The Socratic Method Works

A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my mom. She had to teach a person with special needs about basic house care and did not know how to explain it in a way that they could appreciate. In listening to everything she had to say and playing around with it all, I came up with an idea.

The person with special needs plays the guitar and is very good at it. He knows how to take care of his instruments at every level. So I tell my mom to start out by asking the question, "How do you know when it's time to change a guitar string?" From there, he was certain to know the answer and be happy to share it. (Everybody loves talking about their passion.) With that established, you can ask what else is like that. If guitar strings of a useful life before they get replaced, does a kitchen sponge? If so, then how do we know that it's time?

My mom's concern was that if he has trouble retaining new things, especially rules, that they would never get through to him. And what I told her was that he wasn't learning anything new in the first place. All we were doing was expanding the realm of where his existing knowledge applied. If he can maintain a musical instrument, he can maintain a house (or at least understand when things need to be repaired, even if he couldn't do them himself). She wouldn't have to tell him what to do because all she would do is ask him questions, and let him explain things/teach her.

The next day, I got a very excited phone call from my mom. Things worked better than either of us expected. She got about three steps into my hypothetical conversation by the time he had the realization of how guitar maintenance applies to house maintenance. (And it was a big ah-ha moment, which is a good sign that it was real and will stick.)

I have no hands-on work with special needs people, but I'm pretty good at explaining things to people (which is why I'm an awesome technical writer). And in all my experiences, the Socratic method has worked better than any other approach. I have heard of it working to teach 3rd graders how binary math works on a hot June day, and I have now heard of it working to teach a person with special needs how to be aware of house maintenance.

As a communicator, I cannot recommend highly enough to study the Socratic method. Try to read some Socratic dialogues to see how they work as a conversation. Try to use it on yourself; you may find that you know a whole lot more than you realize, but you just never thought about it.