Socratic questioning
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She says “you just have to make her take it”
Health and social care, Level 3. A learner says it as if it settles the matter. The pull is to tell her the law and move on. She writes it down, and she has not had to think.
For example“If a resident refuses her medication, you just have to make her take it.”
Pick an activity. Each takes two or three minutes.
One stem for each kind. Ask, wait three, pass it on.
Why this works in your room
A follow-up question hands the thinking back to the learner.
For your learners: They have to explain, test or defend an answer, not only give one. That is where a half-understood idea shows itself and gets fixed.
For you: You hear how they got there, so you know whether a right answer was understood or guessed.
Clarify
Gets them to say exactly what they mean.
“What do you mean by fine? What would you check?”
Test the assumption
Brings out what they are taking for granted.
“What are you assuming about who decides?”
Ask for evidence
Asks what the claim rests on.
“How do you know? What did you measure?”
Change the viewpoint
Makes them stand somewhere else.
“How would the resident see that?”
Follow it forward
Takes the idea on to what happens next.
“If you are wrong, what happens?”
Question the question
Turns them back to the question itself.
“Why do you think I asked how you got there?”
Elsewhere in Bradford ThreadWorks
Big 4Copilot: writing detailed prompts that say who it is for and exactly what you want.Open Big 4 (opens in a new tab)
WalkThrusStretch and challenge for all: probing questions, and asking for a better answer.Open WalkThrus (opens in a new tab)
Prompts to paste into Copilot
Copilot is good at writing questions when you tell it the subject, the level and the kind of question you want. Change what is in brackets.
Six questions for my next lesson
Act as a teaching coach. I teach [subject] to [level] learners at a further education college. Give me six Socratic questions for a lesson on [topic], one of each kind: clarifying, testing an assumption, asking for evidence, changing the viewpoint, following an idea forward, and questioning the question. Keep each under 15 words.
A follow-up for a wrong answer
A learner on a [course] course said: [what they said]. Give me three follow-up questions that would help them find the gap in their own thinking, without telling them the answer.
The idea
A Socratic question does not check an answer. It asks the learner to do more thinking with the answer they gave. Paul and Elder sort these questions into six kinds, which are the six used here.
Paul and Elder, The Thinker's Guide to the Art of Socratic Questioning (opens in a new tab)The evidence
The Education Endowment Foundation rates structured talk and questioning (oral language approaches) at about six months of extra progress, and teaching learners to think about their own thinking (metacognition) at seven months or more.
EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit (opens in a new tab)How sure is this?
Partly. The EEF figures are for talk and thinking about thinking in general, not for these six kinds. Paul and Elder's list is a teaching framework, not a tested one. The use here is our own, so treat it as worth trying.
No source claimed