Socratic Method Research Portal. The Role of Socratic Questioning in Thinking, Teac. One of the reasons that instructors tend to overemphasize “coverage” over “engaged thinking” is that they do not fully appreciate the role of questions in teaching content.
Consequently, they assume that answers can be taught separate from questions. Indeed, so buried are questions in established instruction that the fact that all assertions — all statements that this or that is so — are implicit answers to questions is virtually never recognized. For example, the statement that water boils at 100 degrees centigrade is an answer to the question “At what temperature centigrade does water boil?” Hence every declarative statement in the textbook is an answer to a question. Taxonomy of Socratic Questions. Crtitcal Thinking - Standards of Thought.