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Monday, March 31, 2008
Pacing a Course
As a rookie prawf, I've found pacing to be one of the biggest challenges. Generally, I find myself not covering as much as I hoped to. I feel a little like a kid in a candy store, with eyes bigger than my maw. When drawing up a new syllabus, it's hard to know how much material can realistically be covered in a class session. I'm curious to hear what advice there is about how to anticipate pacing.
Posted by Adam Levitin on March 31, 2008 at 06:28 PM | Permalink
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For one 55-minute class, I assign about 15-20 pages of reading (depending on the class and ease of the materials) that typically will include 2 main cases. Class might be 5 minute intro, about 20 minutes per case including questions, and 10 minutes of recap, implications, and summary. That's what works for me, at least.
Posted by: Orin Kerr | Apr 1, 2008 1:47:13 PM
This might sound odd - but perhaps you should deal with the fact that students often don't learn solely from you?
Personally, I pay very close attention to my reading--and relatively little attention in class. I find class to be somewhat distracting--classmates give wrong answers (forcing professors to craft broader and broader hypotheticals until the student realizes their error), professors dwell on hypotheticals that they personally find amusing, and a fairly low-level of discourse pervades most policy discussions. This isn't to say I don't listen--but I selectively listen (and play endless hours of Scrabble on Facebook and spend way too much time sending emails for my journal...). I pay attention to hear whether or not a professor has their own take on a rule, on whether there's some hidden quirk in the statutory language, etc. But I've rarely relied on a professor to "teach" me the course--that's what the casebook is for (perhaps an exception to this has been Commercial Law. Having a professor to guide me through the UCC's wanderings has been really helpful. On the other hand, this may speak to the quality of the book--which does less guiding than many other books.).
The takeaway from this is that, generally, I prefer professors who set a steady pace and keep it. My most effective professors during law school have been those that pass out a syllabus at the beginning of the semester and cover a set amount of topics each day. My least effective professors have been those with dynamic syllabi--professors that update them as the class "progresses." People in law school like to talk, and it's easier to ask a question of a professor during class than to take the trouble to figure out the answer on your own to some legal quirk. Because of this, dynamic syllabi seem to rarely work; class moves along at the pace of the slowest student (especially when, increasingly it seems during 2L, those students haven't read for class). This leads to a pretty large amount of consternation among those students that spend time preparing for class (maybe I'm writing this post out of personal annoyance, since my morning class tomorrow has managed to cover 175 pages in 10 weeks of class).
I'm just a 2L, but I guess my advice would be to make a syllabus, pick topics that span 25-35 pages of a casebook per day, and stick to the syllabus. Those students that care about your class will still learn the material (and well), even if you don't dwell on it (although I wouldn't recommend entirely skipping material. Just summarize it, if you don't have time to ask students. Also I wouldn't recommend telling students how worthless you found parts of the reading--I have one professor who regularly complains about the length of the non-case explanatory material in a casebook, which only makes everyone ask, "Why the hell did you assign it?"). Those students that don't care enough to prepare well for class will simply have more reading that they won't do anyway. Students in between those two polar camps might feel a little bit stressed at times ("oh my gosh, Professor So-and-So is moving so quickly"), but stress isn't terrible. I've been behind before, and the stress just causes me to work harder, because I know that I must (also stress might encourage them to go to professors' office hours, which I've found to be invaluable in clearing up any lingering confusion).
I majored in English Lit in undergrad, and I went to classes within my major expecting a lively discussion of some aspects of whatever work we'd been assigned. I did not expect to have every nuance fleshed out for me--professors expected me to do that by myself (if at all). I don't really see why law school should be any different.
Posted by: 2L | Mar 31, 2008 11:17:04 PM
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