Michael Strong - The Socratic Approach to Learning

Hello and welcome to The New Schools Podcast. We are very excited to welcome today's guest, the founder of the virtual school program ExpansOnline.co, Michael Strong. ExpansOnline is a cognitively rich, emotionally supportive, and affordable virtual education for middle school-aged children. Michael is also the author of The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice, as well as Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems. Michael has been creating innovative K-12 programs in schools for 28 years. He is the founder of the Academy of Thought and Industry, an innovative Montessori-aligned high school. His other projects as a school creator include Moreno Valley Holly High School and Winston Academy. He's known for advocating the Montessori and Socratic approaches to education as well as applying entrepreneurial principles, seeing those as the approaches needed to solve the world's problems. In today's episode with Shannon and Michael, you'll discover how kids develop those higher-level skills and learn how the Socratic method aids in critical thinking, a tool we all need in the age of disinformation. It's a terrific and we hope you enjoy this conversation with your host Shannon Falkenstein and Michael Strong.

First, I met you through your book, uh, The Habit of Thought, and we use it at Acton, of course, so it's like one of our seminal texts for developing our guides. So thank you so much for that. And then because we're Facebook friends, you are always encouraging me to do a little more critical thinking because of all the scholarship and videos and writings that you post. So thank you very much for that.

Well, you're most welcome.

And we have a little bit of a connection through St. Louis because I'm originally from there and you have an Academy of Thought and Industry in St. Louis, right?

We did, we did. There was a Montessori Adolescent Program and we took that over. So it's right where all the kind of, you know, museums, it's near SLU, there's kind of a bunch of cool museums and stuff, so it's a very cool school and facility.

Excellent, so you said you did have it there, but is it still running?

No, no, it is, it is. I'm just saying we took over Montessori Adolescent Program, MAP, had been around for several years And so we kind of took over that program. So I want to give credit to the people who started it before us.

Oh, okay, right, okay, I understand. Great. Most recently you have— well, you founded several schools. So could you, for our audience, summarize kind of what they all have in common and how you chose their models and what drives you?

Sure, sure. So I'll try to do it on a high level without going too deeply. So first, personally, I love intellectual dialogue. I love talking to people about ideas, you know. And so I left Harvard to go to St. John's College when I was, you know, 18 because I loved 4 years of talking with people about ideas rather than having a famous person talk at me. So all of my schools have had a strong Socratic component. You know, I also do a video series with Alana who's 8. I started when she's 4. So some people think, "Oh, intellectual dialogue has to be, you know, big and heavy." No, I think naturally when we're interested in ideas, we exchange, we like to talk about ideas. And so for me, the Socratic dialogue piece is simply a very natural part of human nature to think and talk about the ideas with which we understand reality. So that's always been a huge part. And of course, then later I created a nonprofit to promote entrepreneurial solutions to world problems. And since then I've had a strong kind of purpose-driven entrepreneurship component. So one way to think about it is a heavy, you know, my last school, the Academy of Thought and Industry, think and do, a heavy intellectual component and a heavy let's get stuff done entrepreneurial component. So that's very high level. Commonalities across lots of specific programs.

Fantastic. That reminds me a lot of Acton's learn to do, learn to be, and learn to learn. And most recently, I see just starting now in September 2020 that you have a new project, Expanse Online.

Yeah, expanseonline.co. So the Academy of Thought and Industry was a fairly pricey program. Our brick-and-mortar campus in San Francisco is $40,000 a year, New York $50,000 a year, Austin $20,000 a year. So pretty expensive. They are doing an online version, which is now $15,000 a year. But I wanna reach much larger numbers of people. And COVID, you know, because of COVID thousands of parents, probably millions of parents are looking for other options. So I've created a program, expanseonline.co, at $8,000 a year that includes the Socratic reading and writing component. It includes, I would say, dialogue-based, project-based math and science component. This is for middle school. And then also a project, kind of a team STEM project component through an organization called Nobel Explorers. And then one-on-one mentoring, which is very much part of our program, and then various sort of apprenticeships and additional project-based opportunities. So again, kind of deep, even for middle schoolers, deep intellectuality and lots of project and project-based sorts of learnings, learning. And compared to what's going on in a lot of classrooms where it's still fairly passive, I think it's going to be a really fun, engaging program for the middle schoolers who join us.

Fantastic. So I have an 11-year-old son who just started this year in 6th grade. And he, you know, now we're in COVID, our country and El Salvador, we've been on lockdown since March 16th. Schools are not allowed to go back until January. So, you know, the children are really suffering from this like lack of socialization. And one of the coping skills that my son has is that he has networked with other boys around and girls around the world in some like physics sandbox games and Minecraft and other building games, really incredible games, very intellectually stimulating, and that's something he's really interested in. But these guys that he's working with, he has elaborate relationships with them. They're building things and making things. They have their own vocabulary. They're learning. It's incredible. But he literally doesn't know how old they are, what their real names are, or where they live. And I just find it really fascinating. So what I want to say is kind of bridging that to what you're doing, if if a student is going to take that online option, school used to be kind of a holistic thing where it's like your social life, it had really its roots in the community, and now that we're moving it online, like, how are you, you know, kind of what would you say to a parent in that space who says like, what about the real world? What's my kid doing in the real world if he's going to online school?

Well, so, you know, obviously COVID has changed everything for everybody, but one thing I want to emphasize is You know, as you say, already young people are finding lots of social options online. I think there is something about having your core learning community be part of your social community. Wouldn't be all of their core community. One thing I didn't mention specifically with Expanse is we have half an hour every day of just community building every day. And that includes, you know, activities. So it could include improv and theater games, you know, draw out the drama. Lovers and comedy lovers among young people, includes current events so they can relate to contemporary things and talk about those. It includes setting intentions and appreciations. So we have kind of a structured kind of community formation piece every day. And then I would say the Socratic is also very community building. One of the reasons we focus on interactivity is because when students spend a lot of time talking to each other, we all, we all become familiar, you know, I think we all like and need familiar relationships. And so while I know students, young people have virtual relationships with people they've never seen face to face, and while a Zoom call is not face to face, still there's something. Actually, I'm working with Paul Zak, a neuroscientist, who said that a lot of what we need for kind of bonding is, you know, physical touch is of course really great and necessary, but also eye contact. And so he was pointing out that Well, we can't get the physical, you know, we can't hug virtually. We can still have eye contact and that's actually a really important thing that students who are getting just didactic lessons are not getting so much. Whereas if they're in a peer community and looking at each other and talking to each other, you know, it's imperfect eye contact, but it's eye contact. So I would say yes, I still want people, I want kids to go outside and play and do whatever they can outside during COVID We've actually had some classes where we have students go outside and take a picture and then come back and share it with the group, just to make sure they're going outside and doing that kind of thing. But then very consciously and deliberately creating community online among adolescents, because you're right, they super need that. Just an interesting anecdote, you mentioned Minecraft. Even at the Academy of Thought and Industry, where the kids were together all day in a small community and knew each other extremely well, they lived often an hour apart, an hour away from campus in every direction. So it was hard for them to get together for socializing, but they were all on Minecraft and mostly talking. A lot of them were not doing any Minecraft on Minecraft. It just had become the default social place for our school community. So I think, you know, students are really adept at finding each other, you know, where they wanna find each other. Our job is to create a deliberate learning community that also includes that community warmth.

Thank you. Thank you very much. So we are— our podcast, The New Schools, is focused on parents, families who are kind of frustrated with the traditional model, and they're like, this isn't really working for me, and I want something different, but they don't really know what to do or where to go, and so they feel a little bit stuck. Stuck, and they may feel a little bit scared. What would be kind of your advice to a parent like that?

That's terrific. First, by the way, I've recently found a new blog called The Education Game, and they are all about specifically focused on addressing parents. And their audience consists of, I think, more conventional parents who are forced to do homeschooling right now. But what I would say more broadly, is if your child is learning, and I think you need to slow down and think about learning. First of all, reading is the most important thing. And so if parents, you know, I would say reading and a little bit of math are the most important things. So as long as the child is making steady progress in math and maybe just have a disciplined half an hour a day of moving through the math curriculum, and it's pretty linear, pretty simple, you know, ambitious students or parents can do a lot more than the regular But just sort of a baseline for people who may be worried, well, let's first alleviate the worry. As long as they're doing some regular math and maintain the habit of math and so forth, it's probably enough. Beyond that, read voraciously. And some children are not readers. Many children are addicted to technology. But I would encourage parents even to maybe use access to technology as a reward for having read. I think most children, not all, but most children, once they develop the habit of reading, they really enjoy it. Endless horizons. Then to do just a little bit of this Socratic— again, Socratic sounds like a fancy word, but a simple way to do it is to talk to the kids about what they're reading and to be curious. My video series with Alana, who's now 8, is titled Love Your Child's Mind. And so I think parents, when they get into the superego of an educator, feel like they have to teach their children, and I'm going to teach you X. Personally, I hate regular teaching. If somebody tries to teach me something, I want to run and scream from them, if not yell right in their face. So I personally regard the traditional teaching model as really offensive to me personally. And so when students say they hate school, hey, I'm with you. I hate people teaching me. But if somebody's curious in what I think, wonderful. I'm so grateful. That's wonderful. And so that's why I approach all children, you know, my own children who are now grown, or any children in a classroom, or any child I work with, What are you thinking? What's important to you? Why do you think that way about it? How do you understand it? And you know, one of the things about having done what I've done my whole life is I've never lost for questions, but I want to encourage parents to get into the habit of being curious. You know, attention is a form of love, and so if you're giving your child attention by yelling at them for being on their phone all day or on the video games, okay, the only way they get attention is by being you know, doing something they're not. If you give your child attention for reading, for thinking, for being curious, and if every time your child shows some interest in the world, "Wow, tell me about it. What you doing? What's it like?" you know, then that's a way of kind of expanding it, growing it, because, you know, they love, they thrive on attention, love their minds.

That's really wonderful. Thank you. A lot of times, yeah, I encourage parents to be Socratic and But then I think parents, we have this desire for our children to do well and for them to be successful because we want to protect them. We want to make sure that they are, you know, they can make their way in the world and that they're successful by whatever definition that is. And so sometimes I think parents have an agenda and so they want to be Socratic, but there really is like a right answer that they want to lead the child to. And so, you know who actually I talked to deeply about this was Albert Lone, and we talked about how there's some Socratic teachers that are actually very strategic about getting you to their answer, and then there's a Socratic teacher who's actually having a true encounter with you and is also open to surprise and is more interested in being surprised than in being right. And so could you just talk a little bit about that? How can parents kind of relax and let go of that need to control or to have a certain outcome so that they can allow that to blossom with their child?

That's great, a great question. Of course, you know, I've known Bert for a long time, so I'm glad you're in touch with him on Socratic as well. I think, you know, the notions of love and curiosity take you a certain way, you know, loving loving the workings of your child's mind. And so instead of being worried about a particular right answer, just loving the workings and that curiosity, wondering how do they make sense. For me, there's an alien over there. I mean, I don't know what it's like to be 4. I don't know what it's like to be 8. I don't know what it's like to be 13. I've spent a lot of time around 13-year-olds, but still, you know, middle school, I vaguely, dimly remember it. The experiential, I am honestly and enthusiastically curious about the experiential reality of somebody on that end. What's it like inside that mind and body? So tell me about it, you know. And then kind of more broadly, one of the ways in which I want to encourage parents to relax is that people who are thoughtful and articulate— helps to have read a lot, but simply thoughtful and articulate— are powerful people. And regular schooling does not develop the ability to be thoughtful and articulate. I'll give you a couple of anecdotes along that line. One, I worked in a Socratic Montessori school K-8 years ago in the '90s, and then in the late '90s I also worked in a Montessori middle school in Palo Alto. And there, there happened to be two seniors at Stanford who had been in the earlier Socratic middle school, which had been in San Antonio. I had them come and talk to our Montessori middle schoolers in Palo Alto. Said, you know, is there anything about your Montessori education that stood out? And they said, well, strictly on the basis of traditional academic preparation, our peers from public schools were just as well prepared as we were, but we were much more comfortable interacting with adults. And so we got a lot more out of our professors. We could have conversations, approach them, ask them questions, you know. And so even at the level of, oh, I got into Stanford, The ability to be thoughtful and articulate and engage in an intellectual conversation, a huge win. Give you a different one. Laura Deming is truly extraordinary. Her father completely unschooled her, that is no required education, but he is an intellectual and entrepreneur and he himself is always asking questions and thinking about things. You know, just profusely wondering about things. And so when he says, you know, how did you educate Laura? Oh, I let her do whatever she wanted. And I drilled in, and of course he's talking to her about ideas all the time. He's loving his daughter's mind. At any rate, with— and she got in the habit of doing a little bit of math every day. So with zero formal education, she got into— first she was working with a lab scientist at UCSF at the age of 12, got into MIT at 14, and then dropped out of MIT at 16 to accept a Thiel Fellowship and is now a leading anti-aging VC in her 20s who stopped along the way to produce something like 10% of the COVID tests in the US. So again, knock your socks off amazing, no schooling, but she and her dad talked about ideas all the time. She read a lot and she, you know, did math regularly. So I think when people, when parents are anxious, they have the notion that school is what got them where they are today. And to some extent, I'm sure it is, although This is where for me personally, I think being a reader did more for me than school. The voracious reading I did outside of school. I also was a chess player and I think, you know, just thinking through chess problems all the time. So I think active engagement, we underestimate because we're attached to schooling as it exists. We underestimate the value of active engagement elsewhere and overestimate the value of schooling. For most of my courses for which I got straight A's in high school, I remember nothing. I would memorize for the test, get my A, and forget. And so compared to that, when I compare that to the kind of active engagement in so many things, it's a no-brainer for me that school was not the means by which I got where I am today. It didn't really help me do most of the things. So that's why I think I want to shift parents away from, you know, oh, they have to do this course and they have to do this. No, if they have high-level skills, habits, attitudes, you know, if your child is healthy, if your child is flourishing, Just to do a rant on the other side, you know, in Palo Alto, at Palo Alto High, they've had a rash of suicides. There's an epidemic of suicides among adolescents in the US today. When every year when teens go back to school, the suicide rate goes up and it drops again over holidays and vacations. Depression and anxiety are at epidemic levels. So for me, we're forcing our kids to do mostly worthless activities that cause tremendous social-emotional distress and damage when, you know, as long as they are developing high-level academic skills then, and ideally doing some cool projects, then they're going to be fine. And in fact, they maybe may do much, much better. So again, I can rant on that endlessly, but I'll pause there.

No, I love it. Thank you. Thank you so much. So we've talked kind of about parents, so like the one-on-one and a parent really loving and giving that attention to their child and engaging in their thinking and understanding them. Let's talk a little bit more, um, in a microschool environment or in a school environment. If a teacher or a guide is new to Socratic Seminar or Socratic education, what would be your advice for like a new microschool that would want to be implementing that? It's, I think, Socratic can be like simple, but not easy. And I've noticed that at our own school, for me to try to empower our guides and myself with being more Socratic, sometimes we're like, am I doing this right? I don't know. And I've had other people come and train us in Socratic, and they ask such more powerful questions than we were asking before we developed a better practice. What would be kind of a great roadmap for a school to learn how to implement better? So like the philosophy, and then maybe some tactical ideas also.

Right, no, there are lots of great questions there. First, you know, I prefer to hire liberal arts graduates who themselves do have plenty of experience thinking, talking, and asking questions. So I once knew a man in Ohio who had a $10 million grant to train teachers in Socratic, but none of those teachers, they'd all gone to traditional high schools, traditional colleges, where they had been lectured at. And so at the age of 35 or 40, it was not easy for them to begin thinking and asking questions and so forth. So I think it helps a lot to have had some kind of experience with this kind of intellectual dialogue at a high school or college or graduate school or wherever, just because, you know, we are talking— my book is called The Habit of Thought because it's all about habits. And so, you know, even there when you talk about— I see it as deepening your practice. I love the idea of a practice. So I think before going back to tactical baselines, I think instead of saying, am I doing it right, our goal is rich intellectual dialogue. So if you think of the best, you know, conversation about ideas you've ever had with anybody, it would be a friend or a professor or, you know, maybe a student, who knows. But for me, it's when, when were you most engaged in this world of ideas? And that's sort of the baseline. So instead of Am I doing it right? It's, are we getting the kids to be really seriously engaged in thinking and ideas and so forth? And initially, we may be very far away from that, and that's okay. And one of the things that I learned early on is it takes me, say, a year working in a classroom to get them to the point where they're really good at this. Unless they happen to be raised in a home where the parents are talking about ideas all the time. It's not necessarily— I compare it to learning a new language, that if their model for learning is the teacher tells me, or even I look it up in an encyclopedia, or I look it up in a resource. So I've certainly been in Montessori schools where the kids have a lot, had a lot of agency in the classroom, but had not yet begun to think for themselves. So we're developing intellectual agency where the children have, are expected to think for themselves. And for many, it's very new. So, a couple other things before going into how I get people started at reading them. The other thing, an exercise that I have both guides and students do, is to ask, you know, in writing, from say one paragraph, so I always pick texts, you know, the basic format is we read a text together, we sit in a circle, and we discuss it, and I pick texts that are conceptually rich and often fairly difficult to read because I want them, I want everybody in the group to be slowly working through the text and trying to understand it. The other thing is the text should be full of discussable questions, and the way I explain that to kids are questions that cannot be answered by looking in the dictionary or by looking in the encyclopedia, that is, you know, not factual or definitional. And then I encourage students to take a paragraph of the text I read and maybe come up with Initially, 2 discussable questions, 3, 5, 10. With adults, teachers, I say, how about come up with 10 or 20, 30 discussable questions. And, you know, for even a dense paragraph, that can be a lot. I would say one of the reasons it's so easy for me to lead these, I can just churn out questions on the spot endlessly. People once asked Linus Pauling, the only individual to win 2 individual Nobel Prizes, how he came up with such great ideas. He said, "I don't come up with great ideas. I come up with lots of ideas, and some of them are great." So even in terms of questions, when I started doing this, I thought, what's a perfect question? What's the perfect question? What's the perfect question? Now one of the reasons I have people do this exercise of 10, 20, 30 discussable questions is, you know, you really have no idea what the kids are going to like. I mean, sometimes I'll have something, but I've been in situations, even with all my experience, where I think, wow, they'll really get into this question, I ask a question and they don't. And then I ask another question, I thought that's kind of a dud, and the whole room's on fire. So, you know, I think again, just lots of questions and be forgiving and like, okay, that didn't work. Let's go to another one. Another kind of basic technique I use is I differentiate between in-the-text questions and out-of-the-text questions. So in-the-text questions are very close. You know, what does this sentence mean? What does this paragraph mean? Why is the semicolon here? Why did the author put this sentence in front of that sentence? Any kind of textual detail. And those, you know, are much more kind of academic and cognitive. I look at it as almost putting on the brakes. So if the kids are too rowdy, then I might slow them down by saying, wait, let's see what the author thinks about this. What about this paragraph? And it kind of shifts the energy and we go down into a deep dive. Conversely, an out-of-the-text paragraph— I mean, question is something applying it to life. So, you know, why did you know, this character betrays so-and-so, or do you mind if your friend betrays you? Would it anger you if your friend betrayed you? You know, we were talking about Plato and we're asking, would you, if your friend did a hit-and-run— this is high school students— hit-and-run accident, would you report him or ask him to report himself? So in all sorts of ways, we can take the questions we're talking about in the text, which may be too dull or academic for some students, or may seem I should say may seem academic and dull, I then ask a provocative question outside of the text and then again on fire kind of thing. And one way to think about those provocative questions outside the texts is most of the texts we pick have human universals. By human universals, you know, love, truth, betrayal, identity, confidence, anything that— hate, violence, you know, anything that's part of the human experience. I take those and ask the students about their own experience. They always want to talk about their own experience, especially kind of a provocative version. That way I kind of get the energy going. And but sometimes that can kind of ramble off into anything. Oh, do you know what my grandfather did? You know, it's sort of too, too diffuse. And they're like, well, okay, let's go back into the text. And so initially when I'm leading, say, a fresh group of students who've never done this before, there could be a huge chasm between the in-the-text questions on the one hand and the out-of-the-text questions on the other. And it may look like You know, if I was a driver, like, but gradually my goal is to make the connection between my questions in the text and out of the text clear to me and to the children. You know, I've just met you, but if you and I were reading a piece of literature together, if we read a great fiction story, I assure you that after talking about it in 5, 10, 15 minutes, we'd be applying it to life in all sorts of ways. Well, I think that character is honorable. I don't think she's so honorable. No, I think adults who love literature, that's naturally how we do it. And one of the reasons that we love the world of ideas and thinking and talking about ideas, literature and philosophy, is we do apply it to our lives. I mean, I think regular schooling and regular academia kind of sterilizes it for us because they train us to be a responsible scholar, or we have to have footnotes and, you know, keep it at arm's length. But people who love ideas and love thinking and talking about ideas, there's almost no barrier between what I'm reading and what I'm thinking. You know, Mortimer Adler famously said how to read a book and it has all sorts of annotations. Schools across the US and probably the world are teaching students how to do annotations. But if annotations consist of an exercise that a teacher assigned you, that's not the same as you arguing with a book. You know, I think all of us annotate the books the most where we're furious. This author, no, no, that's wrong, argh, you know. So, we want that kind of engagement with the text from our students. And so, for that reason, I discourage teachers from, say, sharing their favorite text. If you love a text and you think, oh, I'm going to give this special present to my kids and so they'll love it too, and then they don't, and then your questions are kind of like, come on guys, isn't it great? No, no, that ruins it.

Yeah, that's back to you having your own agenda, and that's not what you want.

Huge. Yeah, even loving it or wanting them to love it. Instead, something provocative. What do you guys think? Is this garbage? Is it wrong? Is this author crazy? You know, and so part of my initial questions to kind of open up the space, again, I'm always trying to break away from the school game. The school game is so much about following rules and doing you know, what the teacher tells you. One other kind of subtle hint there: I used to— I've led hundreds of demonstrations for Socratic seminars in public schools, and very often when I lead one in a public school, the students— and this is often the, you know, straight-A, uh, you know, goody-goody student— will say, "But I don't know what answer you want." And that's very deliberate. Um, you know, in poker they have, you know, you can have a tell where everybody knows how you're going to bet because you always, you know, rub your ear or something before you know, bluffing. But, you know, in Socratic, because I'm honestly interested in what they're going to say, I give them no tell because I'm not hoping. As soon as you start hoping that they'll come up with a certain answer, totally you've ruined it. You've just ruined it. So one more anecdote and then let's ask another question. One way I think about this is, again, I'm going into why teaching is rude. If I'm at a cocktail party and somebody comes up to me and starts giving me a lesson on Bitcoin or automobiles or, you know, whatever. I'm bored. This is a boring person. My eyes start looking around. How can I get out of this situation? Where can I go? And so, you know, if you're that kind of— or if, you know, so my point is we would never do things socially to other adults that we routinely do to students. So as much as possible, yeah, think of— have in your head the coolest experience, which probably adult to adult intellectual dialogue you've ever had, and try to kind of gradually, authentically move in that direction. So it's a little bit high level, but some tactical details. Hopefully that was helpful.

That is so helpful. It was very high level also, and very inspiring. So I think that parents and, and guides and teachers will get a lot out of that. So I'm going to bring it really tactical. One of the things when we first started our ACT-EN was we would have, you know, we had an elementary school, so we had like, you know, 8 years old was the average, and we're sitting in a circle, maybe 12 kids, and what was really hard was like there was a lot of like rocking and moving and getting up and walking around and not really paying attention, and then, you know, we would just, we would be in the middle of talking and maybe a student would just like get up and leave and go to the bathroom, so we found it really hard to create like a sacred circle where everyone was staying engaged. And we, I don't know if we ever got super great at that other than, you know, as they got older, maybe they could tolerate more. But maybe could you just address that for a moment?

Sure, absolutely. So first I would say one of the things I've gotten really good at over the years is starting super simple. And a lot of this is having very modest expectations. What counts as a tiny increment of progress? First of all, with younger students, not very long. So if they're having a hard time sitting, I would rather have 5 successful minutes or 10 successful minutes than, you know, try to go for half an hour and it's a mess. So certainly, you know, at 8-year-old, you know, I've known some 8-year-olds who can go longer, but for a lot of 8-year-olds, yeah, 10, 15 minutes might be an achievement. You know, so just scale that back. The other thing is with younger children, usually getting to the text is pure gravy. My number one goal is to get to person A speaks, person B listens, and then responds. And if you can get to that point, you know, again, we're not talking intellectual, we're not talking books, we're just talking A speaks, B listens, and responds. Huge. And so I've spent, you know, weeks and weeks and weeks getting to that. And some of that is, "Oh," and making it explicit. So, "Oh, Shannon, I see you're telling us about your dog. Okay, thank you." And, "Oh, Daniel, did you hear what Shannon said about her dog?" And initially, very often they're like popcorn, you know, speaking randomly, has nothing to do with each other, they're not focused on each other at all. Yeah, it's a mess. So the way I look at it is very carefully weaving threads and, you know, a victory where, oh, Daniel recognized that Shannon spoke about her dog and spent, you know, 2 seconds acknowledging that before talking about his cat. Hooray! You know, we kind of got the beginning. You know, you picture somebody who is building a bridge first has to have an arrow with this tiny, you know, thread and then you go back and forth till you get the cables and so forth. So Yeah, I'm just kind of visually initially these completely solipsistic, you know, pieces of popcorn you can barely control, but getting them tracking, you know, eye contact. "Oh, Shannon, Daniel was replying to you. Can you look at him when he replies to you?" Just being super explicit about the most basic fundamentals of interpersonal dialogue. And, you know, one way to think about this is we cannot possibly have a real discussion about ideas A, when you're getting up, but even when you're talking over each other, or— and the one rule I often start with minimal rules, because if you have a long list of rules, especially with young children, they tune out, you've lost it. So the one rule I always insist on is one person speaks at a time. And so, you know, because you can get nowhere until you have that one. But even getting to the point where one person speaks at a time, you know, and you can of course I don't tend to flatter individuals, but you know, the group, wow, the group as a whole did really great. Let's see if we can have one person speaking at a time next time. And then, you know, you can play little games with it too. Oh, before you speak next time, Daniel, can you repeat what the person before you said? You know, and just begin to get this, you know, we're talking to each other piece. And I think if you expect to walk in and have a great intellectual dialogue and it's like this, then it feels like a failure. I feel like failure. The kids didn't do it. Not a good activity. Okay, we give up. We hate it. We go home. Let's not do that anymore. If on the other hand you say, okay, wait, it would be so valuable if at the end of— pick a time— 6 weeks, a month, 2 months, a year, whatever, these kids could be focused and talking to each other about ideas for 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes a day. You know, so set very low benchmarks and And then, then you can start to break down increments of progress. Yeah, we only had 3 interruptions today, you know, and can celebrate with kids. Okay, wow, 2 interruptions this time. And just again, bit by tiny bit.

That's fantastic. That's going to help so many people. So many, at least so many ACT-N guides will just feel reassured about what you just said and have a great direction to go in. That was a great metaphor with the string and the bridge. So I really appreciate that. So critical thinking, and let's talk about critical thinking in the era of disinformation. You know, I saw the other day where now like AI can make you, you know, could make you say whatever I want you to say on a video. And that is terrifying. You know, I don't know if you saw The Social Dilemma, but these are things that we're all really thinking about. So critical thinking becoming I think my hypothesis is that being able to discern the truth in an era of just rampant and horrible disinformation is going to be perhaps the most important critical thinking skill. Could you talk a little bit about that and how, you know, what are you envisioning for the future with your students about this?

Sure. So first, again, what I want to do is to develop the habit of thought, the habit of thinking. I'll give you one anecdote. One point we were reading William James, the 19th century psychologist, on habit. And he had a sentence where, you know, initially habits, they're thinking about biting their nails or picking their nose or things that their parents get on their case for all the time. But James talks about emotional habits and intellectual habits. And while trying to figure out what those read, one of the students, and this is middle school, piped up and said, "Wait, you're trying to get us to have intellectual habits." And I said, "Pingo, exactly right." I want them to have a habit of thinking about everything they read, every sentence they read. Again, going back to the Adler, when we're thinking about what we read, we're fighting or agreeing, or at least we're evaluating it. Our minds are in the habit of evaluating, if you will, the truth value of every phrase and every sentence. And so if we have that habit of thinking about things, you know, there's no magic recipe for either critical thinking or how to discern the truth. It sounds like a big heavy word, but in a certain sense, I think we are all going to have to become more sophisticated about epistemology. How do we know what we know? You know, because the other thing is there are going to be countless agendas, and in some ways there always have been. Maybe it looked— I think there looked like there was more of a, you know, center in the past. Now it's just been exposed that You know, at the end of the day, you gotta figure it out for yourself. And so the way I look at it is, you know, sometimes we have done, as it were, media literacy, but I've seen lots and lots of teaching materials on critical thinking. And there are also charts and diagrams on unconscious bias and so forth. Those, it's always good to expose students to those, but I just like, I don't memorize parts of a frog or If I don't use Spanish, I memorize words and I forget it. If they memorize how to be a critical thinker as opposed to practicing it every day, it's not going to stick. It's not going to have an impact. Then part of practicing it is not only coming up with their own interpretation of a piece of text, but this is the important part, being responsible vis-à-vis their peers for defending their interpretation. So if they believe a text is about something, X, and another person thing believes it about why. They have to defend why, what the textual evidence is for this interpretation rather than that interpretation. Not just once, but I like to do Socratic practice every day. If they're doing this every day for at least an hour a day, and every time they open up their mouth, um, you know, it is scary. There are some students, I've had students be quiet for a year because it's initially, you know, obviously a range of personalities, but it's high risk if If you say something, especially you can start harmlessly, "Oh, that was a nice class." But as soon as you start, you know, having an opinion about the text or the issue at hand, any one of your peers, could be the adult, will ask a question, "Oh, well, how did you get that reading?" So they know that they're always on the spot for that. But also any of their peers could. And of course, nobody wants to appear stupid. So what they do, what we all do in this experience is we become really good at evaluating, as it were, the truth claim. So I think this story is about, you know, aggression and you think it's about, you know, embarrassment or something. I have— before I speak, I'm going to be, you know, thinking, what evidence, what evidence, what evidence? And they're going to be thinking, what evidence? And then, you know, a third-party observer will be balancing this evidence versus that evidence and kind of listening So I see this whole kind of, uh, sometimes I describe what we do as the conscious development of personal identity. I think people who, say, fall into cults, people who are really gullible, don't have a strong sense of personal identity. And personal identity is not just tattoos and piercings or what clothes you wear. The most important kind of personal identity consists of what kind of convictions do we have, what do we stand for. What do we regard as moral and not. It's not popular, you know, I think cultural relativism in academia has kind of damaged our natural sensibilities. But I think we all have opinions on what is true and what is good and what is noble. And, you know, we also have ambiguous things. We're really not sure what's true here or good here and noble there. But I think the more we recognize in a social context that each of us has a personal obligation to stand up for what we believe to be true, good, and noble, again, not through a one-act lecture, but through thousands of hours of interaction, I see that as the best prophylactic against a good share of the coming nightmares we're facing, including those through social media and fakes.

Thank you. And how do you— you talked about it being risky to state your opinion. Are there specific practices you have for developing that trust in the group so that people do feel comfortable being vulnerable?

Sure. And this is a big topic. One of the ways I would start with that is, first of all, one of the biggest dysfunctions in groups are groups where some students dominate. Because if you get a situation— and this is all too common— where only a few students dominate, every single time, it usually becomes boring for everybody else. So I would say this is one of the biggest reasons why things fail. And just due to, you know, different human personalities, there are some students where they are not afraid, they will talk, they will dominate. And sometimes I've seen students where I can be really blunt with them and, you know, doesn't hurt them at all. You know, I gradually become— if they're dominating, I'll gradually, you know, try to become more and more blunt. They're somewhere, "OK, we have to be very blunt before you're hearing this." You know, just not shy. On the other hand, there are some students who are terrified of the process and it's really hard to get them in. So just a few things on kind of bringing the quieter ones in. First, actually calling the dominant ones out on this. One of the things I do is I debrief after every discussion and ask how it went. You know, what was the best and worst of this conversation or sometimes of on a scale of 1 to 5 or something. A lot of that is the check-in. Sometimes students are quiet because they're thoughtful and reflective. Sometimes students are quiet because they're angry. Sometimes they're bored. Sometimes they're afraid. So I try to get some sense in that debrief as to why they're talking or not talking. And if they're not talking, some of this is sometimes I'll ask their group, "Do you feel as if we had too few voices today? Or would it have been more interesting with more diverse voices today?" You know, there are various ways you can kind of call to the surface these sorts of issues. And some of it is I want to encourage, you know, the adult models all the behaviors. And I want to model the conscious discussion of the group dynamic. Because, and I, by the way, I've had, have had often groups of girls see me model this and at some point really take ownership of that and do a fantastic job of owning the conversation about the group dynamics. So, you know, you check to see and try to encourage diversity in terms of voices. Talk to those who may be dominating too much. You know, at the extreme, sometimes I ask them only to speak the first 10 minutes or 15 minutes or only 3 comments or even to sit out. You know, again, there's huge range and sometimes at the extremes, wow, there's no nice way to do this kind of thing. On the other hand, on the very quiet ones, I often start by asking them completely non-confrontational questions. Such as, "How are we doing?" You know, "Is this discussion going well or not going well?" Where I'm not asking for them anything from them other than their opinion on plus or minus. You know, so they don't have to refer to the text. They don't have to demonstrate they can defend a point. They, in fact, they get to sit on judgment of us. And my question is almost implying problems with us. If we're not engaging, what are we doing wrong? And so I can usually get most students to do that kind of yes or no. And so with quiet students, I'll often start by inviting them in very gently occasionally. How we doing? Is this working out or not? Instead of at the end of the class, in the middle, maybe a couple times. And so then they start to give feedback on how it's going. And sometimes that will lead to— that sort of opens up the conversation. So if we've been, you know, talking a mile a minute and I make room for Shannon, hey, how are we doing? Is this working out? You say, No, this is terrible. You guys are doing a terrible job. Great! And by the way, sometimes, you know, guides want all the opinions to be positive, sweet, you know, sweetness and light all the time. I'm, as a leader, I'm often most excited when somebody's angry in my class, which kind of sounds like a weird thing to say, but exactly. It's authentic emotion. And in fact, very often there is something to be angry about. You know, sometimes, often things are a mess. But if I'm saying, "You guys, I think some of you are dominating," or, you know, as long as I'm in that teacher role, kind of top-down control, it's not as effective as the very first day when somebody will say, "This is terrible. You guys are doing a terrible job." Okay, great. Thank you. Now let's talk about it. You know, they kind of introduced their authenticity. So yeah, I kind of check in. Sometimes I'll escalate to other kind of questions about "you know, I'd love to think, do you like this character in the story or not?" And so again, that's then about the story. We shifted it from about the group to about the text. You know, and I would say with all of my questions, this goes back to have lots of questions. You know, I can kind of break it down to from completely non-confrontational about the group dynamic, to non-confrontational about the text, to really low-stakes question about the text, to gradually higher-stakes question of the text. You know, and just bit by bit kind of make space for them. Another technique I use to strengthen, you know, members who feel weaker is I'll often deliberately bolster their voice. So, you know, suppose there are a bunch of students who have one interpretation of the text and, you know, maybe it's even nonsense, and this very quiet frightened student says a tiny bit and I think it's brilliant. I'll say, "Oh, let's stop and and think about what she said. She said, and then I'll do, you know, a stronger, more articulate version of what she said. And, you know, then gradually I'll kind of boost her position up vis-à-vis by means of questions and rephrasing and stuff to the point where I'm kind of giving her a voice in the discussion as a whole. So I'd say those are kind of a few techniques that I use to gradually develop greater creative balance. But I would say the most important thing is to realize it is an issue, you know, and to feel free to do whatever it takes to address the issue. Because this is where I'm always focused on three kind of vectors in Socratic discussion. One is analyzing the text. Another is meaning and purpose, kind of applying ideas to life. And the third is the group dynamic. And so no matter how brilliant your intellectual questions are, if the group dynamics sucks, your class is not going to be great. And so if I have a really terrible domination problem, say, you know what, in the middle of a class, I'll say, you know what, this isn't working. Let's try to figure out how we can shift things around so more of us are inclined to speak. And just brainstorm. Just create space for a totally open brainstorming. A lot of what I do as a leader is I'm totally transparent about my own frustrations leading it. I think this is where we feel as if 'Oh, I have to be expert and I have to be the leader and everything.' You know, it does take some confidence to say, 'Gosh, how can we improve this?' and putting it open to them. But once you feel comfortable doing that, then again, you're no longer responsible for solving it. And insofar as group dynamic problems are often a substantial problem, they can begin, you know, talking about it and working with you to address it. And I find that most students, when they're given space to address these things, are really interested in addressing these things.

Fantastic, thank you. A lot of times we employ the tactic of an A/B choice and they have to choose and then they kind of argue with one another, you know, to convince the other side and then we feel like we may have done a good job if they sort of switch their opinions. Tell me, how— what is your take on that tactic in Socratic discussion?

So there are all sorts of things that I look at as possible sort of scaffolding to get to the point where you can have a dynamic discussion. I would think of that as sort of a scaffolding sort of thing. And one of the reasons I would say is a scaffolding is I want— it's important to me for the students to develop their authentic intellectual voice and what they want. So I, again, while I say— would say sometimes that's useful, I don't like in debate, you know, people are supposed to be flexible and take whatever position. You debate position A, you debate position B, whatever. I want them to have their own position that they do believe based on the evidence and stand up for it. And so I would say something like that is just kind of to get them fluent in talking about, arguing about ideas. But at some point I'd want to go to, now we're going to figure out what you think and why, and you're responsible for your beliefs. Kind of for the long run.

I like that. I like that a lot.

Okay, great.

Would you say that your schools are ideal for a certain type of student, or do you feel that any student would thrive in your environment?

That's a good question. So, you know, certainly the intellectual dialogue part, there's some students who absolutely love it. They, you know, arrive and they feel like they've been missing their home their whole life and this is their home. There are other students for whom it's very alien. And it seems like a waste of time to be talking about ideas. And, you know, my inclination is not to force those for whom it feels like an unnatural fit. That said, I have known several students who initially hated it and felt as if it was an unnatural fit who later came to love it. And so it's sort of one of those tricky things. One of the great things about being private school where parents opt in is that, you know, occasionally parents opt in and the students aren't enthusiastic, but most of the students visit, they like it, and that's why they're coming. That's the vast majority of students. Also, one of the things I very deliberately do is I try to pick a wide range of texts with respect to theme and tonality to appeal to certain kinds of audiences. Just to go in, you know, my experience, a lot of gender stereotypes turn out to be true. There are certain kinds of stories— give you an example, with Flannery O'Connor, I often find that female students really get Flannery O'Connor and go live, and often the boys don't get it and hate it. On the other hand, sometimes in order— if I've been having kind of girl-dominated conversations for too long, maybe I'll pick a story about a fight or, you know, a war or something. Again, I hate to have gender stereotypes be true, but sometimes the only way I can get certain boys to talk is, you know, we're reading something about kind of violent conflict of some kind. And again, there's way broader than that. Sometimes it's poetry versus philosophy, you know, math versus history. You know, sometimes we'll do a painting, sometimes we'll do, you know, occasionally a news article, but, you know, I very consciously try to vary the kind of tonality so that the different students find something they can engage in. And something I've even done is if students don't like the text that I'm picking, I still want to pick most of the texts, text, but I'll let them pick a text for a class. So, you know, somebody may say, "I like the idea of talking about ideas, but I hate everything you pick." I'll say, "Great, you pick it, but then you also have to lead the conversation." And occasionally they do so and it goes really well. Often they do so and they realize how hard it is to lead a conversation. And that even when they pick a text that's great, half to two-thirds of their peers don't like the text. And so they get the the same kind of complaints that I get. And it very often makes them much more sympathetic about, okay, this is hard. So yeah, I would say huge range of responses. That said, I think most kids in my experience like it. Most kids vastly prefer talking and talking about ideas to most other things. It's just sometimes it's a bit of a hard fit, so I extend the range of what I'm doing to kind of help those students feel more welcomed.

Thank you. So, I know you need to go, but I just, I wanted to take a moment to ask you, maybe this is less about school and more personal. No, it's not personal, but it's like something I'm curious about that I wanted to know your opinion. Is that I feel like right now that the way that the United States is and the polarized nature of it, that it's like there's a sense of mutual exclusion. Exclusivity between holding sacred, like, the founding principles of the United States, like the freedom of speech, for example, economic freedom, and political freedom, but then also identifying as being a person who's very socially inclusive. And then you just brought up, like, you know, I hate for gender stereotypes to be correct, and I get that. So I just wanted to touch on that. Like, how do you— I feel like there's this, like, tiny little space for people like that to be right now because there's so much going on around it. And so it's hard to know kind of where you can be comfortable. And can you talk just a tiny bit about that before we end?

Sure. No, again, huge, huge topic just there. But I think ultimately, so I'm very, you know, I think that people want to understand the world. And I think ultimately, Certainly understanding the history of Western civilization is an important part of understanding the world. Japan, when at the Meiji Restoration, studied Europe voraciously because they wanted to become a powerful country, and they succeeded, and they became so powerful, they, you know, just about conquered half the world in World War II. So I think that simply the current mood of everything being politicized is just not sustainable over the long haul. People are very kind of political and tribal about all kinds of things right now. Ultimately, I'm very confident the long-term resilience— it's, I think, you know, Socrates, know ourselves. It's important to know ourselves. I enjoy knowing other human beings. I enjoy, you know, understanding the totality of history. You know, one sort of, you know, complaint I have is if I want to really understand the history of the Silk Road or the history of Africa or the history of Vietnam or wherever, I want to be free to understand it on my own terms. I don't want to be forced to have a certain view on it. And so what rubs me the wrong way is even, you know, my wife's from Africa, she and I spend a lot of time studying pre-colonial Africa, but we're interested in, yeah, what happened, which is different from, we have to understand how bad slavery was. Yeah, horrible, the past is full of horrible things. But I think that anybody gets tired of either blaming or being blamed. Ultimately— so part of her company Skin to Skin is love, curiosity, and empathy is the way to overcome biases. I think that's absolutely true. I think love, curiosity, and empathy conquers all. And, you know, victim oppression is never a healthy dynamic. So, you know, ultimately I think we're gonna— I'm a humanist. I think the humanists of the world will win. Love, curiosity, empathy. I'm pretty optimistic, believe it or not.

Great. That makes me feel optimistic too. Thank you so much, Michael Strong. This has been a real honor. I was kind of nervous to talk to you because you're a little bit of a hero of mine. So I'm really glad. I feel like it went well and that the people listening are just going to learn so much from you and are going to be able to take these lessons and use them right there in the room with a lot of their students. So I really appreciate all of the detail, all the anecdotes, the tactics. This is going to help people improve their Socratic practice and to feel comfortable kicking it off and using it and understanding how valuable it is to develop that thinking skill.

Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Shannon. It's been a delight to be with you. And until next time, be well.

Excellent. Okay, sounds great.

Bye-bye.

Take care, Michael. Bye.

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