ABSTRACT
Collins proposes that considering the conversations between a tutor and a student – interactions that he calls Socratic dialogues – is an important method of teaching. He further proposes that such conversations empirically uncover their regular features, particularly those that characterize the tutor's behavior. The dialogues that Collins analyzes shows that students and teachers engaged in sophisticated and important kinds of intellectual behavior. By focusing on the empirical analysis of instructional dialogues, Collins explains broad prescriptions for what might improve the quality of education. He promises a psychological theory that will account for behavior in dialogue situations. Beyond that he promises a practical set of rules for constructing effective instructional programs. This chapter analyzes to what extent the work to date seem to fulfill those promises and talks about a distinction between two kinds of instructional theory. A descriptive theory is one that attempts to tell us what it is that people naturally do.
