Tag: Pedagogy

The Stewardship of Fear: Trauma-Informed Leadership in an Age of Anxiety

By Jill Szoo Wilson

She is thoughtful, intelligent, good-humored, and consistently encouraging to her fellow students. She’s the kind of student who listens closely when others speak, offers quiet affirmation rather than competition, and seems genuinely glad when her classmates do well. She began the semester strong, delivering two solid speeches and attending every class. There was nothing tentative about her start.

Midway through the term, something changed. Her warmth toward others remained. Her generosity did not disappear. But her attendance became uneven. Absences began to grow to the extent that she missed one of her assigned speaking dates. From there, a pattern emerged that did not match her ability or her effort.

This student did not vanish or disengage as some do. Each missed class came with a morning email in which she apologized and asked what she could do to keep up with the rest of the class. Even as she struggled to be present in the room, she worked to remain connected to the course and accountable to its expectations.

On the final day of the semester, I pulled her aside before class began. This was her last opportunity to deliver the make-up speech she had missed earlier in the term. I asked a question I have asked many students before, a question meant to open a door rather than close one: “How are you doing? Are you ready to go today?” I could see the fear in her eyes drain into the rest of her body and turn into fight-or-flight level tension. Tears came first. Panic followed. We agreed that she could choose whether to deliver the speech privately, after the other students had gone, or not deliver it at all.

When the classroom emptied, we talked for a long time. In the end, she did not give the speech—she could not—and in that moment, I knew I needed to honor her choice. There are times when I will encourage a student to push through their fear. Knowing when not to is part of the work.

What unfolded in that empty room was a trauma response. Panic, dissociation, and fear overtook the student’s capacity to communicate as her nervous system shifted into a state of perceived threat. Her breathing became shallow and rapid. Her body held itself tight. Her words rushed forward, tumbling over one another as she tried to explain how desperately she wanted not to feel the way she did.

Anyone who works in a position of authority—teachers, pastors, physicians, supervisors—has seen this moment. Communication can become physically unavailable when fear takes over. The body tightens, language recedes, and access to speech narrows. When someone is in that state, it is important to remember that applying pressure to the one suffering amplifies distress. Performance returns only when the nervous system has time and space to settle.

There are moments when growth comes from learning that discomfort is not danger, and pushing through fear can be part of that work. There are other moments that call for a different response, as I will explain in the next section.

Fear, Authority, and the Return of Choice

Clinical psychologist David A. Carbonell has spent decades working with people whose lives are shaped by anxiety and panic. His work is especially instructive for those in positions of authority because it explains fear without shaming the person who experiences it and without requiring the leader to become a therapist.

Carbonell begins with a simple but destabilizing premise: anxiety is not a failure of reasoning. It is the activation of a survival system designed to move faster than thought. When fear arises, the brain’s alarm circuitry engages before the reflective systems responsible for language, planning, and explanation have time to come online. This system is meant to protect us, not to help us communicate well.

In moments of perceived threat, the nervous system does not pause to ask whether fear is reasonable or proportional. It acts. Muscles tighten. Breathing shifts into the chest. Attention focuses inward, and sometimes sight narrows. The body prepares for escape, defense, or collapse. Thought follows only if the body allows it.

This is why anxiety so often surprises both the person experiencing it and those witnessing it. A student who is prepared may suddenly freeze. A patient who understands their condition may struggle to answer basic questions. A congregant who wants to speak honestly may fall silent at precisely the moment language feels most necessary. These responses are not evidence of avoidance, deceit, or unwillingness; they’re evidence that the body has moved ahead of the mind.

Carbonell describes anxiety as a “counterintuitive problem” because the strategies people instinctively use to overcome fear often make it worse. Reasoning with fear, pushing through it, or trying to suppress it may appear sensible, but they frequently intensify the nervous system’s alarm. The body interprets urgency, control, or insistence as confirmation that danger is present. What sounds like encouragement to the leader can register as a threat to the person already struggling to regulate.

When I was struggling with heightened anxiety in 2013, I remember telling my longtime family doctor, who was familiar with my personality and profession, “Speaking exhausts me right now. I know what I want to say, but I just don’t feel like talking. It’s exhausting.”

This insight is critical for anyone in authority. When anxiety is driving the body, access to speech narrows as survival takes precedence. Communication returns as the conditions that support it are restored.

The AWARE Framework

Dr. Carbonell developed the AWARE framework while working with clients whose anxiety escalated quickly and overwhelmed their ability to stay present. Rather than asking people to conquer fear, the model offers a way to slow the moment down once fear has already arrived and to change how a person relates to that fear in real time. AWARE stands for Acknowledge, Wait, Allow, Repeat, and Engage. The sequence follows the nervous system’s own rhythm as it moves from alarm toward steadiness.

Acknowledge

Acknowledge begins by bringing attention to what is happening in the present moment. Fear often intensifies when it goes unnamed, especially when a person tries to reason their way out of it or push it away. My student described it this way: “The last time I did a speech, I kept thinking if I could run out of the classroom I would be okay, but then also telling myself I couldn’t run out of the classroom. The more I told myself to stay, the more panicked I felt.”

Acknowledgment interrupts that spiral. When fear is named as it appears, the body no longer has to work as hard to contain it. Attention shifts from escape to awareness, and the nervous system begins to loosen its grip.

In practice, acknowledging fear means noticing and naming what is present in real time: a tight chest, shallow breathing, racing thoughts, a sense of urgency. This naming does not analyze or correct the experience. It simply brings it into awareness. That attention eases the body’s demand for immediate action and signals that the moment can be tolerated rather than escaped.

Instead of asking, “How do I get out of this?” the question becomes, “Is this danger or discomfort?” When the answer is discomfort, fear can be acknowledged without being obeyed.

Acknowledgment slows the interaction and opens space for choice.

Wait

Wait introduces time into a moment that feels compressed. Fear collapses experience into urgency. Everything begins to feel as though it must happen immediately.

For my student, waiting would not have meant deciding what to do next. It would have meant staying with the sensations for a few seconds longer without acting on them. Feeling her feet on the floor. Allowing her breath to move as it could. Letting the urge to escape crest and fall rather than rushing toward resolution.

Even brief pauses give the nervous system crucial information. As seconds pass without action, the body begins to register that immediate escape is not required. Breathing steadies. Muscles soften. Attention widens enough for choice to return.

For leaders, waiting can feel counterintuitive. We are trained to move toward solutions, explanations, or outcomes. Carbonell’s work asks us to trust time itself as a regulating force. Waiting allows the body to recalibrate so that whatever comes next emerges from awareness rather than urgency.

Allow

Once fear has been acknowledged and time has been introduced, the next impulse is often to make the fear stop. This is where anxiety tends to escalate. The body senses resistance and responds by pushing harder.

In the student’s experience, this showed up as an internal struggle. She tried to calm herself, reason with herself, and override the urge to escape. Each attempt intensified her panic. Her body interpreted the struggle itself as evidence that something was wrong.

Allow changes that relationship. Instead of working against fear, the student lets the sensations exist without trying to fix them. The chest remains tight. The breath stays shallow. The urgency lingers. But the fight stops.

Allowing fear does not mean agreeing with it or surrendering to it. It means recognizing that the alarm has already sounded and does not need correction in order to settle. When resistance drops, intensity often follows. The body begins to regulate not because it was forced, but because it is no longer being fought.

Repeat

Fear rarely resolves in a single wave. It rises, softens, and often returns. When it does, the impulse is to interpret its return as failure.

Repeat offers a different response. When fear resurfaces, the student returns to the same steps without escalation. She acknowledges what she notices. She allows the sensations to exist. She waits again. Nothing new needs to be solved.

This repetition teaches the nervous system something essential: fear can come and go without requiring action. Each cycle weakens the urgency attached to the sensations. Over time, fear loses authority not because it disappears, but because it no longer controls the response.

Repeat builds tolerance, not toughness. Consistency, not control, carries the system toward regulation.

Engage

Engage comes after fear has been acknowledged, time has been allowed, and resistance has eased. The student does not wait for fear to disappear. She reenters the task while carrying the remaining sensations with her.

In the classroom, this means shifting attention outward. The student stands at the front of the room with a breath that is still shallow but workable. She looks up. She finds one face in the room. She begins with the first sentence she prepared.

Engagement does not require full calm. It requires orientation. Attention moves away from internal monitoring and toward the shared task of communication.

As the student speaks, fear may continue to rise and fall in the background. She does not evaluate it. She stays with the work in front of her. Each sentence spoken gives the nervous system new information: the body can remain visible, engaged, and unharmed.

Engage restores agency. Communication resumes not because fear vanished, but because attention found a place to rest outside the self.

What This Means for Leaders

Over the years, I have noticed that more students are arriving in my classrooms with nervous systems already shaped by repeated alarms. I see it in attendance patterns, in the way bodies brace before a speech, and in how quickly attention collapses inward once fear takes hold. This is not unique to my classroom. It is widespread and growing.

Recent data make that clear. A large national survey by the University of Michigan School of Public Health found that one in three college students reported moderate to severe anxiety symptoms, with more than a third meeting criteria for a diagnosable anxiety disorder (University of Michigan School of Public Health, 2023). The National Education Association reports similar findings, noting that anxiety now surpasses depression as the most frequently cited mental health struggle on many campuses (National Education Association, 2023). A global review in BMC Psychiatry echoes this pattern, showing that roughly one-third of college students worldwide experience elevated anxiety levels, with anxiety disorders among the most common conditions in this age group (Nguyen et al., 2023).

These are not abstract statistics. They describe the lived reality of the bodies and minds leaders stand before every day in classrooms, churches, clinics, and offices. Anxiety is shaped not only by individual history, but by cultural and academic pressures that accumulate long before people enter our spaces. For many, heightened vigilance is already the baseline.

That reality has direct consequences for communication. Bodies braced for threat do not speak as freely as bodies oriented toward engagement. When the nervous system detects danger, real or perceived, it redirects energy toward survival. Leaders trained to maintain momentum or secure outcomes may misread hesitation as resistance, silence as avoidance, or uneven performance as lack of preparation. Yet insistence on immediacy or efficiency can quietly confirm the very threat the nervous system is trying to manage.

Trauma-informed leadership begins with recognizing this dynamic. It does not require diagnosis, nor does it ask leaders to become therapists. Instead, it calls us to:

  • notice how fear shows up in the moment,
  • slow the interaction enough for regulation to begin, and
  • orient expectations around the body’s capacity before asking it to communicate under pressure.

This does not weaken standards. It strengthens people.
Honoring a student’s nervous system in a moment of acute distress does not eliminate accountability or academic standards; it ensures that evaluation reflects capacity rather than collapse.

A trauma-informed posture creates the conditions under which students and colleagues can perform to their actual ability. It allows them to remain present long enough for thinking, skill, and preparation to take shape. The goal is not to remove challenge, but to ensure that challenge does not exceed the body’s ability to participate.

When leaders understand fear as a physiological response rather than a personal failing, they interpret hesitation as information. They allow choice to reenter the moment. And they learn to meet fear not with urgency, but with timing, which is often the difference between collapse and communication.

In an era when anxiety is this pervasive, trauma-informed leadership is not an added skill. It is a necessary form of stewardship.

Afterword

This is a complicated topic to write about because so much of what we do in a classroom grows out of instinct and the kind of discernment that only time creates. It is hard to explain to a new teacher, or to a young professional in any field, when to hold a firm pedagogical line and when to let it soften in order to meet the human being in front of you. Students need different things in different moments, and those needs are often invisible until they surface in panic, silence, or retreat.

I was out of the college classroom for two years. When I returned this past semester, I noticed a marked shift in the students. I am not someone who says, “This generation is lazy” or “The kids are changing” as a complaint about the future. The students are changing, but they are responding to changes that began long before they entered our classrooms. They face a cultural landscape shaped by social media, constant comparison, economic pressure, and a world that asks them to “perform” in nearly every public and private space. Their nervous systems reflect the world that formed them.

I taught a student in 2013 who blacked out while giving a speech. He remained standing at the podium, but his words stopped. Just before he went silent, he began to stammer, and I watched fear move through him until it overtook the moment.

After class, we sat together and debriefed. I asked him what had gone through his mind just before the fear took hold. He said, “I pictured my mom in the audience. And she was telling me I would not amount to anything.”

In that moment, it was clear that no amount of pedagogy would help him. He did not need stricter deadlines or more detailed feedback. He needed encouragement. He needed someone to meet him in the present moment and remind him that the story he carried was not the story he had to live. I decided to let him give the speech again during the next class period so he could replace that frightening experience with a new one.

What happened next shaped the way I think about teaching. After he finished the second speech, the entire class stood and applauded. They were not applauding brilliance. They were applauding something much more important: courage. They had seen a peer face something that had once undone him, and they honored the strength it took to return.

That semester taught me to build classroom cultures rather than classrooms organized around performance. It taught me that skills grow best in environments where students trust that their humanity is seen and that their fear will not be used against them. I have never regretted that decision.

Further Reading

Carbonell, David A. The Panic Attacks Workbook: A Guided Program for Beating the Panic Trick. McGraw-Hill, 2004.

Carbonell, David A. The Worry Trick: How Your Brain Tricks You into Expecting the Worst and What You Can Do About It. New Harbinger Publications, 2016.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press, 2024.

Sapolsky, Robert M. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. 3rd ed., Holt Paperbacks, 2004.

What My Students Taught Me This Semester

Christmas treats handed out. Goodbye hugs and handshakes extended. Grades turned in. Another semester in the books.

Moments like this remind me of what it used to feel like to drop a coin into a noisy fountain. Whatever wish I made filled my mind and hand with anticipation, with the kind of energy that moves you forward. Then came the thrust of the arm, the release, the drop, the looking through rippling water. It felt quiet. Like you had accomplished something, but wouldn’t quite know what until much later.

Where do our wishes go? Where will these students go?

Does that make sense?

This was probably my favorite semester in all my decades of teaching in higher education.

Intersections. Semesters are always intersections between me and the students, the students and one another, and the students and themselves. Who they were, who they are, and who they are becoming. But this semester felt electric, alive with points on a map charting lefts and rights, ups and downs, and ins and outs. For better and for worse.

I had students who became homeless and held on. Students who were beginning afresh and letting go. Students who started with little hope and left with direction, and others who learned quietly that school just isn’t for them. There were fights for freedom. Heated arguments about the meaning of courage, good, and knowledge. I bore witness to confusion and courage and strength and joy. Tides in an ocean of relative chaos, and ships that refused to sink.

I am so proud of my students. Every single one of them. And I am humbled by the role I have in their lives to listen, question, encourage, and challenge.

In the final summation, what I realize is that I needed them more this semester than they needed me. Or maybe it was equal. They kept me focused outside of myself, and when I wanted to despair, they met me with laughter, frivolity, complexity, and routine.

This is life. Our classrooms are microcosms of the wider world, and when we can love, negotiate disagreement, have difficult conversations, and still extend hugs and handshakes at the end, we have taken part in some of the most rewarding work this life offers.

I’ll leave you with some of the results from one of our more contentious Socratic question roundtables this semester, What Is Courage:

“Courage is the willingness to make a full, genuine attempt at overcoming an obstacle that presents a physical and/or mental danger.” —B

“The full attempt to overcome a physical and/or mental obstacle with perceived risk.” —A

“An action. Choosing to face an obstacle that presents risk in spite of those risks.” —P

“An act or mentality that allows or enables someone to overcome an obstacle despite the chance of danger or other unfavorable outcomes.” —D

“The mental and moral strength to act despite fear and danger.” —T

“Courage is doing something even when you feel afraid.” —C

“Courage is the act doing something even when you feel fear/danger/risk/ obstacle, whether is physically or mentally challenging  even when it costs you something, and even when no one is watching.” —S

“Courage is bearing up under the weight of outward and/or inward threat for the purpose of becoming who you need to be for yourself and others. All for the glory of God.” —J

“I’m not sure, but I know it’s something we do for the greater good or else it’s just self-confidence.” —L

What do you say courage is?

Thinking in Community: Constructivism and the Socratic Tradition in Higher Education

By Jill Szoo Wilson

In contemporary higher education, a surprising harmony emerges between two pedagogical lineages often perceived as distinct: constructivist teaching philosophy and the Socratic Method. One grounds itself in cognitive development and social learning theory; the other traces its heritage to ancient Greece. Yet together, they form one of the most intellectually generative combinations available to the modern classroom. Both treat learning not as passive absorption but as active inquiry. Both assume that students arrive with prior knowledge, internal frameworks, and tacit assumptions that shape how they understand new information. Most importantly, both contend that education is not simply the transfer of content, but the transformation of the learner.

Constructivist thinkers argue that students build knowledge rather than receive it. Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist, described this process as a dynamic interplay between assimilation and accommodation, a continual restructuring of cognitive architecture as learners encounter new experiences (The Origins of Intelligence in Children). Lev Vygotsky, the Russian social psychologist, extended this idea by emphasizing the social dimensions of learning. His concept of the Zone of Proximal Development proposed that understanding flourishes when learners engage in dialogue with a more capable peer or mentor. John Dewey, the American philosopher of education, echoed this view, asserting that “knowledge is not something which exists apart from experience” (Democracy and Education). Their scholarship provides the intellectual foundation for constructivist pedagogy: students learn by doing, by reflecting, and by negotiating meaning in community.

The Socratic Method shares this commitment to meaning-making through dialogue. Though separated by millennia from contemporary cognitive theory, Socrates, the Athenian philosopher, had already intuited that learning requires active mental engagement. His method—probing questions, conceptual clarification, and disciplined reasoning—invites students to articulate, examine, and ultimately revise their assumptions. Mortimer Adler, the American educational philosopher, writes in The Paideia Proposal that the Socratic classroom is defined by its refusal to reduce ideas to mere facts. Instead, it seeks to refine the mind through inquiry. Similarly, Nel Noddings, the influential scholar of ethics and education, observed that Socratic questioning “challenges students to consider why they believe what they believe” and requires an educator to listen closely, ask precisely, and build questions that reveal the architecture of a student’s thinking (Educating Moral People).

Although constructivism and the Socratic Method arise from different intellectual traditions, their meeting point is the conviction that learning is constructed, not delivered. When paired, they generate a classroom that is both rigorous and learner-centered.

Constructivism in Practice: Learning as a Process of Meaning-Making

Constructivist pedagogy begins with a simple premise: students bring a world with them. Prior experiences, cultural narratives, internalized scripts, emotional histories, and unspoken values become part of the classroom’s cognitive landscape. Jerome Bruner, a central figure in cognitive constructivism, argued that learning occurs when students “go beyond the information given” (The Process of Education). He believed that education should not simply prepare students for future life; it should cultivate their ability to interpret and re-interpret their world.

This orientation toward interpretation requires instructors to move from transmission to facilitation. In a transmission model, the teacher is positioned as the primary source of knowledge who delivers information for students to receive, record, and reproduce. In a facilitative model, the teacher instead designs learning experiences, poses questions, and structures interactions through which students actively construct understanding for themselves. Jerome Bruner, the American cognitive psychologist, argued that learning occurs most powerfully when students are guided to “go beyond the information given,” a process that requires thoughtful scaffolding and inquiry-based engagement (The Process of Education). Stephen Brookfield, a leading scholar in adult learning, similarly contends that facilitation encourages learners to examine their assumptions, engage in reflection, and build insight through structured dialogue (Teaching for Critical Thinking).

These theorists converge on one central claim: meaning is co-constructed. Students learn not only from lectures and readings, but from the interplay of questions, reflections, and interpretive tensions that arise during discussion.

In the college classroom, this creates a pedagogical environment that values nuance over finality. Students learn to test ideas, articulate interpretations, and reconsider or solidify earlier conclusions. The instructor becomes an architect of inquiry, designing learning experiences to provoke reflection rather than prescribing answers. Constructivism thus offers the philosophical soil in which Socratic teaching can take root.

Socratic Questioning: Inquiry as Intellectual Discipline

If constructivism provides the philosophical ground, the Socratic Method supplies the structure. Socratic pedagogy is not spontaneous conversation; it is purposeful inquiry. Christopher Phillips, founder of the modern Socrates Café movement, describes Socratic questioning as “a shared search for understanding” where each question functions as both challenge and invitation (Socrates Café). Allan Bloom characterizes this process as the cultivation of the “examined life,” where intellectual discomfort is not an obstacle but an essential component of learning (The Closing of the American Mind).

At its core, the Socratic Method rests on three types of inquiry:

  1. Clarification questions, which refine imprecise statements.
  2. Assumption questions, which uncover the beliefs beneath a claim.
  3. Implication questions, which reveal the consequences of those beliefs.

Together, they encourage students to build a more precise conceptual vocabulary. This practice strengthens not only critical thinking but also metacognition, the process by which learners examine their own thinking and monitor how understanding develops. By articulating how they know what they know, students begin to understand the architecture of their own reasoning.

Stephen Brookfield notes that Socratic inquiry helps students identify “assumptions that are taken for granted and rarely examined” (Teaching for Critical Thinking). These moments of self-interrogation are often destabilizing, yet profoundly generative. The student shifts from absorbing knowledge to inhabiting it.

Within the college classroom, the Socratic Method functions as both compass and catalyst. It directs students toward deeper understanding and accelerates the cognitive processes described by constructivist theorists. It requires students to participate actively in their own intellectual development.

Where the Traditions Converge: Dialogue as Pedagogical Architecture

Constructivism and the Socratic Method converge in their shared conviction that learning emerges through intentional interaction. Both approaches resist the notion that knowledge is acquired through answers alone; instead, they emphasize the intellectual labor of forming, testing, and refining those answers. Dialogue becomes the medium through which understanding is shaped, not merely communicated.

In a constructivist–Socratic classroom, dialogue serves as an architectural framework that supports and directs cognitive growth. Questions are not interruptions to learning but the mechanisms that move it forward. They guide students from initial uncertainty toward increasingly complex interpretations, prompting them to articulate assumptions, revisit earlier conclusions, and trace the logic of their own thinking. It is in this movement that Vygotsky’s insight becomes visible: learning accelerates in the space between what a student can already do and what becomes possible through carefully guided interaction. The Zone of Proximal Development is not a chart or a formula in this setting. It is the lived moment when a question arrives at just the right level of difficulty, when a peer’s interpretation stretches a student’s own, when the instructor’s prompt nudges thought into a new configuration. As students respond to questions situated just beyond their current mastery, they test hypotheses, negotiate meaning with peers, and begin to inhabit the intellectual habits of inquiry.

Such a classroom is relational, reflective, and rigorously engaged. It honors the individuality of student experience while drawing learners into a shared pursuit of understanding. Within this environment, the instructor becomes a designer of intellectual movement and a structurer of dialogue so that students can recognize themselves as co-authors of their learning. The result is not merely the acquisition of knowledge but the cultivation of an interpretive stance that endures far beyond the course’s boundaries.

Conclusion

As these traditions come together in practice, the college classroom becomes a setting where inquiry deepens and understanding gains structure. Their shared commitment to reflection and the active construction of meaning encourages students to interpret ideas with increasing precision and to recognize the habits of thought that guide interpretation itself. Through this integrated approach, dialogue emerges as a sustained intellectual practice, inviting students into the slow, disciplined work of questioning, analyzing, and revising their thinking.

This work reaches far beyond the mastery of course content. The interpretive habits cultivated in a constructivist and Socratic classroom form the foundation for adult intellectual life. They strengthen the ability to discern patterns, evaluate competing claims, and approach complexity with patience rather than haste. In a culture shaped by constant information and rapid exchange, these habits create a practice of attentiveness. They help students recognize nuance, situate themselves within ongoing conversations, and contribute thoughtfully to the civic, professional, and relational worlds they will inhabit.

Viewed in this light, the purpose of higher education expands beyond the acquisition of knowledge. It becomes an invitation to develop a way of thinking characterized by curiosity, rigor, and a readiness to dwell in questions. When instructors adopt a pedagogy that affirms the social construction of understanding and the disciplined inquiry associated with the Socratic tradition, they help students cultivate a lifelong interpretive stance. This stance, more than any discrete skill or body of information, equips learners to encounter a complex world with insight, discernment, and intellectual courage

Further Reading

Adler, Mortimer J. The Paideia Proposal. Macmillan, 1982.

Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. Simon & Schuster, 1987.

Bruner, Jerome. The Process of Education. Harvard UP, 1960.

Brookfield, Stephen. Teaching for Critical Thinking. Jossey-Bass, 2012.

Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. Macmillan, 1916.

Noddings, Nel. Educating Moral People: A Caring Alternative to Character Education. Teachers College Press, 2002.

Phillips, Christopher. Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy. Norton, 2001.

Piaget, Jean. The Origins of Intelligence in Children. International Universities Press, 1952.

Plato. Meno. Translated by G.M.A. Grube, Hackett Publishing, 1997.

Plato. The Republic. Translated by G.M.A. Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett Publishing, 1992. (Book I)

Vygotsky, Lev. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard UP, 1978.

Originally posted on my Jill Szoo Wilson Substack.

Living With Questions: The Socratic Method in Classroom and Culture

By Jill Szoo Wilson

Socrates left a legacy without pages or diagrams. No book, no formal lectures, no chalkboard sketches survive him. What endures is the way he lived with others: asking questions, listening intently, and then pressing further. His gift is a method of dialogue that unsettles, clarifies, and invites. To teach in the Socratic tradition is to resist performance and cultivate a climate where inquiry carries more authority than certainty.

That tradition speaks as directly to the classroom as it does to a fractured culture. In both settings, the Socratic method interrupts the rush to easy answers. It honors the long pause. It elevates the well-placed question above the polished explanation. What begins as a teaching practice matures into a posture for living, one that dignifies thought and relationship by daring to stay with questions.

The Marketplace Origins: Asking Instead of Telling

Athens in Socrates’ lifetime was a city at once confident and restless. Fresh from its victories over Persia, it stood as the cultural beacon of Greece. Marble temples gleamed on the Acropolis, dramatists filled the theatres with tragedies and comedies, and statesmen praised the promise of democracy. Yet beneath this brilliance ran deep fissures—political rivalries, the scars of war, and a constant struggle over who truly held power.

The agora, Athens’ central marketplace, embodied this tension. It was a place of commerce and spectacle: stalls piled with figs and olives, artisans hammering bronze, and heralds shouting the news of decrees and battles. Philosophers debated beside fishmongers; politicians addressed citizens over the clamor of bargaining; incense smoke mingled with the smell of fresh bread and animals waiting for sacrifice. It was here, amid noise and distraction, that Socrates carved out his peculiar space.

He would stop citizens in their errands and ask them to define justice, courage, or piety, slowly unraveling their answers until their certainties frayed. In Euthyphro, he presses a man outside the courthouse to explain piety, only to show that each attempt contradicts the last. In Laches, he asks two generals to define courage, and their confident replies dissolve into confusion. In the opening of Republic, he challenges Cephalus and Polemarchus on the meaning of justice, demonstrating how easily their definitions falter under questioning. What seemed like simple conversation became a mirror, exposing how fragile even the most assured convictions were. Plato’s dialogues preserve these encounters not as tidy resolutions but as open-ended confrontations with truth.

What set Socrates apart was not the possession of wisdom but the way he pursued it. He treated each encounter as a mutual investigation, overturning the idea that knowledge could be handed down like a finished object. Truth, for him, was something coaxed into view through dialogue, through the disciplined art of asking.

Socrates’ conversations in the marketplace did more than unsettle individuals; they modeled a form of learning that has echoed across centuries. What began among merchants and magistrates in Athens set the pattern for dialogue wherever teaching takes place. The classroom, no less than the agora, can become a site where questions break open assumptions and where truth takes shape in conversation.

The Classroom as Dialogue

In a modern classroom, the Socratic method unfolds in deceptively simple ways. A student offers an answer. Rather than affirm or correct, the teacher presses: Why? What evidence supports that? Could it be otherwise? The questions circle, sometimes frustratingly, until the student is forced to examine not only the conclusion but the reasoning beneath it.

Educational research helps explain why this works. In a classic study published in Cognitive Science, Michelene Chi and her colleagues found that students who were prompted to generate their own explanations remembered concepts more deeply and transferred their knowledge more effectively than those who were simply told the answer (Chi, de Leeuw, Chiu, & LaVancher, 1994). The act of reasoning aloud forces the mind to weave fragments of knowledge into coherence. In other words, the question matters more than the answer.

The Socratic method also relies on what psychologists call productive struggle. Manu Kapur, writing in Cognition and Instruction in 2008, demonstrated that students who wrestled with challenging problems, even to the point of initial failure, ultimately achieved more robust learning than those given immediate instruction. The discomfort of not knowing is not a flaw in the process. It is the process. A teacher’s role is not to step in too quickly, but to sustain that tension just long enough for students to find their own foothold.

Silence, too, is part of the method. Mary Budd Rowe’s pioneering research on “wait time” in the 1970s revealed that when teachers extended their pause after asking a question from one second to three or more, students’ answers became longer, more thoughtful, and more complex. What can feel like an empty pause to the teacher becomes essential space for the student, a place where thought can ripen. The Socratic method depends on this kind of patience.

This approach does not abandon structure. It requires precision. The teacher must listen closely, know when to push further, and know when to let silence do the work. In this sense, Socratic teaching is less about performance and more about orchestration. It is the art of drawing forth what already exists in the room.

One can think of it as choreography. Students move between certainty and doubt, between answer and reconsideration. The teacher’s role is not to correct their steps but to keep them dancing.

Everyday Questions: Beyond the Classroom

The Socratic method is not confined to philosophy seminars or literature courses. Its spirit belongs equally to the conversations of daily life. In relationships, questions can transform conflict into dialogue. A child says to a parent, “You never listen to me.” The reflexive answer is defensive. The Socratic one is curious: What do you mean when you say I don’t listen? Can you give me an example?

This instinct to probe rather than defend rests on something deeper than style; it rests on the nature of curiosity itself. Psychologists remind us that curiosity is more than idle wondering. George Loewenstein, in a landmark 1994 article in Psychological Bulletin, described curiosity as an “information gap,” the restless tension that arises when we sense something missing in our understanding. More recent work in Frontiers in Psychology shows that when students encounter uncertainty, curiosity becomes the force that drives them to explore and make new connections (Vogl, Pekrun, Murayama, and Loderer, 2020).

In friendships, in workplaces, even in disagreements over politics or faith, asking rather than asserting changes the emotional temperature. A statement closes the door. A question cracks it open. Curiosity reveals something essential about imagination: how a person envisions not only what is, but what could be; the possibilities they long to explore, the connections they hope to forge with themselves, with others, and with the world.

Neuroscience reinforces this. Celeste Kidd and Benjamin Hayden, writing in Neuron in 2015, define curiosity as “the motivation to seek information for its own sake.” In a related study, Matthias Gruber and colleagues demonstrated that curiosity activates the brain’s reward circuits and strengthens memory formation (Neuron, 2014). A good question, then, does more than elicit an answer. It calls imagination into play, deepens memory, and builds connection.

This does not mean questions are neutral. They can unsettle. They can demand honesty. Yet precisely because they do not declare, they invite the other person into the act of discovery. Socratic questioning is not about winning an argument. It is about honoring another’s mind enough to linger with them in uncertainty and to treat their imagination and hopes as worthy of exploration.

The Risks of Unsettling: A Real Life Example

To live by questions is to embrace vulnerability. Students often resist when pressed beyond their first answers. They want the comfort of being told they are correct. Adults, too, may bristle when asked to explain themselves. The Socratic method exposes the fragility of our assumptions, and this exposure can feel threatening.

On the first day of one of my Theatre classes this semester, I asked my students, “What is art?” I called on each of them to give me a definition and wrote down the key words from their responses: skill, technique, motivation to create, free speech, passion, purpose, beauty, subjectivity, therapy, communication, no rules, and evolving.

We then took each word and examined it together. “Beauty,” I asked, “is beauty art? Is art beauty?” One student pushed back: “Well, art can be beautiful, but it can also be scary. Or ugly. Or even neutral, depending on who’s looking at it. So, no. Beauty is not art.” I pressed further: “Can we agree that beauty is a descriptor of some art? Maybe we could even say all beauty points to an artist?” Another student jumped in: “Not really. A tree is beautiful. Clouds are beautiful. They appear from natural processes. So they aren’t art.” I redirected, “Can we agree that beauty is a function of art?” And on the conversation went until the students decided to cross beauty off the list.

One by one, we worked through each of the words on the list in the same way, weighing assumptions, testing counterexamples, and listening carefully to each other’s reasoning. By the end, the only words left on the board were creation, purpose, and expression. Together, we concluded that art is “creative expression on purpose.” The definition wasn’t handed down. It was discovered.

Moments like these illustrate both the risk and the reward of the Socratic method. Students feel unsettled at first, stripped of the security of a quick, “right” answer. However, the unease compels them to move past preconceived notions and into genuine thought. Jack Mezirow, in his work on transformative learning, called these moments “disorienting dilemmas,” disruptions that compel us to reconsider our frames of reference (Mezirow, 1991). Similarly, research on “desirable difficulties” in learning shows that challenges that slow down the process often produce stronger retention and deeper understanding (Bjork & Bjork, 2011).

Teachers who practice this method must learn patience. Silence stretches. Frustration mounts. The temptation to resolve the tension with a quick answer is strong. But to yield too soon is to miss the point. Socratic dialogue insists that truth is not a prize handed down but a path walked together.

These moments of questioning can be charged, uncomfortable, and revealing. They carry the risk of resistance, but they also create the conditions for genuine transformation. To teach Socratically is to accept that unease is not failure. It is the very ground where change takes root.

The Gift of Dialogue

The gift of the Socratic method lies in its redefinition of authority. The teacher’s power is not in providing answers but in dignifying students with the capacity to seek their own. To be asked a serious question is to be taken seriously. It signals that one’s perspective matters, that one’s reasoning deserves attention.

This gift matters far beyond the classroom. The United States is in a season of turmoil. Every time an angry word is shouted, a bullet flies through the air, or a cultural symbol is weaponized, dialogue fractures into generalizations, name-calling, and heels dug into the soil where the blood of ancestors who fought in the Civil War still lingers. When dialogue collapses, we don’t only lose civility. We lose the possibility of understanding.

One afternoon, I set aside my lecture notes and simply asked my class, “How are you all? If there was one thing you would want my generation to understand about your generation, what would it be?” The room quieted. Students looked at each other, then at me, and began to speak. Their answers were not rehearsed. They spilled out of anxiety, depression, numbness, confusion, and a sense of chaos. And yet, as they named these things, the fire burning in the world outside our classroom seemed to recede. No one was trading positions or slogans. We were speaking above them. Each person had the opportunity to share complex thoughts, emotions, and ideas, while others listened.

All I did was ask a question and then pay attention.

Conclusion: Living With Questions

The Socratic method is more than a teaching strategy. It is a way of being present to the world with curiosity. It slows the rush toward certainty and leaves room for ambiguity while honoring the dignity of another person’s thought.

To live by questions is not easy. It asks for patience, humility, and a willingness to stay with silence. Yet in that space, understanding becomes possible. Dialogue deepens. Connections form. Perhaps this is why the method endures. Not because it guarantees answers, but because it keeps us searching, together.

Beauty and Destruction in the Work of Sam Shepard: A Theatrical Collision

By Jill Szoo Wilson

Introduction

In the plays of Sam Shepard, beauty and destruction are not opposing forces so much as interdependent elements, continually coexisting, colliding, and reconstituting one another. His characters, often broken men in desolate landscapes or fraying domestic spaces, search for transcendence but are tethered to the ruins of family, memory, and myth. This essay explores Shepard’s use of beauty and destruction as thematic counterpoints and mutually generative forces in works such as Buried Child (1978), True West (1980), and Fool for Love (1983). In Buried Child, a child’s corpse buried in the backyard serves as a symbol of familial disintegration that resurfaces through surreal harvests. In True West, the kitchen becomes a battleground where toast and typewriters fly, and in Fool for Love, the rhythm of two doomed lovers is rendered audible through physical contact with a set built from drum skin. Each play demands intense physical and emotional presence, and together they form a trilogy of destruction drawn in poetry, silence, and sound. This essay considers the structural and performative demands these themes place on both text and actor.

In contrast to playwrights who treat destruction as a moral end or beauty as a redemptive balm, Shepard constructs a theatrical world in which the two often co-occur. In Shepard’s work, we see raw violence framed in lyricism and spiritual longing undercut by physical collapse. His stage directions read like prose poems. His dialogue pulses with the tension of characters reaching for something sublime while pulling the trigger on their own undoing. This paradox resonates deeply with the teachings of Sanford Meisner, who insisted that “acting is the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” In Shepard’s imaginary worlds, the truth is frequently unbearable and, at the same time, luminous.

Destruction as Inheritance — Buried Child

In Buried Child, Shepard excavates the American family mythos, exposing its rotted core beneath the pastoral iconography of the Midwest. The play opens with Dodge, an alcoholic patriarch, coughing on a couch while rain lashes the windows of his decaying farmhouse. The setting is already decomposing; destruction is not merely happening, it has happened, and its aftermath persists like mold on the American Dream.

What makes this destruction poetic rather than gratuitous is Shepard’s language. Dodge’s sardonic wit and Tilden’s fractured monologues evoke a kind of haunted beauty. When Tilden carries in freshly harvested corn and carrots, impossibly, from land long presumed fallow, the vegetables function as both an eerie miracle and a symbol of buried truth. The farm yields again, but only as a sign that the past cannot stay buried.

This return of growth serves as a central metaphor in the play: the truth, once buried, has taken root. It now pushes upward in ways the characters cannot fully comprehend or control. The new growth is ambiguous—both miraculous and monstrous, both a sign of life and a symptom of rot. As the character Shelly remarks, “You can’t force a thing to grow.” Her observation, offered with both innocence and frustration, frames one of the play’s central tensions: the futility of control. What has been buried, especially when traumatic or unacknowledged, does not remain dormant. It germinates in silence, demanding recognition. The corn and carrots become emblems of this paradox in that the land produces life not in celebration, but in indictment. The soil remembers.

As acting theorist Uta Hagen writes in Respect for Acting, “the objective must always be rooted in the truth of the moment, however elusive that truth may be.” In Buried Child, the actor’s task is to embody emotional disorientation within a physical world that no longer obeys rational laws. The characters’ denial of the unspeakable crime (an incestuous child murdered and buried in the backyard) structures their entire relational dynamic, making truth both the threat and the only possible redemption. Destruction in this play is not explosive but ambient; it lingers, infects, and ultimately demands to be unearthed. When Dodge mutters, “He’s not dead. He’s lying out there in the rain,” or when Tilden brings in armfuls of crops and states flatly, “I picked it. I picked it all,” the audience begins to grasp the scale of denial wrapped in ritual and decay. The crime at the heart of the family has not simply been buried; it has become atmospheric, altering everything it touches.

Beauty on the Brink — True West

If Buried Child presents destruction as something buried within the familial structure, True West stages it as a volatile performance, immediate, escalating, and bound by an unstable intimacy. The play centers on two estranged brothers, Austin and Lee, whose identities slowly collapse into one another in a taut, absurdist spiral. Their interactions shift from passive aggression to full-blown physical chaos, culminating in a nearly feral regression.

What emerges, paradoxically, is a strange kind of beauty: a dark symmetry between the brothers, a primal dance of dominance and dependence. Their chaotic exchanges echo Meisner’s call for emotional truth: “Don’t do anything until something happens to make you do it.” Every gesture in True West is reactive, impulsive, and dangerously real. The play becomes a study in what happens when actors are fully present within characters who are fully unraveling.

In one of the play’s quieter yet more hauntingly resonant moments, Austin asks his mother if he can take some of her china with him into the desert. The request, almost absurd given the play’s building chaos, reflects a deeply human impulse: to carry something civil, refined, and domestic into a wild and untamed place. It is a moment of tragic tenderness. Austin, whose identity has begun to dissolve under the pressure of his brother’s presence and the unraveling of his life, tries to hold on to something emblematic of order. The china becomes an anchor, a symbolic plea for beauty in a world rapidly losing form. But the attempt to impose civility on chaos is ultimately futile.

This desire to preserve the daily rituals of safety, represented by dishes, meals, and domestic customs, is swallowed by the very wilderness he is stepping into. The destruction of the daily order becomes, paradoxically, an act of liberation: a refusal to replicate the emotional sterility and performative masculinity modeled by their father. Their unraveling, though chaotic, is also an act of anti-inheritance. It’s a way of rejecting the rigid, lifeless structures passed down to them. In destroying the structure, the brothers reach, however destructively, for something that might be more authentic.

Their final confrontation, circling each other with cords and toasters, lit in a harsh wash of kitchen light, culminates not in resolution but in a mutual snarl of recognition. As the lights go down, they are frozen, both caught in mirrored stances, each a grotesque reflection of the other. The beauty here is not in their harmony but in the stark exposure of their inherited chaos. It is the raw, unvarnished honesty of the moment—the shedding of illusion, the physical embodiment of the emotional lineage they have both tried to escape—that becomes beautiful. In seeing themselves reflected in each other’s ruin, they finally confront the truth that has been simmering beneath the surface all along. The symmetry is terrible, but it is real. In Shepard’s world, reality, no matter how brutal, carries its own strange and terrible grace.

Shepard writes the destruction of these men with startling elegance. Their violence is framed in precise stage directions and taut, almost musical dialogue. Beauty resides not in the content of their actions, but in the way the play choreographs collapse with clarity and control. The kitchen, once a place of order and domesticity, becomes the site of total disorder. Toast burns, typewriters smash, and identities merge. And yet, in this implosion, Shepard captures something elemental: the deep, even mythic pull toward self-annihilation in the search for meaning.

Desire on the Edge of Ruin — Fool for Love

In Fool for Love, Shepard explores the entanglement of beauty and destruction through the lens of obsessive love. The play unfolds in a Mojave motel room where May and Eddie, bound by shared history and irrevocable desire, attempt to extricate themselves from a relationship that has long since passed the point of salvation. Their love is violent, cyclical, and relentless: a collision of longing and despair.

Here, destruction takes the shape of repetition. Eddie leaves, returns, makes promises, and breaks them. May pulls away, only to be drawn back in. Their intimacy is a closed circuit, sparking and sparking but never resolving. The presence of Martin, a well-meaning outsider, introduces a strategic third element, used by May to reestablish her autonomy and disrupt the intensity between herself and Eddie.

Martin becomes a foil, not only to Eddie but to the rhythm of the couple’s collapse. He functions less as a romantic rival and more as a symbol of distance, a grasp at sanity, and an invitation to something less volatile. In Martin’s calm and steadiness, Eddie’s chaos becomes unmistakable, and for a moment, May can see it for what it is and see herself as someone who might choose differently.

In one unforgettable scene, Martin asks simple questions—about Eddie, about the past—but is met with silence or deflection. He becomes a quiet observer, watching the frayed edges of a relationship he cannot fully comprehend. When Eddie returns with rope and a motel bedpost in mind, Martin shifts from passive guest to unwitting witness, positioned just outside the emotional violence unfolding before him. His bafflement mirrors the audience’s own, offering a point of contrast: where Eddie and May are entangled in a closed circuit of obsession, Martin represents the rational world. He is detached, orderly, and unprepared for the depth of their volatility. In this way, Martin’s presence underscores the gulf between emotional entrapment and emotional clarity.

The language of the play is undeniably beautiful. Shepard allows lyricism to rise through the violence, crafting lines that vibrate with poetic realism. In the original production, that lyricism was made visceral through sound. The set design included walls made of stretched drum material, allowing the actors to fall against, roll against, and hit the surfaces. Their bodies created percussion with each physical interaction resonating audibly in the space. In one key moment, May launches herself against the wall in anguish, and the reverberation stuns both the audience and her scene partner, making the violence not just visible but visceral. The drum-like resonance blurs the line between action and underscoring, allowing the architecture itself to speak the unspeakable. The walls held their pain, amplified their pulses, and gave form to the emotional choreography that defined their bond. In this way, the set itself became an instrument, conducting the music of destruction.

Uta Hagen reminds us that “the best performances are those in which the actor ceases to act and begins to live.” Fool for Love demands exactly that. The actors must inhabit emotional extremes without ever veering into melodrama. They must make devastation look inevitable but never rehearsed. It is step by step that Eddie and May unravel. The characters are not caricatures of dysfunction; they are portraits of the human impulse to chase beauty (love) even when it leads to ruin.

Conclusion

In Shepard’s theatrical universe, beauty is never pristine, and destruction is rarely complete. The two are fused in an uneasy duet with one rising through the other, undoing and remaking what came before. His characters do not simply live in the aftermath of chaos; they create it, inherit it, resist it, and remake themselves through it. They destroy what they love in the same breath that they reach for transcendence. Truth, in this world, is not a final destination but something that emerges only through rupture and rebirth.

For actors, Shepard’s work is both an invitation and a crucible. It demands presence without pretense, risk without rehearsal, and emotional exposure without easy catharsis. As Sanford Meisner reminds us, the actor’s task is to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances, and in Shepard’s plays, those circumstances are often brutal. The performer must inhabit contradictions so fully that they cease to be contradictions and become character. For audiences, the reward is a visceral encounter with the kind of upheaval that often defines real life, rendered before them with clarity, immediacy, and form. Shepard’s plays are not about fixing what’s broken. They are about what is revealed when the breaking is allowed to speak.

✨ If you’d like to keep reading more essays like this, you can also find me on Substack: https://substack.com/@jillszoowilson