Teaching Like It's 1801

Let's think about law school teaching. Start by watching this video, A Vision of Students Today. (Please bear with me and suspend your objections that it's not specifically about law school).  It was created by Kansas State Professor Michael Wesch (Cultural Anthropology) and his 200 students. And it's a pretty powerful indictment of education structured in a way that students are passive receivers of information. I realize (hope) that these students' experience is not a perfect fit for law school (they are undergraduates, and their average class size is 115), but I still think this has some lessons for us as law teachers. (For more from Professor Wesch, you can watch his TED Talk about moving students from "knowledgeable" to "knowledge-able" and the ability of students to create and share knowledge here.)

Our goal is to instill knowledge, skills, and values in our students in a way that encourages them to continue to learn on their own and that enables them to transfer what they learn to new settings (i.e. later classes and their professional careers). Educational theorists are very clear that active rather than passive teaching environments are best able to accomplish that goal, and that students who understand the relevance of what they are learning are more likely to retain it.  Technology can be a tool in accomplishing that goal (the first chalkboard is attributed to a Scottish headmaster in 1801), but what's most important is what happens in the classroom -- interaction, discussion, reflection, engagement.  Do our law classrooms look much different from the Harvard of Christopher Columbus Langdell, or the Kansas State classroom in the video?

The Socratic Method, at its best, involves active student engagement. But how often does it degenerate into a lecture punctuated by occasional questions? And even when excellently deployed, in a large classroom it is only an active experience for the students being called on -- we rely on the rest of the class to participate vicariously by imagining how they would be answering the questions.  I'm not arguing that we should ditch it -- but do think we need a large dose of alternative teaching methods.

Consider the critique offered by the video:

• in large law school classes, do we know our students' names? (tips to help are here)
• do our students do the assigned readings from their multi-hundred dollar casebooks?
• do we make it clear how what we teach is relevant to their future lives and careers?

Consider, too, the results of the students' self-survey (and this video was made in 2007 -- it can only have gotten worse since then):

• they read far more on web pages and Facebook than in books
• they write far more for emails (and text messages) than for classes
• they deal with multiple competing time demands and believe they need to multi-task
• they worry about the impact of their student loan debt

If our law school walls could talk, what would they say? The good news: there are a number of teaching options that get us beyond nineteenth century methods.  My next blog entry will provide some ideas and resources that I hope will be helpful.