Questioning as Tutoring Method
Hey, all,
It's Sylvia, making my debut blog! At the end of our CRLA training yesterday, Jesse asked "What is the Socratic method?" which, I assume, was a question on the worksheet that the presenter didn't really cover fully. I asked Scott to give his take on things, so here it is:
the Socratic method as little more than a pointed interrogation of one person by another in order to arrive at some desired conclusion (although I think it'd be a lot of fun if we had a Thrasymachus character in our class!). It is, in this sense, the opposite of lecturing, since it forces the person being question to answer the
questions for him/herself and therefore go through the process of solving the problem on his/her own rather than have the "right" information simply read/lectured/spoken to them.
For Writing Center tutors, this is going to be an absolutely crucial means
of running a tutoring session. It will be most readily applicable in
matters of content and argumentation, since the tutor can "drive" the tutee
toward a desired conclusion about the writing.
Anybody else want to expand on this definition?
It's Sylvia, making my debut blog! At the end of our CRLA training yesterday, Jesse asked "What is the Socratic method?" which, I assume, was a question on the worksheet that the presenter didn't really cover fully. I asked Scott to give his take on things, so here it is:
the Socratic method as little more than a pointed interrogation of one person by another in order to arrive at some desired conclusion (although I think it'd be a lot of fun if we had a Thrasymachus character in our class!). It is, in this sense, the opposite of lecturing, since it forces the person being question to answer the
questions for him/herself and therefore go through the process of solving the problem on his/her own rather than have the "right" information simply read/lectured/spoken to them.
For Writing Center tutors, this is going to be an absolutely crucial means
of running a tutoring session. It will be most readily applicable in
matters of content and argumentation, since the tutor can "drive" the tutee
toward a desired conclusion about the writing.
Anybody else want to expand on this definition?
posted by Anonymous at 12:27 PM
1 Comments:
Please pardon the random comment, but I was a tutor in collge and my preferred weapon of choice was the Socratic Method. I thought I was pretty good at it, that is until I went to law school. As it turns out, law school professors are the Jedi Knights of the Socratic Method. I had one professor who never made a single non-interogatory statement in the two semesters I had him as a teacher. It got to the point that my classmates and I begged him to stop, his response was simple, "why should I?"
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