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« Nobody's Fools: The Rational Audience as First Amendment Ideal | Main | Congress and Iqbal/Twombly »

Monday, March 15, 2010

The Socratic Method, Love The One You're With?, Take 2: Is the Problem Method The RC Cola of Teaching Methodologies?

Do you remember those old RC Cola commercials from the 1980s? They would always tout that people consistently picked the cola over stalwarts Coke and Pepsi in blind taste tests. And yet, despite being armed with this data, my friends and I never bought it, and we were not alone. By the mid-1990s, Royal Crown products reached only 2.5% of the soft drink market, compared to 43% for Coke and 31% for Pepsi; RC Cola was eventually bought in October 2000 by Cadberry Schweppes. This sounds like it could form the basis for a good business school case study. Could the same be said about the Problem Method in law school?

When I guest blogged here last April, I posted about what I call my "law school case method." As you can see from that post, the method works as follows: We cover a topic such as the search incident to a lawful arrest in a given class using the Socratic Method. Before the next class, I send students several excerpts from recent opinions dealing with that topic. At the start of that next class, I have students read the excerpts out loud and ask them what the prosecutor and defense counsel would argue in each case and how the court would likely rule. I started by giving 4 such excerpts, but now I give up to 8. The discussions of these excerpts can take up as much as half of a given class session. 

This method fits under Cynthia G. Hawkins-León's definition of the "problem method" in The Socratic Method-Problem Method Dichotomy:  The Debate Over Teaching Method Continues, 1998 B.Y.U. L.J. 1, 9 (1998). According to Hawkins-León, 

There are three key features to the effective use of the Problem Method: First, the problem itself must be complex....Second, the problem is distributed to the students in advance of class....Third, the problem is the focus of in-class discussion.   

As I noted in a previous post, "ninety-seven percent of those teaching first year classes report using the Socratic method, with the use of alternative teaching techniques decreasing as teacher became more experienced or tenured!" And yet, 

[w]hen the Socratic Method was compared to the Problem Method by respondents to the 1996 AALS survey, the Problem Method was perceived by professors who used the Problem Method predominantly as being "much better" by a margin of 4 to 1 in its development of student abilities. Hawkins-León, supra.

So, are you a professor who incorporates aspects of the problem method into your classes? Is it something you are considering? Is it something that you tried but didn't like? You can answer these questions by responding to the following poll and/or leaving a comment.
 
Do you incorporate aspects of the Problem Method into your classes?




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-Colin Miller

Posted by Evidence ProfBlogger on March 15, 2010 at 09:47 AM in Teaching Law | Permalink

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Today, on the Ides of March, I come here not to praise the case-bound Socractic method, but to bury it. But then, I'm a self-interested unreliable narrator...

I question the question. There are types of legal material (both doctrinally and practically) that skew each way. For example, in Criminal Procedure -- a post hoc context if there ever was one -- my professor (LaFave) very effectively employed a set of fact patterns to guide discussion for the entire semester. These fact patterns all described incidents to arrest and/or conviction, and expected the students to apply the readings to the fact patterns. Most critically, there was no element of prevention available: Although Professor LaFave had done a lot of ride-alongs to gather fact patterns and observe actual procedures, he was not there as an on-scene counsel to the cops to tell them what they could and couldn't do, or to the accused miscreants to tell them what they could and couldn't do. In short, by the time of a Crim Pro fact pattern, the putative misconduct is already long complete.

Conversely, I do not think this approach would work nearly so well in a confined-by-statute context like Sales (the tail end of contracts, focusing on UCC Articles 2 and 2A), because the point of learning this material is to avoid the error in the first place -- that is, the protolawyer will ordinarily be in the position of trying to write the contract, or make a considered opinion on how a client should interpret the contract, before the putative breach occurs.

I'd suggest that the problem method is more likely to be helpful in imparting material to the innocent (pun intended) in a post hoc context than in a preventive context. It certainly has uses in the latter, but it seems essential in the former. I still remember particular discussions and rules from both classes nearly two decades later, so I guess both professors were onto something with their particular methods...

Posted by: C.E. Petit | Mar 15, 2010 1:04:47 PM

And among professors who predominantly use the Socratic method, what was the comparative perceived effectiveness of the two methods?

Posted by: James Grimmelmann | Mar 15, 2010 11:00:22 AM

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