“Education is not the filling of a pail. It’s the lighting of a fire.”
- William Butler Yeats

Socratic questioning is a method of teaching and learning that employs systematic, disciplined questions to help students explore issues thoroughly and draw their own well-reasoned conclusions. Here are some thinking standards to help you conduct Socratic questioning with yourself or with others:

Clarity Could you elaborate further?
Could you give me an example?
Could you illustrate what you mean?

Accuracy How could we check on that?
How could we find out if that’s true?
How could we verify or test that?

Precision Could you be more specific?
Could you give me more details?
Could you be more exact?

Relevance How does that relate to the problem?
How does that bear on the question?
How does that help us with the issue?

Depth What factors make this a difficult problem?
What are some of the complexities of this question?
What are some of the difficulties we need to deal with?

Breadth Do we need to look at this from another perspective?
Do we need to consider another point of view?
Do we need to look at this in other ways?

Logic Does all this make sense together?
Does your first paragraph fit in with your last?
Does what you say follow from the evidence?

Significance Is this the most important problem to consider?
Is this the central idea on which to focus?
Which of these facts is most important?

Fairness Do I have any vested interest in this issue?
Am I sympathetically representing the viewpoints of others?

(From "A Guide to Critical Thinking", by Linda Elder and Richard Paul, Foundation for Critical Thinking, http://www.criticalthinking.org)