# Resuscitating the Socratic Method: Student and Faculty Perspectives on Posing Probing Questions During Clinical Teaching

*Abou-Hanna, Owens, Kinnucan, Mian & Kolars · Voice & Silence, Team Learning, Power & Equity · Academic Medicine · 2021 · Paywalled*

Teaching by asking questions is ancient, and in medical education it has acquired a name and a reputation: pimping, the practice of a senior clinician firing questions at a junior in front of others. The connotation has become negative enough that many faculty have grown hesitant to ask students anything at all. Abou-Hanna and colleagues surveyed 165 medical students who had completed an internal medicine clerkship and 144 of their supervising faculty, and, in the study's cleverest move, asked the faculty to predict what the students actually wanted. The result is a perception gap with a sting in it. Students did not want to be spared questions; they valued being asked, regarded probing questions as good teaching, and wanted more of them than their faculty supposed. What they objected to was not the question but the cost of getting it wrong: they reported feeling humiliated when they answered incorrectly in front of their peers and seniors. Faculty, meanwhile, had drawn the wrong conclusion from the discomfort, and were retreating from questioning altogether. For a corpus about psychological safety this is a precise and unusually practical finding, because it separates two things that are habitually confused. The interpersonal risk that suppresses learning is not the challenge itself but the public price of being wrong in front of people who hold power over you. Remove the questions and you remove the teaching; remove the humiliation and the questions become the teaching. It is the same tension Sutcliffe and colleagues found among residents who would not ask for fear of appearing incompetent, and the same one that runs through the critique of grading elsewhere in this map, arriving here with a concrete remedy: ask more, and make being wrong survivable. Its limits are those of a single-institution survey at one American medical school, relying on self-report and on faculty predictions rather than observed teaching, so the gap it measures is a gap in perceptions. (Text drawn from the 2021 Academic Medicine paper, 96(1), pp. 113-117.)

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