The Socratic Method

The Socratic Method in the 21st Century (Updated)

For many non-lawyers (and a good many lawyers), law school conjures up images of large lecture halls packed with students being instructed by an overbearing, authoritarian professor relentlessly posing a series of questions to the hapless students caught in the line of fire. As vividly perfected by the fictitious Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase, the pedagogy is commonly known as the “So...

Andragogy and the Socratic Method: The Adult Learner Perspective

One of the teaching methods available to teachers in the ‘andragogic’ model of teaching is the method of ‘Socratic Seminars’. This is a teacher-directed form of instruction in which questions are used as the sole method of teaching, placing students in the position of having to recognise the limits of their knowledge, and hopefully, motivating them to learn. This paper aims at initiating the di...

Running head : STUDY OF THE SOCRATIC METHOD 1

In this study we analyzed 65 fragments of session recordings in which a cognitive behavioral therapist employed the Socratic method with her patients. Specialized coding instruments were used to categorize the verbal behavior of the psychologist and the patients. First the fragments were classified as more or less successful depending on the overall degree of concordance between the client’s ve...

Using the Socratic method in office-based teaching.

(Fam Med 2004;36(3):162-3.) Editor’s Note: In this month’s column, Douglas Lewis, MD, discusses how the Socratic method can be used in office-based teaching to help the learner gain new knowledge. Dr Lewis is the associate director of the Via Christi Family Practice Residency in Wichita, Kan. I welcome your comments about this feature, which is also published on the STFM Web site at www.stfm.or...

The Socratic Bergson