JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS, Vol. 5,4, aaa-bbb.
Copyright © 1993, Maximilian Press, Publisher.

The Socratic Classroom: Classroom Communication Strategies

John Immerwahr
Villanova
University
 

ABSTRACT

Many college professors view class discussion, as opposed to lecturing, as the most appropriate way to enhance critical thinking and real understanding. At the same time, beginning teachers often have difficulty in stimulating discussions and frequently ask questions that inhibit communication rather than enhancing it. The author proposes a classification system for classroom questions, and uses this system to show how changing the type of questions asked may promote classroom communication and improve its intellectual climate.

Stimulating Classroom Communication

One of the professional activities from which I have profited most over the years is watching graduate students evolve from awkward beginning teachers to mature (and sometimes outstanding) professors and mentors. To me the most striking thing about the process is the difficulty of the initial shift from master-student to beginning-teacher. One would think that after seventeen or eighteen years as a student, a graduate student would be well prepared to be a teacher. But in fact, the difference between student and teacher is rather like the difference between restaurant critic and chef. there are a number of skills which have yet to be learned.

One of the most frustrating tasks for beginning college teachers is the challenge of stimulating and leading class discussions. Most beginning instructors believe, with Socrates, that philosophical learning is inextricable from dialogue. They see philosophy not so much as a content of material to be memorized and digested, but as a method of critically examining questions and assumptions. Their goal is Socratic in that they believe that this communicative process can only take place best in a process of give and take and mutual exploration. Indeed, as Book (1993) points out, there is quite a bit of research which also supports the concept that
"students most effectively construct their understanding of concepts through talking with other students and teachers about the subject matter" (p. xxx).

Unfortunately, this apparently simple goal is sometimes difficult to achieve. The problem is that thinking is oftentimes a painful process. Especially in a classroom situation, it is often easier and safer for students to manipulate communication symbols without really internalizing their meaning or significance. Unfortunately, much time in classrooms is spent on what Roby (1988) calls "quasi-discussion." What the teacher communicates about the subject becomes more important than why the teacher is communicating it.

Given this commitment to intellectual exchange, many beginning instructors regard success in stimulating discussion as the mark of good philosophical teaching. All too often, however, they find themselves lecturing to groups of bored students who are, in turn, wondering bow this lecture is going to help them get a job especially in today's slow-growth economy.

In what follows, I present an analysis both of the classroom communication environment and of the types of questions teachers typically ask. Ibis analysis, while simple, has a number of concrete implications for why faculty members don't get the kind of discussions they would like to have, and some steps they may wish to experiment with to obtain better results. While this approach grew out of discussions concerning the teaching of philosophy, instructors in other disciplines have also found it helpful In this paper, I try to give this analysis a less discipline-specific focus by selecting examples from literature.

A Vignette

Consider the following little piece of classroom dialogue:

Teacher: When Hamlet goes up to his mother's chamber, who does he see on his way up there?

(Initial response from the class: dead silence. Eventually one student raises a hand]

Student: The King?

Teacher: Right, what happens then?

Student: Well, he thinks about killing him but decides not to because the king is, like praying.

Teacher: Right, what is ironic about that?

Student: Uh, Hamlet doesn't seem to be like especially religious anyway. So why is he worried about this?

Teacher: Isn't the real irony that Claudius isn't really praying anyway?

Student: Oh, yeah.

The Complex Dynamics of a College Classroom

Aristotle's pupil, Theophrastus, once observed that "Boys throw rocks at frogs for sport, but the frogs die in earnest." His point was that in certain games, the stakes may not be the same for all players. In understanding what has gone awry in the discussion above, it maybe helpful to analyze the classroom situation as a communication game, with different stakes for different players.

The instructor's perspective.

The instructor, who may well have a passionate commitment to Shakespeare, wants to have a discussion of this particular scene in the play. The instructor's dream is that the students will be interested in the material and will be tossing out ideas, challenging each other, and developing a deeper love for and understanding of literature.

The response from the class, however, suggests that only one student can identify even the simplest facts relating to the scene. This is in many ways humiliating for the instructor, whose entire life may be predicated on the value and interest of the subject being taught. In a desperate attempt to get some class discussion going, the instructor focuses attention on the one student who has read the text. Unfortunately, that student also crumbles under pressure. The professor is likely to leave the class frustrated, grumbling about how students don't read, don't really care, etc.

From the instructor's point of view, the students were invited to participate in a delightful game of intellectual exchange, but none of them were even prepared to make the first moves.

The students' perspective.

When we switch to the viewpoint of the students, however, the stakes in this game change. In the classroom, the teacher may be focused primarily on the intricacies of Shakespeare, but the students are often functioning in a complex network of their own. After the class, for example, the instructor goes back to a community of other faculty, as well to as neighbors, friends, and family. What happens in the classroom environment has relatively little impact on the faculty member's life outside. The student, however, lives in a world inhabited by other students, and the attitudes of the other students can be highly significant for basic questions concerning, for example, social networks, dating, and housing. Shakespeare may be important but other questions intrude such as these: "What do my peers think of me? Will other people find me sexually attractive? Can I find a roommate for next year? Will I be invited to join a Sorority/Fraternity?" Perhaps a few students are more interested in Shakespeare than in these other matters: not surprisingly, these are the students who in turn go on to become graduate students and eventually professors. This may also explain why many of those who become teachers are surprisingly insensitive to communication dynamics in the classrooms.

While the instructor wishes to invite the students to participate in a world of pure ideas, the students may perceive themselves as being invited to play a game which has consequences having nothing to do with Shakespeare. The game is called "omniscience," where "I (the instructor) know the answer, does anyone else know it too?" What is characteristic of this game is that the stakes for the student can be surprisingly high, and there is more than one way for the student to lose.

A student who answers a question such as, "Who does Hamlet see?" faces a tricky double jeopardy. On the one hand, the answer seems obvious; probably most of the people in the class also know it as well. But many students don't like to answer obvious questions, it makes them look (or feel) like "grade grubbers" or worse. Indeed, one of the most contemptuous expressions in the language-"brown-noser' --is reserved for such people.

On the other hand, the obvious answer may be the wrong one. In the moment or two the students are given to decide whether to answer the question, fleeting doubts can pass through the mind: "Maybe Hamlet met someone else along the way, or perhaps the teacher is thinking of a different scene." If the student offers the wrong answer, the student will be penalized by looking stupid in front of everyone else. Is it a surprise, then, that the typical student's response to these questions is a fragile silence?

In the vignette above, eventually one student does decide to rescue the professor. The result, however,- is that the bold student is now subjected to a cross examination, which ultimately ends in public humiliation. Unless this student is remarkably irrepressible, he or she will not volunteer a classroom comment again soon. When we step back from topic of Shakespeare and examine the communication transpiring in might appear at first glance. The communicative exchanges are set against wider concerns that may impinge upon the instructor's pedagogical goals. The instructor's goal was to stimulate class discussion. But because the instructor has not really analyzed the communicative environment, the net effect was to inhibit dialogue. The instructor came away from the class believing that the students were ill-prepared and disinterested. The students came away equally frustrated, both by being invited to participate in a no-win game, and also by the effort involved in having the instructor's lecture pulled out of them through a painful process of cross examination. They might rightly ask: "If the instructor has something to say, why not just say it, instead of making us say it."

A Simple Classification System

Once an instructor departs from the safety of a monologue, the stakes invariably go up. There are, however, ways to make the dynamics more explicit and to make them work more effectively. One way to do this is to focus greater attention upon the kinds of questions that teachers ask in classroom settings. There are many different schemes for analyzing questions, but the one I find fruitful in this context is an understanding of three different variables which apply to most classroom questions. These variables include: using questions to invite an infinite range of possible answers; directing questions to subgroups; and, allowing time to formulate responses to questions. These variables provide, in effect, a three-dimensional grid on which instructors can plot different styles of classroom questioning and evaluate how each improves communication in their classrooms.

Dimension One: How many answers are possible?

One obvious dimension for classifying questions is the number of answers which would be regarded as correct. In our example above, there is really only one correct answer, and, of course, the instructor already knows it. Other questions have a wider range of possible answers, and the teacher may or may not know all of them. The question: "Can you give me examples of irony in Hamlet?" permits a wider number of acceptable answers. Other questions, such as "How did you react to this scene?" can invite an infinite range of possible answers.

Dimension Two: How many people are asked the question?

Some questions are directed to an entire class, others to a single individual. Alternatively a question may be addressed to a subgroup, for example, "For those of you who said you favored this, what were your reasons?"

These two dimensions taken together create a two-dimensional grid for plotting questions. A question with a single answer may be directed to the entire class, or a question with multiple answers may be directed to a single person. Although the possibilities are infinite, we can at least isolate four extremes. For ease of classification, I attach names to the extremes of each type of question. Reminiscent of television quiz shows, "toss-up" questions are those where the whole class is presented a question with a single answer. A "free fire" question gives the entire class an opportunity to contribute multiple answers to a single question. When we pose a single-answer question to a single student we put that person in the "hot seat," or, more gently, we can "invite' a single student to give responses to a more open-ended question. Figure I plots the four extremes with examples of each:

Figure I
                                                                                           

    Dimension Three: How much time is allowed for the response?

A third dimension concerns how much time is allowed students to answer the question. Once again, this can vary considerably. Many questions are presented in a way such that only an immediate answer is appropriate. At the other extreme, an instructor may give out the questions before the assignment is even read, so that students can think about the questions as they are
preparing the assignments. Between these two extremes, some instructors present the questions to the class, and then allow people a few minutes to talk in groups or to jot down their thoughts before asking for public responses. (I leave it to the reader to imagine the more complex three dimensional grid, where each of the types of question described above can be asked with more or less time permitted for the answer.)

Any of the types of questions enumerated above can be asked with greater or less permissible response time. Obviously, toss-ups and free fires can be given out in advance, as can inviters. There are even contexts where it can be effective to give students advance notice of a hot-seat question. I find that with a student who wants help in speaking in class, it may be helpful to say: "In the next class, I will begin the class by asking you to summarize the reading assignment." In some cases this allows the student to prepare an answer in advance which decreases the anxiety about public speaking. Meanwhile, the overall pedagogical effort remains to improve the intellectual climate of the classroom by fostering its communicative environment.

Applications

Keeping this simple philosophical analysis in mind can be productive in learning how to promote classroom communication. Let us return to our initial vignette. The instructor opened by demanding an immediate answer to a toss-up question (a question with only one answer directed to the entire group). Not surprisingly few people were willing to risk an answer. For the reasons we have already noted, this is often the least productive way to stimulate classroom communication.

A general rule of thumb I have discovered is that an effective way to encourage a Socratic dialogue class is to move away from immediate answer/toss-up questions. There are several ways to do this: by asking questions with a wider range of answers, by directing the questions to a smaller number of students, and by giving students more time to answer them. Let's explore some of these strategies:

Strategy 1: Changing the permissible range of answers.

The teacher can change the dynamics by modifying the question so as to broaden the range of possible answers, using free-fire questions instead of toss-ups. Suppose the conversation goes like this:

Teacher: Let's talk about the scene where Hamlet, on his way to his mother's room, sees Claudius but doesn't kill him because he thinks Claudius is praying. What did you think of this scene? Do you believe Hamlet?

Heather: I thought it was really interesting that just when Hamlet thinks like Claudius is praying, Claudius tells us that like he can't pray.

Teacher: Wonderful irony, isn't it. Other reactions?

Chris: I really don't believe Hamlet. I think he is just afraid to kill him and the prayer thing is a rationalization.

Lee: He kills someone else just a few pages later, so he can't be that afraid.

The effect of free-fire questions is to permit a wider range of possible answers. Indeed, the answers quite literally are not known to the instructor. The fact that the teacher does not already know the answer means that the teacher is more likely to listen to the responses that are given, rather than simply dismissing student comments as soon as it becomes clear the student is not giving the right answer. Nothing encourages class discussion more than the feeling that the teacher is actually listening to what the students are saying.

Another advantage of this strategy is that since multiple answers are possible, the instructor need not stop after the first one is given. Indeed, the teacher need not evaluate the individual comments one way or the other; the teacher can write the responses on the board and let the students comment, or only comment after the answers are all out on the table.

Strategy 2: Changing the number of students invited to answer.

Another way to change the framework is to change the number of students who are invited to answer. One approach is to address questions to specific students. These questions might be open-ended "inviters" (e.g., "Chris, what were some of your reactions to the reading?'). These questions put pressure on an individual student, but since they allow for a wide range of answers, give the student a certain amount of freedom.

Indeed, the teacher might even want to experiment with hot-seats. The dialogue looks like this:

Teacher: Jill, who does Hamlet see on his way to the chamber?

Jill: Claudius?

Teacher: Right. Fred, what happens at that moment?

Fred: I didn't do the reading.

Teacher: Hmmm, I'll have to come back to you next time. Kevin, what about you?

Kevin: He sees Claudius praying and he goes, "Like I can't do him now because I'll get blood all over the little chapel here in the castle, which God won't appreciate. Also since Uncle C. is praying he will go off to heaven." [There is always at least one wise-guy in every class.)

Single answer questions may be directed to individuals, allowing little time to respond. For students who have done the reading, this is a less complex communicative interaction. Because they do not volunteer, students lose nothing by giving the right answer to an obvious questions. Even for a student who gets the wrong answer, at least some self respect can be preserved. Everyone knows that not every student can complete every assignment. (In fact, this was Socrates' typical methodology. He almost invariably directed a closed-ended question to a specific individual.)

Using this pedagogical strategy, the teacher is, in effect, administering an in-class oral examination. While this form of cross-examination cannot exactly be described as "classroom communication" it does have advantages. At least it tells the instructor who has and who has not completed the assignment, and it provides a motivation for students to complete the assignment. At any rate, it is a straighter communicative transaction, which rewards preparation and punishes those who have not prepared. The original example, by contrast, tends to reward students for not
speaking at all.

Strategy 3: Adding an element of time.

A third pedagogical strategy involves opening the discussion by giving people more time to prepare and answer, which in turn means that they may be more willing to defend their comments, and to enter into dialogue with other students who have different perspectives.

Teacher: I'd like each person to jot down a few ideas about how Shakespeare treats the women in the play." [Another version: "Form groups of two or three and discuss
this question among yourselves for a few minutes.]

[The instructor waits a minute.]

Teacher: Let's get some of these ideas on the board, I'll start in the back of the room. Terry, what did you write down?"

Terry: He is really hung up on his mother.

Teacher: Great, let's get that up on the board and then come back to it later.

Dave: I can't understand his attitude toward Ophelia. He treats her badly but then is really upset when she dies.

[After the instructor (or student) places a few ideas on the board, the instructor can shift back into free-fire questions, based on what has been placed on the board. ]

Teacher: "OK, Terry thinks Hamlet is obsessed with Gertrude. Who agrees or disagrees, can you give me some examples?"

Conclusion

It is not my purpose here to try to anticipate the implications of each form of question. Obviously the most strategic question varies depending on the context. My thesis for now is a broader one. The first part of it is psychological: the classroom is a much more complex communicative environment than it may appear to be at first glance, and many factors are at work for students over and above the exclusively cognitive issues that may preoccupy a faculty member's mind. Indeed, most of us got to be faculty members precisely because we were one of the few students in the class who actually cared more about Hamlet than about who to ask to the semi-formal dance. Although our own experience as students is a valuable resource, in many ways it is misleading. Most of our students are not images of ourselves a their age. If teachers are to foster communicative environments in their classrooms, then they need to step back from their own experience and try to understand their students' experience.

Secondly, I have argued that a simple philosophical analysis of the practice of questioning invites instructors to focus on the psychological implications of different communicative strategies that can be used in classrooms. This in turn offers us a wider range of approaches for helping students to take responsibility for their learning.


REFERENCES

Book, C. (1993). Implications of transactional communication and the constructivist view of learning for teaching and staff development. Journal of Management Systems, 5(4), xxx-xXx.
Roby, T. W. (1988). Models of discussion. In J.T. Dillon (Ed.), Questioning and discussion: A multidisciplinary study (pp. 163-191). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.