Socratic Dialogue For Sustainable Futures: Groups Guidance Innovation To Build Students’ Critical Thinking Skills

Abstract

Critical thinking has been identified as one of the fundamental competencies students must acquire, as emphasized in Indonesia's national education policy, which positions critical reasoning as a mandatory graduate profile dimension achieved through meaningful, contextual learning. However, national and international assessments indicate that Indonesian students' critical thinking skills remain persistently low, and preliminary observations in junior high school group guidance practice reveal that students still struggle to analyze problems systematically, evaluate information critically, and make logically reasoned decisions. While prior studies have shown that Socratic dialogue can effectively enhance critical thinking across various educational and counseling settings, none have produced a comprehensive, operational guide that enables school counselors to implement Socratic dialogue systematically within group guidance sessions. This study aims to address that gap by developing a structured guide for applying Socratic dialogue in group guidance to build critical thinking skills of eight-grade students at SMPN 2 Ciwaringin, Cirebon. A literature review method was employed, synthesizing critical thinking theories, group guidance principles, and Socratic questioning frameworks to construct a guide that maps Socratic questioning stages to core critical thinking skills within the procedural structure of group guidance. The findings indicate that Socratic dialogue can be systematically embedded into group guidance stages to stimulate interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and self-regulation among students.