What if instead of saying whatever we want to say about any subject even when we don’t know enough about it we simply stopped to listen what those who have read more about something has to tell us?

I’ve decided to start this post with a question because it is possibly the Paramount way learning becomes effective...through questions. Asking someone (or maybe ourselves) abou our most fundamental certainties can surprisingly reveal that we don’t know very much about them. The socratic dialogue is an important technique for leading learners not to the right answers but to the right questions instead. By the way, are there right questions? Can you see it? I started this paragraph by affirming something that I myself started to question now. I do think that the foolest questions might be the ones that guide us to self-reflection.

So, Socratic dialogue is one of the strategies which can be applied in Problem Based Learning situations to promote the enhancencment of discussions. It necessarily involves negotiation and the setting of goals which move towards a common interest. Talking about common interests don’t mean people need to agree with each other’s conclusions in the end. Actually, the means through what the members of a conversation or group discussion are going to find their (in)conclusions is the major idea in cases like this. Socratic dialogue is a good strategy to explain the principle of falsibility of Sciences for example. While Faith depends mostly on the beliefs someone put on a superior being, in Sciences several researchs about the same topic are carried out with different methodologies and different results may be found once the points of view are changed. In other words, socratic dialogue is not a way to make people doubt their own beliefs, it is indeed a good way to move us to self-questioning. In the critical literacy studies, for example, several authors have emphasized the need of asking ourselves the following questions: Why do I read texts the way I do? That’s socratic dialogue which sponsors self-regulated and ubiquitous learning. For more information about this resource, check the video below in which a Philosophy Professor and their students comment on how it is applied in their meetings: