Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Ask the Right Questions

Using the Socratic Method

"Life without examination [dialogue] is not worth living."

Socrates, 469-399 B.C., was a Greek philosopher of Athens, generally regarded as one of the wisest people of all time. Most of our knowledge of him and his teachings comes from the dialogues of his most famous pupil, Plato, and from the memoirs of Xenophon. Using a method now known as the Socratic dialogue, or dialectic, he drew forth knowledge from his students by pursuing a series of questions and examining the implications of their answers.1

1. Concise Columbia Encyclopedia.1991, Columbia University Press
2. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, Plato's Socrates. New York and Oxford: Oxford University, 1994. ISBN 0-19-508175-7
3. Gerald Nadler, Smart Questions: Learn to Ask the Right Questions for Powerful Results, William Chandon, Jossey-Bass, 2004, ISBN: 0-7879-7137-5
4. Cynthia Richetti and James Sheerin, Helping Students Ask the Right Questions, www.ascd.org/publications/ed_lead/199911/richetti.html, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1999
5. Phillip E. Johnson, The Right Questions: Truth, Meaning & Public Debate, InterVarsity Press, 2002
6. M. Neil Browne and Stuart M. Keeley, Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking, Prentice Hall, 2000, ISBN: 0130891347
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method