The KindlED Podcast | Episode 15: Teaching Kids to Think. A Conversation with Michael Strong.

Hi, and welcome to the Kindled Podcast, where we dig into the art and science behind kindling the motivation, curiosity, and mental well-being of the young humans in our lives.

Together, we'll discover practical tools and strategies you can use to help kids unlock their full potential and become the strongest version of their future selves. Welcome to Kindled. Katie, how's it going today?

So good, how are you?

I'm good. Any fun stories to share today before we get to our awesome guest?

Um, I was just having a little visitor in here before we pushed record, and it was so fun to show my little 3-year-old about Kindled and our little podcast. And she was sitting in here and she thought it was so fun with the microphone. She was like squeezing the microphone and like It just turned her into a cat. Like, she walked in here and saw her microphone and suddenly, like, she was probably in here for like 15 minutes as I was setting up and she was just like meowing the whole time into the microphone. And then she decided that the new name of Kindle, just FYI, like our podcast is now renamed the Mom and Cat Show and I'm the mom and we have a brand new show going. So we'll, uh, follow that closely.

I like how you said the microphone turned her into a cat. Like, I had this visualization. You grab the microphone and turn into a cat with whiskers and all. But super fun. We should totally like animate something where we can make her into a cat. I bet she would love that.

You would love that.

I'd love to introduce our guest today. His name is Michael Strong, and he's the founder of the Socratic Experience. A virtual school for children ages 8 to 19. He is one of the most experienced designers of innovative school programs in the United States. His projects include a public school program in which minority female students gained 4 years' worth of critical thinking gains in just 4 months. He created the Winston Academy where middle school students passed AP exams, making it the most academically advanced school school in the country at the time. More recently, he co-founded Co-School in Austin, Texas, which combined his high-performance approach to AP coursework and SAT score gains with a focus on entrepreneurial and creative projects. Co-School in turn became the original model for the Academy of Thought and Industry, the high school model for the largest Montessori network in the United States. He is the author of The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice, And lead author of Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems. We cannot wait to welcome Michael to the show.

Michael Strong, welcome to the show.

I'm delighted to be here.

We're gonna have such a great conversation. So tell us a little bit about your background, like your whole story. Tell us how you came to work in education, how you discovered Socratic teaching, and then kind of like what is your big why? Why are you so passionate about your work?

Absolutely. Well, first I had a class in high school. school where, you know, junior year of high school, I had a teacher and we would simply read and discuss philosophy, Plato, Nietzsche, Buber. I loved it. It was, you know, you've seen those films, you go from black and white to color. For me, it was, wow, I get to think about ideas. And I'd never had that experience before. So I loved it. There's a college, St. John's College campuses in Santa Fe and Annapolis, which is 4 years of Socratic discussion on classic texts. I was going to drop out of high school and go there, but I stayed for my senior year. I had good test scores. So I went to Harvard and after a year at Harvard, I decided to transfer to St. John's because I don't like even famous people talking at me. I love dialogue. So I spent 4 years at St. John's, absolutely loving it. And then I went to graduate school in Chicago at the University of Chicago. While there, I started going into public school classrooms under Mortimer Adler's Paideia program in the 1980s and doing demonstration Socratic seminars. And the kids would come alive. You know, I would ask them a question and just so much energy. That led to a full-time job as a teacher trainer, Socratic teacher trainer in Alaska under the Alaska Paideia Project. We were on grant funds. After 3 years, we lost our grant funding and some parents asked me to start a school based on Socratic method. And so I became an accidental education entrepreneur and created what became the Athenaeum School of Anchorage. I then joined a Montessori school in San Antonio where they wanted me to Socratize the pre-K through 8 program. I then created a school for highly gifted children in South Florida where we had 6th, 7th, and 8th graders taking and passing advanced placement exams and a Socratic humanities program. I then created Montessori middle schools for the largest Montessori organization at the time in the San Francisco Bay Area. Then created a charter high school in Angel Fire, New Mexico based on Socratic principles. We were ranked the 36th best public high school in the US in our 3rd year of operation. I then took a break, worked with John Mackey of Whole Foods on entrepreneurial solutions for world problems for about a decade. And I got back into education with both a Socratic emphasis and now more of an entrepreneurial and creative project focus at what was CoSchool in Austin. That then became part of the largest Montessori chain in the US, Higher Ground Education. And so we had Montessori high schools that I created in San Francisco. New York, Austin, and St. Louis. And then when COVID hit, I took all of this virtual to what is now the Socratic Experience for grades 3 through 12 online with students from around the world. So a long and winding path.

That is amazing. So what keeps you going? Like, what is it that you're seeing in this method that's drawing you?

Well, first, I love it. So the, the selfish interpretation is this is so much fun and most of we call them guides rather than teachers. Most of the guides love it. I have people applying to work for me every day unsolicited, and especially when teaching is not fun in other places, because often people who go into education love learning themselves and we're constantly thinking, talking, asking questions. It's so alive. The kids are so alive. So I see it as a way to develop children cognitively to a very high level while also being an authentic and engaging social experience. that I would say adds to their wellbeing considerably. Maybe later we can talk about the adolescent mental health crisis, but it's fun for guides, it's cognitively demanding, and so it helps high-level thinking skills as measured by the SAT and AP tests, among other things. And it's good for kids. What's not to like?

It sounds like it has provided you a really full life.

Oh, it's wonderful. You know, so many people are depressing— depressed. I have fun all the time. It is. It's a wonderful way to live. And often I have teachers who used to teach with me come back, and I've had students who were my students who are now teaching in my schools. And, you know, it is a sort of way of life. So once you get into it—

Yeah. And it sounds like it develops strong connections too, which is really cool. I would love to know, I don't know a whole lot about Socratic method. So can you describe what it is and how it differs from other traditional methods in education?

Sure. So kind of the basic— there are variations, but the basic experience is we read a text. It can be a story, fiction, science, a mathematical proof, read something together. We can do a painting and music as well. But the core experience is read a text, sometimes out of class, sometimes in class. And then the guide simply asks a question. You know, Socrates in Periclean Athens would ask, what is truth? What is beauty? What is justice? And we'll ask questions like that. And then we'll also ask questions from within the text. What does the author mean by this? But they're authentically open-ended. My ideal is a text that's so difficult no one student in the group can understand it on his or her own, and we work together to figure it out. It's sort of a learning club where we're thinking to understand difficult texts. And as a consequence, the students have to think hard. They learn to read. We Train them to break down difficult paragraphs into sentences and clauses, and what's the grammar mean exactly? So it's a very close reading. And then we also do big picture thinking. Sometimes we're in the text doing the close reading, sometimes we talk about truth, justice, betrayal. I was in an elementary classroom last week where we were talking about how do you know when someone is manipulating you? And, you know, 4th grade students have a lot of strong opinions on that. So whatever it is, we ask these authentic open-ended questions, get the kids thinking and talking. And then when we're using a text, dive back in to analyze the difficult material.

So I didn't even realize it. So I have one child that I homeschool, or he's home-educated with tutors, and I work with him sometimes. We kind of unschool a few days a week. He has just a different learning experience, but we've been using Socratic method and I had no idea. And because he loves to read and loves rich literature, and I am the one that I'm like, oh no, I want to understand this, but he likes diving into these books that are really difficult to understand, then we go piece by piece and try to really break down what the author is trying to communicate. So I love that we've been doing this at home, and I like Socratic method too.

Look at you.

Well, absolutely. In a certain sense, you know, of course it's 2,500 years old, but also humanities scholars have been doing this for centuries. Oxford and Cambridge doing something similar. There are many liberal arts universities in the US that do something similar. What's less common is to do it with younger children, but I think once one realizes you can do pretty much the same thing, certain adaptations need to be made. But I think families, educated families, often have intellectual dialogues with their children spontaneously. And I'm very big on social mobility. My parents, my mom was a high school dropout, my dad was an elevator repairman. And I think this is much more important for social mobility than most people realize. Just to talk about writing skills, Often, if you've been thinking and talking about ideas from the time you're young and reading difficult material, essay writing is a totally different experience than if you've simply been taught what a thesis statement is. Like, what? So I'm very big on this as a fundamental path of intellectual development and just making people more aware of its importance and then ways to engage different kinds of students in different ways.

Would this tie into, like, copywork as well, like copying? Literature into writing?

So I wouldn't say copying so much, but, you know, we're very big on essay writing. The way I think of the basic essay is one takes— I'll give you an example. We read 2 essays by Yale on should we bring the woolly mammoths back from extinction or not. One said yes and one said no for these reasons, those reasons. You know, this is middle school. The kids have lots of opinions, very strong opinions on that. But after doing so, Most kids hate essay writing. I often say I love learning and I hate school. And I think language arts is where many of us, and I think especially boys, we're not too happy with school. What is the symbolism of blah, blah, blah? I never got it. It seemed like a weird game. But if we talk about, do I think woolly mammoths should come back or not? And why do you think this, this, this, this, and this? And you can just see kids love to argue and they love to watch their friends argue. But what they don't realize is when they are defending a thesis, they don't use that language, but I do make it explicit. You've just given us the thesis for your essay, and then you did those follow-up points. Those are the supporting points. And what I show them is the spontaneous argument— arguing for something you believe in then can easily be transferred for the outline of an essay. And then of course we can coach writing in terms of paragraph structure and transitions and all of that. But the first thing is to have an opinion you actively want to defend. And from that, basically all of essay writing comes pretty naturally.

I love that we're talking about writing too, because when you're— when you look at people doing Socratic discussions, like, oh, they're just talking, that's easy. But I, I think a really good analogy here is that teaching people how to write before you help them think is kind of like asking someone to read before you help them understand how to talk.

I rant about this all the time. So I write a lot. And I, in my experience, 95% of writing is thinking. Often I'll be lying on the couch doing nothing and my wife will say, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm, you know, preparing to write an essay or an article. You know, I have to think through it, get the ideas in order. Um, and I think this is why so many children hate writing is because they haven't been given the time to think. At one point I was in a high school classroom and I was giving, I was substituting for a teacher and I was give— gave them the writing assignment the teacher had given me to give them. And the students all said, wait, we can't write on this. We haven't had a Socratic discussion yet. And they self-organized into groups of 4 or 5, got together, Argued about it for a bit, and then they were able to write. And it's just that natural.

That's great. I remember last summer I was doing some work with some teenagers, and we take a very Socratic method at home with our own kids. And my oldest, my boys are 8 and 10, so on the younger side. Even my 6-year-old will, you know, share her ideas and things. And I went to work with these teens, and I was asking them questions about what they thought about some texts and trying to like pull out some symbolism for them. And they were just like, did not know what I was at. Like, it's just a blank stare. And then I went home and I pitched the same exact questions to my kids, and they were like just coming up with all of these different analogies and symbolism, like looking at the same thing 10 different ways. I'm like, okay, there's something cognitively going on here when this is the style, when it's the culture.

And it takes— again, I think this is one of the advantages children in educated homes have, is often they've heard this kind of dialogue from the time they're young. Again, coming from working-class home, I did not, so it was so alien. But I do have a YouTube channel called Socratic Michael Strong where I started with a 4-year-old recording Socratic dialogues with her. She is now 10, so you can watch her development from age 4 to age 10. And now she is working through a college-level Python course at age 10 and thinking her way through it. I wrote a book on this called The Habit of Thought, and the whole point is to develop the habit of thinking about things. So it's no longer alien. And once you do that, once the children have a lot of experience— I mean, in my school, the Socratic experience, we basically have 4 hours of dialogue a day, which is way more than what almost anybody else does. But when they have that much experience, then they become interested in different things. They become aware of different possibilities. They are very sophisticated on how to negotiate ideas. In our elementary school last week, we had a couple of students in a breakout group 9-year-olds who were talking. One was Muslim, one was Christian, and they were debating Christianity versus Islam at 9 in a peaceful, respectful way. And it's just, again, it's a habit. This kind of dialogical style is a habit. Once you get used to it, it's easy and fun, but there's a cultural transition that we need to be prepared to do it well. Yeah.

One of my favorite quotes, I'm blanking on who said it, but teaching is, or It goes, learning is mostly talking, teaching is mostly listening. And I think we have that so backwards sometimes. We think the adults, whoever knows more, should be doing the talking when really the people who are coming up need to be doing the thinking and the talking.

Big time. Maria Montessori said the greatest sign of a successful teacher is the students are doing it on their own when the teacher isn't there. And so for me, at all my schools, when the students are actively engaged in dialogue on ideas at lunchtime and after school, That's the win. I've had students do Saturday morning groups, summer groups. You know, they spontaneously create groups on their own because once they have this appetite for learning, then it's pervasive. And the comparison I do is, you know, a coach would— a weightlifting coach would never lift the weights for the, you know, coachee. It's important that the children do the lifting. They have to be doing the thinking, the active intellectual work.

And the younger they start, the more developed these ideas Can be as they get older and as they grow. So many times kids are stifled because they start at such a young age. I have a 6-year-old and we started him in a traditional environment because we were just like, well, that's what the options were around our house. Figured we'd try it. You know, I'm not anti-traditional school or anything like that. I'm more pro my individual children and what works for them. He was only there for about 2 months and it was incredible to watch how He had already started being trained to wait, to be told what to do. His ideas— he has the biggest imagination. We just started seeing that get smaller and smaller, and now he's in a Montessori environment, and it's incredible the shift just from 2 months traditional to now. He's been in the Montessori for 3 months. We did a little just deschooling, unschooling for a few months in between, and he's just constantly grabbing things and creating things and asking questions. And his curiosity, like, light is, like, back on, which is going to serve him his whole life.

I'm a big fan of John Taylor Gatto, the New York State Teacher of the Year. His 7 Lessons of a Schoolteacher essay is essential reading for anyone in education. And he makes the case that traditional top-down education is 12 years of training in how to be passive and dependent. I think that's exactly right. You know, it's not an accident that Prenda was started by an entrepreneur. Most of my parents with a Socratic experience are entrepreneurs or creative professionals. I think people who succeed in life by taking initiative to figure things out and get things done naturally see the value of this kind of education. And again, I think it provides a huge advantage in the 21st century economy because as AI can do anything that's the least bit rote, you know, even they're writing essays and everything, the people who are best at taking initiative and figuring out unstructured situations are going to have the greatest advantage. And to develop these habits of taking initiative to figure things out from the time they're young, I think is gonna have immense— it already, I've seen it decades with the children I've educated. It has immense payoffs.

Have you seen, just to, to go on a little tangent about AI for a second, have you thought about the AI's ability to be the Socratic mentor to ask the questions? To help prompt the thinking. Do you think there's potential in that direction?

Absolutely. And I would say the irony there, at least in the experiments we've done at our school and I've seen other people done, is that right now somebody who's more sophisticated at asking questions themselves gets more out of the AI. And so there's a sort of chicken and an egg kind of thing where I think if one is trained to be passive, It's hard to know where to go exactly. So I am— we're actually developing AI companions, chatbots for, say, our math courses and places where it's, you know, fairly narrow domain. But the big picture is still human. And the way I see this playing out is that humans, first of all, human beings love to be with other human beings. We love the attention of other human beings. We need community with other human beings and connection. So I think there will always be a place for human educators. And I think the more rote, even going to coaching mathematics Socratically, there's a Khan Academy video where Sal Khan is doing this. I think that's a great use for AI chatbots. And I think there are increasingly, as the AI learning tools become more sophisticated, I think it's more important for the humans to do the big picture human connection. Gestalt thinking, and then the chatbots and brilliant edtech. We use a lot of great edtech, as you guys do. Edtech is just, you know, rocking it in terms of more specific skill development.

Yeah, absolutely.

So have you— can you share any research about the effectiveness of the Socratic teaching? Have people studied it, like in randomized control trials or case studies or anything?

So I would say not really. And one of the— I would say the biggest issue there is quality control. So in the 1990s, when I wrote my book, I was leading hundreds of in-service trainings across the US, and one of the difficult things is this is— well, in some ways it's natural. In order to have consistent high quality, it does take training and experience. I was envious from the start when I saw that Montessori educators had a year-long training program designated just for Montessori pedagogy, because I think as we develop these sophisticated pedagogies, we need extended training, mentorship, internships, those sorts of things to make maintain high quality. And so I have seen people use Socratic discussion and it's just talk session. It can be very unstructured and even unconstructive. Sometimes I've seen kids bully each other in class. Conversely, in the back of whatever we do is intellectual consistency. I've got a mind and I choose guides and train guides so we can have the expectation of a logical argument. And it takes a certain level of intellectual sophistication to ask follow-up questions that have a logical consequence. So it's the sort of thing where I've had great results. And when I saw that in the absence of quality control, I could promise nothing. And in fact, I would say there were classroom situations that I would be embarrassed to be associated with described as Socratic. With Montessori, they've had certifications. Montessori school certifications, Montessori training, and so forth. And so I think quality control is a central issue in any kind of innovative, sophisticated pedagogy.

And this is actually a project that you and I have been working on kind of in parallel, redefining teacher education preparation, writing about this with some partnerships. So that— I love those conclusions that it really— it's not that humans don't have a role to play. AI is not going to replace all of this. And also that it's not that we need to replace the role of the teacher. It's that we need the teacher, the adult role, to have a different skill set to really prepare students for the next generation of innovation and how the world is going to work.

Absolutely. And going back to what Adrienne said earlier about kind of taking initiative and kids coming alive, what kind of research would capture that is my question. So, you know, my children, again, were in Montessori schools. I saw them so alive. Quick anecdote, 20 years ago, I created Montessori middle schools in Palo Alto, and half the kids came from up from in the Montessori elementary and half came from public schools. And no matter how intelligent and well-behaved they were, when they were in an environment where they were expected to take initiative, those from public schools had no idea what to do. We had to create a very structured scaffolding to help them learn how to take responsibility. And it took a semester or a year because, again, going to the passivity thing, if they've never been in a position where they can choose their work and are responsible for completing things on their own, They have no idea. And I think one of the challenges with a lot of research is right now it's all test score based, but there's so many different dimensions of what it takes to be a successful, happy human being. While I was at that school, there were 2 Stanford seniors who had gone to Montessori middle school, you know, more than a decade earlier. And we had them come to speak at our middle school and ask them, did Montessori give you any advantage at Stanford? And they said, with respect to academic preparation, none at all, that their public school peers had just as good an academic preparation. But they did say that they were really comfortable going to faculty and asking them questions and engaging them. And they felt as if they got a lot more out of the Stanford experience because of this, I would say, greater social and intellectual maturity that was not measured by SAT and AP scores.

So how are you developing this training then? What are you pulling from to create this training? So like you said, like the Montessori has this whole program. So how are you developing this?

No, that's a great question. So first, I'd like to hire from Socratic colleges. So St. John's is not the only one. Boston University, there are 30 or 40, maybe 50 or 60 programs. Sometimes Plan II at University of Austin has some Socratic elements. So I first hire from places where the young people have had at least 4 years of serious Socratic discussion themselves. And as a quick side note, I once knew somebody who had a $10 million grant for one public school in the '90s, and he was there to train them Socratically. But he said, because none of them have had that experience earlier, even with $10 million in hand, he couldn't train a 50-year-old to be a different human being. So I always hire from these programs. Then internally, we have mentors and coaches. They read and discuss my book, The Habit of Thought. But then also we have communities of practice. And that's an idea where we're all there to improve our practice endlessly. So we have, we have our schedule allows a Wednesday. So Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, regular classes. We have electives on Wednesday so our core staff can work together to improve their pedagogy. And as a consequence, every week we are engaged in refining, you know, not just the Socratic part, but also the writing, the mathematics, STEM teachers, problem solving, so forth and so on. So it's ongoing.

Yeah, it sounds like belief systems is really key in this and what their belief around education and curiosity is. And I keep envisioning as you're talking just the shape of the brain and what this does. Like, do you have any research or anything like neuroscience or neurobiology related?

So my book was endorsed by a couple of authors of brain-based learning book. And what they said, their book was Making Connections. I'm temporarily forgetting their name, but I can put it in the show notes. But their whole understanding is the brain makes literal connections, the neurons make connections when you learn, um, which is of course one of the reasons we need to sleep well is so that the brain can make those connections overnight, but also that a lot of learning is making connections among different ideas. And of course, as many of us have heard, if, um, we are presented information that's disconnected from the meaning systems in the brain, then we have a hard time learning it. In some ways, I think a certain kind of good student is good at learning meaningless information, you know, random digits, for instance. But once something becomes meaningful, it's easier for all of us to learn. I'll give you a concrete example. Once I had worked with a high school teacher who'd been teaching the French Revolution for 17 years, and she had a 3-week unit, but I wanted 2 weeks of that for Socratic discussion. We read Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, and we were talking about inequality, and the kids again have passionate opinions on inequality. And after that, then she could teach them about you know, Robespierre and the Sans-Culottes and, you know, the rage and the terror and so forth. And all of a sudden, this absolutely— I think for most kids, most of history is meaningless. French Revolution, blah, blah, blah. Um, but then if you've felt in your bones why you are angry or even not angry, whatever your opinion about inequality is, if you've been in an emotionally laden environment where we're expressing opinions on inequality, and then you go back to the French Revolution and Wow, that is incredible. So a lot of this is connecting to the meaning systems we already have, various pieces of academic content that would otherwise be meaningless, thus connecting to the brain and making connections.

Yes.

So we talk about emotions a lot, and I think that in school or just in society, like, we, we tend to put our emotions aside and not acknowledge them as a valid source of information. And I'm not saying that we should just listen to our emotions and go with that, like go with whatever you feel. That's not my message. But, um, we're trying to get people to be calm, right? And what we really— what we need to get to, like, engage the memory of your brain. Like, if you think about, like, your most impactful childhood memories, it's the ones that were the most emotional. Your brain holds on to those things. It's like, oh, that was important, that was important, right? So if you can get some emotion built into the learning, feel passionate about some of these topics or these stories even. I love teaching with story because it just wraps you into these feelings. So I'm really into literacy education and there's a lot of flashcards going on. I'm like, man, you can put the flashcards away if you give an application. Like if you help a child use that information and their brain sees like, oh, that's useful. That's, I got something or like I was able to accomplish something that was desirable because I knew that they're going to hold onto that without the flashcards. So it's like replacing repetition with application and meaning.

Huge. A very fundamental technique I use is talk about in-the-text conversations versus out-of-the-text conversations. And in the text is analyzing the paragraphs, sentences, and so forth, but out of the text is applying to life. And the way I think about this is every human being cares about certain humanistic universals. So love, trust, betrayal, justice, you know, I can go to any classroom in America, probably the world, and say, do you care if your friend betrays you? Of course they care if their friend betrays them. A lot of emotion there. And so whatever it is, I look for a connection with these humanistic universals. And if class is too slow and academic, I'll ask a provocative question where, is this person honorable or dishonorable? Is this person fair or unfair? Ask about those in a way that connects to the passions students have. And then they do, kind of the way the The way in the text, out of the text goes is out of the text is a gas pedal, you know, rawr. And then if they become too rowdy, then we'll go, whoa, get back in the text to slow it down and become more cognitive and so forth. But what that does is the students generally have an emotional relationship to whatever text we're reading. So I don't care if they love the text or hate the text, but if, you know, we're reading Aristotle and they hate Aristotle, they're going to remember more Aristotle because rawr, rawr, rawr, rawr.

This is the same thing we do when we try to help kids find their purpose. It's like, We always go to purpose from a very positive thing, like, oh, what do you love? It's like, actually, what do you hate? My passion is illiteracy. I hate illiteracy. It's what makes me get up in the morning. So you can have— feelings are powerful regardless if they're positive or negative.

Big time. And one of the things I would say, part of the artistry of doing this better, there's some groups where you walk in, ask a question, the students do an amazing job, and it's so easy. It's like, why do we need to learn how to do this? But different groups are more challenging. And so one of the things that becomes challenging is in a group that maybe— I've worked with groups that are quiet and perhaps depressed. I've worked with groups that are very well-behaved and complacent, sometimes gifted students. But whatever it is, it's good to have the ability to ask provocative questions. So often if things are not energetic enough, I will ask a deliberately provocative question to get some energy going in the room. And then once— and students sometimes are annoyed with me, but they're often grateful at the end Because it's more fun if there's energy in the classroom. So I'm very deliberate about introducing provocative questions.

How do you do that? How do you take a group of kids who's never even heard of Socratic method before, Socratic discussion, and how do you move them to being able to do it? Like, what's that process like?

So, you know, Linus Pauling, the only person to win 2 individual Nobel laureates, was once asked how did he come up with such great ideas. And he said, I don't come up with great ideas. I come up with lots of ideas. And some of them are great. So one of the things I recommend that people do is be prepared with lots of questions. When I started doing this, I thought, I need to ask the perfect question. But sometimes I would think and have what I thought was the perfect question, kids didn't care at all. And then I'd end up asking something random that I thought was not very interesting and total life. And so one of the ways I train teachers actually is, say, with a paragraph of literature or philosophy, I'll have them start by asking 3 discussable questions, 5 discussable questions, 10 discussable questions, 20 discussable questions. I've done this with students too until we get to the point where the text is exploding with meaning. I can pause on almost every noun and every verb. What does that mean exactly and why? Why is this grammar like this? And of course, some of those are dull, but if you have the ability to ask 30, 50 questions easily, And again, part of teacher training is in preparation in advance, come up with 20 questions per paragraph. You know, eventually you'll get something that lands. So it doesn't sound, you know, it sounds almost too easy, but often people early on have a very hard time coming up with discussable questions. And going back to your point, often I have the students write discussable questions, sometimes just write one question for next time. And by the way, that's a really easy assignment to evaluate. Because you can just cruise through the students, uh, as a preparation for class, you can cruise through, you know, all the student questions and did they do it or not. Uh, but it, it does prepare them to come to class thinking, and they realize with any text, there's so many different perspectives. I think once one realizes that there's so many different ways to think about this, that's when it starts to become easy and fun. But it can take, again, a semester for a teacher or a student. When I used to do this in public schools and they were very resistant, sometimes I would wait 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, the kids are starting to look at each other like, what's going on? I'll ask, how are we doing? You know, part of this is that insofar as the students want the teacher to put on the show, they're really not taking responsibility. And so in some ways, the first few days with a really resistant class, I'll engage in a bit of a struggle. Like, this is for you. You have to be doing this. Going back to the weightlifting analogy, if I'm there doing the whole show, you're not thinking. And this is all about you thinking and understanding. I would say as a relevant aside, some of the teachers that have found this most difficult to adapt to are brilliant entertainers. There's a certain kind of teacher who's been a successful teacher because he or she may be almost a comedian or a dramatist. They're so good at doing that. And there's a role for that kind of education for sure. And I have huge respect for it, but it's a different thing. And that's what students— students would prefer to sit back and be entertained than to think. So you have to kind of shift that energy.

I was going to say, why do you think there is resistance? And are you talking about like the schools, like the system having resistance or the students themselves? I think I heard a little bit of both of that.

Absolutely both. And it depends on the population on the student side, on the more positive side. So I have had really resistant classes, but I've also had classes where I feel like I'm liberating prisoners. I actually wrote my book because I had gone to a class of juniors and seniors and was asking them questions. And they said, this is the first time any adult has listened to us. And, you know, they said, our teachers don't listen to us, our parents don't listen to us, our boss doesn't listen to us, our ministers don't listen to us. And, um, you know, even discounting for teenage, uh, attitudes, I think it's true. Many, many young people don't feel listened to. And, and the other part of the Socratic question is we ask the question, but then we listen. Often I say what I'm doing is person A asks a question, person B responds while the other person is listening and then processing. In some ways, it's so simple and obvious for those, you know, this, hey, I didn't even ask you guys to listen. You know, where this is what adults in civil conversation do. But in many, in many parts of education, it's an unusual behavior, believe it or not. And so we have to kind of, uh, do this. But yeah, some students, liberating prisoners, so much fun, so much joy. Um, you know, the system is resistant in a whole other way.

I just wanted to call out that Socratic method is very portable, right? Like, you could, as a classroom teacher in a traditional education, suddenly instigate this in your classroom. If you're a soccer coach or something, like, you could shift how you are with kids in a very easy way. It doesn't cost anything. And I just was thinking that that was really neat.

Absolutely. I would say my perception is that, um, public school teachers used to have more autonomy and leisure to do this kind of thing. And that the accountability movement has made it more difficult. I think there are confident, mature teachers who will still happily engage in this very successfully. But I think for many younger teachers, the accountability movement has led to kind of a fear and anxiety. We've got to march to the test with great discipline such that they feel less leisure to have a conversation.

I think that's true of anything, of any method that takes a longer time. Right? Like, cognitive development is slow. We're talking about years of thinking how to— or learning how to think gradually. It's not something that's just going to suddenly show up on your unit test by a certain date. So hard, and it's hard to measure.

One of the things I've actually gone to is the SAT Verbal, because insofar as we're doing complex texts and trying to understand them, if you look at the SAT Verbal, a significant amount of what it looks at is, you know, there are complex paragraphs and nuanced questions on those paragraphs. And so in our high school, one of the things we do is we administer the free Khan Academy SAT 3 times a year from 9th grade on, which is early. But the idea is in 9th grade, it's a no-stakes test. People have anxiety about the SAT because they take it as seniors and don't like their scores. But if you just get used to thinking and understanding difficult texts, uh, it's really not a problem. And then the other thing, of course, is that justifies why we're reading difficult texts. Some students, you know, why can't we read something fun and easy and talk about it? And occasionally we do, you know, we're not all hard all the time. But, um, you know, I do— I, I'm very big on not just reading, but, you know, sophisticated reading. And I want to train young people to become capable of reading and analyzing very difficult texts.

Yeah, so this is a really interesting question. I talked to lots of parents who They call their kids resistant readers, and they're like giving their kids Captain Underpants or like something like very easy to access and fluffy because they're trying to entertain them into reading. What do you think about that? Is it fine? The sentence I hear them say is, as long as they're reading, it doesn't matter.

So, again, I am grateful enough for all reading, but I look at both intensive reading and extensive So extensive reading, read as much as possible, but intensive reading, which is what we're doing, is let's read more difficult things. And the way we make it accessible for non-readers, sometimes we do read the text aloud together in class, which is slow and laborious, but given that a lot of kids don't read anymore, that's how we may need to start, and that's okay. And because we're having these interesting, provocative, out-of-the-text conversations, the students, even non-readers, will engage in those. But then we go back into the text and In order to stay up with us, they have to start paying attention. And some of this is being trained to read because there is an art. If you've never read a sentence so complex that you need to break it down into clauses, of course you're going to struggle. So there is, I would say, a kind of deliberate training in how to read more complex paragraphs, sentences. And again, it could even take a year to get used to that. But once they get used to that and it's normal, and also the validation that, oh, you mean not everybody understands this? When you have a situation where we're all struggling to figure this out. And one of the frames that I like to use is that most people, most young people think of understanding as binary. It's binary. It's right answer, wrong answer, that kind of thing. I always think of texts as 0 to 100. 0 is you're not sure what language it's in, Portuguese, Polish, Mandarin, I have no idea. 100 is you know every sentence, every clause, what the author meant, what the author was thinking. You're inside the text so deeply you could explain the author's perspective. None of us are at 0, none of us are at 100, we're somewhere along the way. Let's just shift our understanding a bit more. And so this notion of sophistication and depth in reading is something that most young readers don't have. And so we kind of normalize that. Going back to your earlier comment, Adrian, about there is a worldview implicit in this. Part of this is that it is worth learning to understand difficult texts. And just to complain about, there's a certain kind of deconstructionist attitude in some PhD programs that texts are just about power agendas and not so much about understanding what's really going on in the text. So, you know, this notion that we should work hard to understand what the author was trying to say is a prerequisite to really spending time on it. And so there's kind of a whole worldview about what and why we are bothering to figure things out that are difficult.

And that helps kids to develop empathy too, I think, in understanding others. And realizing that they're not the only ones that exist because, you know, we start out very egocentric and then kind of move into this realizing we're not the only ones that exist and diving into these texts, I feel like, can really develop that sense of empathy.

Huge, huge. So a couple of things. One is, you know, sometimes— first, I'll go to the students who really need this in some ways. Often there are students who used to be the smartest kid in the class class and they want to get the first one to have the right answer. And they often want to just explain it to everybody else. And sometimes there's this attitude of, I'm smart, you're dumb. I got the right answer, you didn't. That is so destructive to this process. And so part of what we do is, again, by means of difficult texts with depth, even if they're really capable, they can't have a perfectly coherent understanding. But the other thing that I explain to them over time is that to do this well, You need to have a mental model of what the text is saying, which is really difficult, and what each participant is saying, which is really difficult, and how the different ideas of different participants relate to the text and relate to each other. And at that point, we're basically more cognitive horsepower than anybody has. And then if you add the emotional dynamic and how to be a leader with a social-emotional dynamic, no end to how much sophistication cognitively we're talking about. But going back to your earlier point, I've had many students where they discover that their best friend has different beliefs than they do, and they're shocked because especially in conventional high schools, there's a sort of tribalism around cliques. But to understand that different people have different beliefs, and that's okay, and it's actually interesting. Often I've had students articulate that after doing this for a while, they realize every one of us has our own whole worldview that's so different from everybody else. And I've had students say, How do we ever communicate at all successfully? And then, you know, look at the adult world and yeah, it's a challenge.

Yeah, like if I just am looking around the adult world and thinking, man, if we understood how to listen and how to ask questions and how to understand.

And how to collaborate. I hear a lot of collaboration happening.

Huge. You know, I'm sure you know that a few years ago Google had Project Aristotle, and what they discovered is the most effective teams were not the geeky rock stars, but they're teams that work together well. Where they had a positive dynamic. And I've got a rubric in the back of my book. It's called the Socratic Practice Ready for Work Rubric. My work in Alaska where I started was financed by the private sector workforce. And they were all about, we call them soft skills, those sorts of things, teamwork, collaboration, exactly. And it turns out that you need, in order to do this effectively, we can't be defensive right away. We have to be honest. We have to be respectful. We have to work together well. And especially when decoding complex texts. I'll give you another exercise I've done to give you the range of this. At one point, I did something in elementary school where I had 3 columns of text, one in Spanish, one in French, and one in German. And none of the students knew any of these 3 languages. But I, my expectation was with cognates, there were enough cognates in Spanish and French and in German that they could, like a puzzle, figure this out. And so it was very, and they had fun with it. They were really having fun. I bet this means I bet that means— and so it's sort of like, you know, puzzle solving, but it forced them to work together to figure things out.

So I want to shift gears a little bit and just ask you, what do you have to believe about a young person to be a successful Socratic-style teacher, right? It seems like there needs to be some foundational beliefs in order to make this succeed. What would you say those are?

Absolutely. I think part of it is that they are capable, independent thinkers whose ideas should be respected. Even when I'm working with a 4-year-old, I want to know what she is thinking and why and how she's constructing this understanding. One way that I've had teachers explain the difference between what I do and what many teachers do is many teachers, when they're having a conversation with a student, have a mental model of right answer, wrong answer. And just like in poker, there's a tell. Oh, you had the right answer. Oh, you had the wrong answer. It destroys the conversation. If students— and I've been, you know, this is especially, I would say, you know, honors classes in high school, they always want to write answers. So they're looking for the tell. How can I get the hint from the teacher? And so I have students complain to me, I don't know what you want. I don't know what answer you want. And that's exactly right, because I want to be completely neutral. I want to understand how they are building their own reasoning. I want to understand how they are going from the evidence on the page to their belief. And at least in early stages of that, I'm agnostic as to whether or not their answer is matching what I think, what I may think is a correct answer. I'm much more interested in their thought process and help in coaching them to improve their thought process. So it's deep respect for the students. Part of this is cognitive, also it's belief systems. You know, I think you have to be— we've got students who are on the left and on the right and Muslim, Christian, atheist, you know, all kinds of things. Yeah. You have to respect wherever they're coming from. You have to respect their thought process. In many ways, you have to— I see ourselves as coaches, really mentors and coaches. I like to talk about parents and educators should regard every child as a genius. Our job is to help them discover and manifest their own genius, which means having radical respect for them. I've had many children, many of whom have even been in alternative schools, said they never felt so respected. As it did in my schools, because we're really not trying to manipulate them. I would say another kind of defect in many classroom conversations is the teacher is trying to manipulate the kids into the right answer. Come on, guys, let's get over here. Let's get to the right answer. It destroys it. And so sometimes I'm willing to let kids go off in what I think is kind of a crazy direction, but I'll say, well, what about this passage? And then they'll have an interpretation. Occasionally I've had kids develop Completely, I think, ridiculous, frankly, understandings of a story. But if they provide a really articulate, well-constructed defense, that's really amazing. You know, I'd say, you know, on tests in the future, you might want to do this because this is what the test takers will tell you the answer is. But if they construct it— and this is how the real world works, you know, I'm very interested in original thought, and original thinkers break out of the traditional patterns. They get, as it were, the wrong answer on the test, But if it's sufficiently well constructed, they create new intellectual realities, new innovations, new companies, whatever it is. So I'm very interested in the discrepancy between top-down, one-size-fits-all, this is the only right answer, versus how can I help you become a more sophisticated reasoner so you can reason your way to an original belief that is in alignment with who you are?

Do you have specific tips or tools that adults can use in order to help get to that curiosity level?

Well, actually, one perhaps non-obvious one is I often— teachers who are excited about this want to use their favorite story. Let's bring my favorite story to the kids and let's discuss that. Often that's the worst thing because if it's your favorite thing, then you're really inclined— even I'm a little bit inclined— let's get to the right answer. In some ways, And even, you know, with respect to an open conversation, sometimes with a new group you don't start on love. You might start on something that's a little bit less personal. Sometimes with early groups, I've had the most open conversations on math. It takes a semester in before we can have an open conversation on love. So I think a lot of this is realizing that to get started, focus on understanding the students and seeing where they're coming from, listening to them, Get the energy going. Often I focus on intellectual engagement. My goal, much more than right answer, wrong answer, or covering material or anything, is are they engaged intellectually? And if they're not engaged in the text, sometimes in the first week or two, I'll be totally out of the text. We'll talk about justice or honor or friendship out of the text, and then I'll look for opportunities to bring it back into the text. But intellectual engagement is everything because once they've had the experience where, going back to emotion, I actually— there is a, there's a cool device from a company called Immersion Neuro that can measure engagement, psychological engagement, and psychological safety. We've played around with it. You have to wear like a Fitbit sort of device, but it can measure this in real time. Super cool. It's super cool. Super cool. And actually, you know, in our classes, they, they said in corporate trainings, the engagement goes up during the coffee break and down during the corporate training. And our classes, it went up during the class. That's how it should be. Exactly, exactly. But that's, as a leader, that's what I want, engagement. Because if you don't have engagement, if you don't go back to the emotions, if you don't have them excited to be there, even if they're getting on arguing passionately and somewhat angrily, you have nothing. Once you have intellectual engagement and that's become ordinary and expected, then you can go back and do some more work. I've had students be kind of bored because we're doing academic work and I'd say, okay, what did we do last week that was different? How do we get this energy going? And sometimes just tired. I think the other thing for adults to realize is, you know, if you're the entertainer in front, you have complete control over your entertainment factor. But if we're opening up to the students, you know, there's some days when they're just all tired and it's slow. When I used to do 6 sections, 7 sections of this in public schools, Sometimes 3rd period would be the most fun ever and 4th period would be completely dull. And so part of this is realizing that the chemistry of the group is everything. Have lots of questions, go for intellectual engagement. One other thing that we do, I think, that's really helpful is at the end I debrief. We go around and ask, what was the best thing, the worst thing, the most valuable, least valuable? What did you love? What frustrated you? Some variation, some feedback mechanism, because sometimes when things are quiet, it's because they're really thoughtful. Sometimes it was quiet because they're really bored. Sometimes the people that are most quiet are the most thoughtful, and the people who talk the most maybe were frustrated. And so I would say, rather than be the adult who thinks you know exactly what happened, just 5 minutes at the end for a quick debrief. And occasionally you get feedback at the end that is very powerful. I'm angry because— oh, and it turns out that there was a part of the social dynamic that was frustrating things. But then you can address that social dynamic. In my book, I have kind of 3 things we work on. One is textual understanding, going back to learning how to read difficult material. The second is social dynamics. We pay much more attention to the social dynamic than many groups do. And in the long run, that's essential. And the third is taking ideas seriously, going back to what beliefs you need. If you don't think ideas matter, then all this talk is a stupid game. But I personally am of the belief that ideas have changed history. more than most events. Ideas are powerful. And so what we think about truth and justice matters. And so one of the reasons it'll be out of the text as well, in addition to engagement, is does it matter what the truth is? Does it matter if we don't believe there is a truth? There's a lot of cultural relativism out there. And I've had lots of long conversations with students where they believe there is no truth. It doesn't matter. And you can talk, well, if the engineers believe whatever they want to believe, is the bridge going to work? So we have to get that understanding the text, Healthy, positive social dynamic and taking ideas seriously. And then work with that to create great intellectual engagement. Cut everybody some slack because it is sophisticated to get all groups to do this well. And then have fun with it.

And what I hear is you're helping fulfill those developmental needs of helping the kids feel seen, heard, understood, like their opinion matters, which helps them develop their belief systems. Which is really powerful as well. And we are starting to run out of time, which we could talk to you, I feel like, for another couple of hours. But real quick, can you tell us specifically about the Socratic Experience? Like, who's it for? How does it work? We would love to know.

Absolutely. So it's a virtual school, grades 3 through 12, socraticexperience.com. Our kids love learning, but perhaps they're not engaged in school. We mentioned creative, intellectual, and entrepreneurial children, but we've also marketed, does your child hate school? Again, I love learning. I hate school personally. Pretty unusual as an educator who's in that position.

I hear that a lot from my 10-year-old.

Exactly. And, you know, look at it, looked at it a different way. And 75% of American high school students are unhappy at school. So this is not a small market. 2/3 are not engaged in learning. I would say high school is a disaster for Yeah, about 70% of students. And, you know, there's an engagement cliff. It's— the situation's better in elementary, it starts to get bad in middle, and it's a catastrophe in high school. So I'd say any secondary school student, you know, we start with younger students, but there are a lot of great elementary programs. But any secondary student who is not flourishing should consider our program. And most of them shadow and love it after shadowing for a day, and many of them want to enroll immediately.

So we ask all of our guests this final question: who is someone in your life that has kindled your curiosity, motivation, or passion?

So I would say St. John's College as an institution. I describe it as, after my wife, the great love of my life, 4 years of thinking and talking about ideas was an absolute joy. And I was exposed to so much intellectual beauty. And yeah, that's basically— I've spent the rest of my life trying to replicate this deep intellectual experience with probably thousands of students at this point. So very much St. John's as an institution.

Such a ripple effect. That's incredible. And then how can listeners find out more about your work or follow you?

We do newsletters at socraticexperience.com. I'm, I'm on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and I'll send you links to put in the notes. I also have essays at Medium, and then I have the Socratic Michael Strong YouTube channel. So I'm prolific. I write and speak a lot. I'm very passionate about all of this. So happy to have people engage. And if anybody is interested in any of this, subject to the fact that I'm busy, I'm happy to help people do what they can to engage students intellectually around the world.

Amazing. Thank you so much for your time today.

You're welcome. Delighted to be here.

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