Learning to Be Wrong: Using Socratic Challenge to Foster Critical Thinking

Contemporary educators view classroom dialogue as an effective pedagogy that promotes critical thinking and, consequently, disciplinary knowledge. Yet, many current dialogue-based models may not be sufficiently robust to help students learn to discriminate among competing claims and, whenever appropriate, change their initial positions. In this article, we introduce an instructional approach we call Socratic Challenge. Inspired by the centuries-old model used by Socrates, as well as contemporary research in education, this approach relies on brief and critical exchanges between the teacher and the learner in the context of strong counterintuitive arguments. We discuss the importance of truth as a collective goal of a dialogue designed to foster the development of critical thinking and examine the role of cognitive dissonance and social interaction in supporting key practices of Socratic Challenge: strengthening the critical-analytic function of dialogue and attending to students’ epistemic emotions. Next, we illustrate a step-by-step process for implementing Socratic Challenge. To show how Socratic Challenge can offer opportunities for students to progressively recognize errors in their reasoning and process the emotions associated with being wrong, we draw on transcripts from a discussion in a high-school philosophy class. We then argue that truth-seeking dialogue should not be restricted to a specific disciplinary context. Instead, educators should capitalize on the transdisciplinary nature of philosophy and use it to promote student learning across school curricula. While the contribution of this article is largely theoretical, we draw on the concept of Socratic Challenge to question some of the common assumptions and instructional practices aimed at promoting critical thinking and disciplinary knowledge through dialogue. This analysis exposes disagreements about the role of truth and critique during dialogue, providing guidance for future empirical studies.