The short answer to this question is, ‘No, a Socratic teacher cannot be a
behaviorist’. There are, however, some similarities between behaviorist learning
theory and Socratic pedagogy.
In a behaviorist paradigm, ‘learners are told about the world and are expected
to replicate its contents’ (Jonassen, 1991, p. 28). This is antithetical to Socratic
practice. Even though the Socratic teacher shares the same epistemological presuppositions
as the behaviorist (i.e., that the world exists and it can be known), the
very design of the method prevents the teacher from telling the student how the
world is, from expecting the student to respond or behave in a certain way, or from
demanding that she exhibit proscribed verbal behavior.