Hi, I would recommend Teaching The Classics for literature by Adam Andrews as a good starting point to get an idea of how the Socratic list works. I quite like that book, because it has questions for all age groups, each getting progressively harder. I used it with the girls though I don’t use it for everything all the time. As the girls got older I wanted them to become thinkers and not just accept everything on face value. We all do so many things without really thinking things through and I think it is a vital skill. All questions have multiple levels, and lead to new questions and new thought processes. I am no expert at describing this, however in my college in the UK our lecturers used this type of questioning, so it was familiar to me and I use what I was taught back then as well with the girls, I frame my questions on the type of questions I was asked and encourage the girls to question as well. It was in college that I realized that there are no easy answers, that everything requires thought and that one seemingly simple question can lead to a million others – that the original question had a previous question that must have been asked and so forth. I like to use this method in literature, history and politics because it opens up completely new ways of thinking for the girls, they are not just taking things in from the book, but they are deeply thinking about it and it really does teach them to think outside of the box. Since we have been discussing in this way, their essays and discussions have become much more advanced and they themselves have become more confident in their abilities. We don’t do it every day or with every literature book or history item – we pick and choose the times when we use it. I am not about to ruin their enjoyment of history or literature by slavishly demanding discussion after every thing they do – we use it sparingly, and it has made a big impression on them. They are now actively asking deep questions themselves on things they see in the news or read in World or National Review and looking for answers. It sounds a lot more complicated than it really is. It is just basically digging a lot deeper and getting past the superficial, it teaches us to deal with more complex issues – to learn new ways of thinking on subjects. We have to stimulate thought and the way to do that is to ask questions of depth, not just yes and no questions. It also should encourage the student to ask deep questions about things. I imagine this is how scientists come up with things, each question, leads to another, the whys, the what ifs, the hows and is it possible – types of questions. As I said I am no expert and have probably done a terrible job of trying to explain how our family does this – but hope it makes a little sense. This is also why I like CM – narrating and then later written narrations, make a student think and organize their thoughts far better than any textbook could. http://www.criticalthinking.org is a website I really like and has some example questions and explains things far better than I ever could.
Blessings, Linda
