How to Use Socratic in a Sentence

Socratic

adjective
  • Here’s how to walk through some questions commonly used in the Socratic method.
    — Kristen Rogers, CNN, 2 Apr. 2024
  • Jack turned the evening into a live Socratic dialogue on the nature of love.
    — Elizabeth Bobrick, New York Times, 4 May 2024
  • Science doesn't work through Socratic debate with an agreeable partner.
    — ArsTechnica, 25 Aug. 2025
  • Ask clarifying Socratic questions to activate a new train of thought.
    — Nuala Walsh, Forbes, 28 Oct. 2021
  • All signs pointed to his being a Stanford lifer, clicking through slide decks until his hair and beard took on a Socratic quality.
    — Anthony Lydgate, WIRED, 6 Sep. 2022
  • And so one is the Socratic method and the other is motivational interviewing.
    — Leah Feiger, WIRED, 1 Aug. 2024
  • Kids filtered in and out of classrooms, with eight-year-olds sitting in the same room and discussing Socratic theory alongside 15-year-olds.
    — Ej Dickson, Rolling Stone, 23 Apr. 2024
  • Apply Socratic questioning to get to the heart of the issue and hear the topic explained by different stakeholders to hammer it home.
    — Jodie Cook, Forbes, 29 Nov. 2023
  • The Socratic question-and-response teaching method is recognized as practical.
    — Lux Narayan, Forbes, 16 Jan. 2025
  • Ideas and opinions are turned over, examined, questioned after Socratic tradition.
    — Stephanie Bunbury, Deadline, 25 Sep. 2024
  • The result is a series of virtually Socratic dialogues (set amid a quietly rich framework of dramatic action) on the subject of life and love.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 2 Oct. 2020
  • This ultimately makes Quizlet’s move from a self-study tool to an interactive Socratic tutor possible.
    — Ray Ravaglia, Forbes, 21 Feb. 2024
  • Math teachers who use Socratic questioning report that students develop stronger problem-solving skills than those who learn through traditional problem sets.
    — Sarah Hernholm, Forbes.com, 9 Sep. 2025
  • When the Socratic method is used in place of lecturing, students are forced to trade their passive role in the classroom for an active one in which participation is the primary measure of mastery.
    — Jeremy Tate, WSJ, 5 Feb. 2023
  • The Socratic dialogue features a story about an ancient race of people with double bodies who were cut in half by Zeus, forever being doomed to wander the earth in search of their other halves.
    — Glenn Garner, Deadline, 27 Jan. 2025
  • That said, a student model could still learn quite a bit from a teacher model just through prompting the teacher with certain questions and using the answers to train its own models — an almost Socratic approach to distillation.
    — Quanta Magazine, 18 July 2025
  • The Socratic approach to untimely questions has both intellectual and social dimensions.
    — Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, 21 Jan. 2025
  • As the women have no memory of the attacks themselves, their conversation is abstract and theoretical, a Socratic dialogue that unfolds amid farm equipment.
    — Jennifer Wilson, The New Republic, 19 Dec. 2022
  • The class has a Socratic, collaborative feel to it and Chapin comes off as personable and approachable when encouraging students to explore songwriting.
    — Thomas Goodwin Smith, Baltimore Sun, 6 July 2023
  • For example, Fernanda is the type of scholar who will help a peer prepare for a Socratic seminar in English class and even attend that Socratic with her as support.
    — Joe Mutascio, The Indianapolis Star, 15 Apr. 2024
  • Where the 2017 posts were filled with Socratic questions, the later posts were more declarative and expository, with heavy use of exclamation points and words written in all capital letters.
    — New York Times, 19 Feb. 2022
  • One came from a precocious history of science concentrator, Xander, who led a chatbot through a Socratic dialogue on the relationship between being and becoming.
    — D. Graham Burnett, New Yorker, 26 Apr. 2025
  • Rather than simply providing answers, this mode uses Socratic questioning to prompt students to think critically, reflect on their reasoning, and deepen their understanding of assignments.
    — Sandy Carter, Forbes.com, 6 Aug. 2025
  • Indeed, instructors often understand the Socratic principle – that there needs to be an active give-and-take and back-and-forth between a teacher and a student, or between two other partners, that feeds a certain kind of productivity.
    — John Werner, Forbes.com, 1 July 2025
  • Well, for starters, there’s AI-powered tutoring, which can give every American student access to the Socratic method and the back-and-forth that’s useful in developing a lot of cognitive skills.
    — John Werner, Forbes, 20 Nov. 2024
  • Cecsarini's Paul is introverted and professorial, openly Socratic in his argument with Joshua.
    — Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 24 Nov. 2020
  • The Paideia proposal was in essence a call for school reform, championing schools’ revival of the Socratic seminar and urging a rigorous academic core curriculum regardless of students’ backgrounds or levels.
    — Bob Goldsborough, Chicago Tribune, 12 June 2025
  • The ChatGPT Study Mode pushes the AI to perform Socratic dialogues with the user and gives guidance rather than spitting out answers.
    — Lance Eliot, Forbes.com, 17 Aug. 2025
  • Much of Blackouts is a kind of Socratic dialogue between Juan and the narrator, yet instead of trading philosophical arguments in order to unearth essential truths, their principal mode of communication is storytelling.
    — Tope Folarin, The Atlantic, 16 Nov. 2023
  • Dialogue from ancient Greek Socratic dialogues to contemporary mentorships enables learners to understand intricate concepts while sharpening their thinking abilities and expanding their comprehension.
    — Ayooluwa Nihinlola, Forbes.com, 12 May 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'Socratic.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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