SS: Socratic Pedagogy: An Ancient Approach Serves as a New Catalyst for Teaching Critical Thinking

Description/Overview: The goal of this workshop is to engage participants in applying ancient principles from Socrates to new strategies for teaching critical thinking. Although nursing literature emphasizes the importance of critical thinking, there is little research focused on how to teach this kind of thinking. A landmark study by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Benner, Sutphen, Leonard, & Day, 2010) identified an urgent need to develop new pedagogies that would teach nursing students and new nurses how to think critically, creatively, and ethically. Socratic pedagogy excels in teaching all three of these areas. The two key parts of Socratic teaching – questioning and metacognition – work in synergy to help students think critically and develop skills for lifelong learning and self-reflection. Socratic questioning prompts students to question their own beliefs and assumptions and to test connections between their beliefs and the situation at hand. Metacognition assignments invite students to reflect on their own thinking and learning, which deepens learning and improves retention. This workshop builds explicitly on the recommendations from the Carnegie Foundation and demonstrates how Socratic pedagogy serves as a catalyst for thinking critically, creatively, and ethically. Part I of the workshop includes findings of a qualitative research study of new nurses trying to apply knowledge from their nursing program to nursing practice. Study participants responded to the prompt: “Describe an incident during your orientation that reflects changes in your critical thinking skills, either positively or negatively”. Voices of nurses responding to the prompt revealed their poignant struggle to bridge the preparation-practice gap. Part II of the workshop provides an overview of Socratic principles drawn from Plato’s dialogues to illustrate how nurse educators can implement these principles into classroom and clinical teaching to help build critical thinking skills. The final portion of the workshop includes specific “how-to” advice, using scenarios relevant to nursing education and practice to allow workshop participants to try out Socratic pedagogy and begin to see for themselves how Socratic techniques can be a catalyst to foster not only critical thinking, but also creative and ethical thinking. Workshop participants will engage in multiple interactive activities with the goal of envisioning how Socratic teaching could take a place in their own educational practice setting. After workshop facilitators demonstrate Socratic questioning with a group of volunteers, all participants will be provided relevant scenarios and invited to practice questioning fellow participants, who will pose as new nurses or nursing students. Participants will also brainstorm together metacognition assignments for students or opportunities for new nurses to engage in metacognitive reflection in a clinical practice setting. The workshop will include frequent opportunities for questions and sharing of ideas among participants, as well as an evaluation in terms of objectives for the workshop. Other than the introduction, the entire workshop will be conducted in a Socratic manner, thus also providing a model for participants of how Socratic teaching functions and what it is like to learn by such a method.