “theory of recollection”—but we are still left with a foundational example of the Socratic method.

At the conclusion of the episode, Socrates observes:

If someone will keep asking him these same questions often and in various forms, you can be sure that in the end he will know about them as accurately as anybody.

~

“You do this, then that, then this, then—oh, this is a little weird, and I suppose you could do it this other way, too—this, then that, and then you’re done!”

Yikes.

I wince when I hold my teaching methods up against Socrates.

Over the past few months, I’ve been on-boarding a new employee, so my “teaching style”—if the generous word “style” is even merited—is something I’ve paid a lot more attention to.

Sure, not every process demands a Socratic approach; sometimes, you just need to show someone how to export a PDF from InDesign.

But there are other times when Socrates would come in handy.

For instance, I often find myself explaining how to solve a type of problem, especially in InDesign, an extremely flexible program, where the problem is: I know what this needs to look like, but how should I do it?

Now, I know what my answer would be. But because InDesign is so flexible, there is more than one answer.

So this is something for me to work at. It feels disingenuous—knowing the answer but not providing it—but I hope that the result is a form of learning less rote and more self-directed.