On Socratic Dialogue and adapting to students’ needs
Karthish Manthiram is an assistant professor of chemical engineering at MIT. This spring, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced a rapid transition to remote teaching and learning, Professor Manthiram adapted his popular Socratic Dialogue-based classes to a virtual environment. His efforts to keep his students engaged won him a 2020 Teaching With Digital Technology Award from MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor.
Here, Prof. Manthiram shares his insights on using Socratic Dialogue to help students reach the right answers in class; creating a space where students feel comfortable hitting “unmute”; and using the challenge of going virtual as an opportunity to play with teaching practices.
Creating a space to think openly
It was an eerie feeling transitioning to digital learning in the midst of Covid-19. We had worked hard to make an environment in our physical classroom on the MIT Campus into an environment where students felt comfortable speaking their mind and thinking openly. Students knew they could expect this when walking through the doors into that space. It took some time for us to discover how to recreate that in a digital classroom. That was my highest priority as we were transitioning: to re-establish our mores in a new setting as we transitioned from physical to digital, so that we could continue on our journey to learning how electrons are involved in chemical reactions.
The Socratic method, in class and online
I remember the very first lecture that I ever taught — being excited to deliver content that I had poured endless hours into preparing and perfecting. I came into the room and started lecturing, looking to the students’ faces for a sense of whether they were engaged by the material or not. And instead, all I saw were faces looking to the board to digest a statement, and then looking down to write it down, followed by a repeat of this process. I stopped lecturing and asked the class a question, and slowly they stopped this process of digesting and writing; someone chimed in and answered the question I posed. The answer was close but not quite right, so I gave a bit of feedback to guide towards the right answer. Another student chimed in, building off the last student’s answer and taking my feedback into account, and at that point we were a step closer to the right answer. We continued this process of me providing guiding feedback and another student chiming in for a few cycles, and a few minutes later we actually arrived at the right answer, together through dialogue.
I remember chatting with one of my colleagues, Klavs Jensen, a few months later about this, and he mentioned to me that Socratic Dialogue of this sort has historically played a role in chemical engineering since the early days of the discipline. Warren K. Lewis, an MIT professor who is widely considered to have created the modern field of Chemical Engineering during the first half of the 20th century, employed Socratic Dialogue — so there is a long history of this teaching method even within our own department here at MIT.
Socratic Dialogue for me is very much built upon the comfort that students have in a physical classroom — that they have found the space within those four walls to be a place where they can speak their mind without judgement as they creatively put forth bold hypotheses for questions we are posing. Hence, one cannot take for granted that the trust they had built in the physical classroom would translate to the digital classroom. Furthermore, I realized that students had years of experience that led to productive habits in the physical classroom setting — feeling comfortable raising their hand, talking to me after class, or leaning over to their seatmate to ask a question. These lessons they have learned since childhood do not immediately translate to a digital classroom.
Indeed, our first days of teaching over Zoom were quieter, and it was difficult to engage in Socratic Dialogue. It was important that students feel comfortable unmuting themselves; to encourage this, we started using breakout rooms. I would pose a question to the class and then use breakout rooms as a means of creating discussion in a smaller setting where students felt more comfortable unmuting themselves for the first time. Then, this comfort translated to the larger classroom setting as well, where students were also willing to unmute themselves and engage in Socratic Dialogue. The students just needed a little help in building new habits for our digital interactions.
Adapting in real time
Creating an environment where students feel that they can provide continuous feedback on my teaching has helped me react more quickly to unforeseen problems. This is especially true during this pandemic, as we are changing so many aspects of our teaching simultaneously, making it hard to de-convolute which changes are responsible for particular changes in students’ outcomes. I have found that by making clear on the first day of class that the students are responsible not just for the standard learning objectives but for creating the change they want to see in this course, that they become interested agents in understanding and improving the pedagogical tools we use in our classroom.
“Students have an amazing capacity for empathy. It’s important to be open and honest with students that you’re learning too, and trusting in their understanding of your vulnerability.”
Whether we are students or instructors, we are all experiencing so much for the first time this year, and we may as well acknowledge that and make this “beginner mindset” a strength. We are all liable to make mistakes as we experiment with new ways of teaching and learning, but this is what makes it all exciting — that we experiment not only in our own research labs, but in the classroom, as we take a risk to try new things and dynamically adapt as we see how things play out in practice.
