Socratic questioning - BrainFood To Go

Socratic questioning

Socratic Questioning is disciplined questioning that can be used to pursue thought in many directions and for many purposes, including: to explore complex ideas, to get to the truth of things, to open up issues and problems, to uncover assumptions, to analyze concepts, to distinguish what we know from what we don’t know, and to follow out logical implications of thought. It emphasizes self-education as well as instruction. Plato advised that we should release our inner knowledge through questioning. He favored a learning process that emphasized a process of drawing out knowledge rather than one that focused on stuffing it in. The traditional classroom approach emphasizes the feeding of students; the BrainFood technique focuses on proactive student foraging. Socrates admonished us to “know ourselves” and developed a technique of inquiry that allowed us to do just that. He believed that the teacher is a “midwife of recollection.” (Self-generated lists facilitate such recollection and drawing out. The are like a pick, shovel, sifter and nugget sack that have been historically been employed in the process of mining valuable resources.