I lecture. It used to be my dirty little secret, but now it's out in the open. Why? I suck at the Socratic method (too cherubic I guess). It leaves the other 130 students in my class unengaged. Students in big (100+) upper year class courses often aren't sufficiently well prepared to do it justice. Socratic method doesn't teach anything about being a lawyer, at least the kind of transactional lawyer I was in practice. If students can't think critically by the time they get to me in the second or third year of law school, they're beyond my ability to help them. And so on.
See generally my essay Reflections on Twenty Years of Law Teaching: Remarks at the Rutter Award Ceremony (April 2008).
Hence, I was very interested in a post by Christopher Judge, a third year law student, who takes on what he calls "opinion discourse" in the law school classroom:
Although anti-intellectual to do so, your average student does the math when thinking about the investment they make in law school without job security, calculating the cost of each moment of class time. For example, at Syracuse University College of Law, a member of the class of 2012 will pay $43,250 in tuition for the 2011-12 year. At this rate, each hour of a semester-long, three-credit class costs about $133.07; each minute, $2.28; each second, $0.036. However, I am convinced that the economic value of student opinion is merely an afterthought concocted by students in order to justify, rather than explain, resentment of student opinion during class. It might be argued that disdain for the opinion of fellow law students during class is related to the legal community’s above average level of narcissism; however I argue that the answer is that law students simply do not perceive opinion discourse during class as having significant intellectual value.
There are several reasons why law students do not find significant intellectual value in opinion discourse during class. First, law students work extremely hard on their homework. Perhaps it has something to do with the fundamentally focused nature of reading the text book contrasting with the free-flowing and seemingly infinite nature of opinion discourse, but after spending between two to four hours of our personal time preparing for each class, tired law students want to give validation to their sacrifice by reviewing specifically what they read and then promptly go home to their loved ones (or television sets).
Second, opinion discourse is perceived as unlikely to appear on the final exam. Even if the final exam does include a policy oriented question on the exact topic that is discussed, the opinion expressed during class is usually available in the assigned reading or could be thought of while writing the final exam essay.
Third, very few law students see themselves in a position to actually shape most, if not all, areas of the law. Even if the law student could remember a particular class conversation beyond several months of the final exam, most law students see themselves as researchers or litigants, being either neutral or told which position to advocate. The simple truth is that most students just want to pass the bar and find a job; not yet ready to appreciate a future role in shaping the law.
The fourth, and final, reason is that law students have recognized that opinion in law classes is abused by a number of groups. One of these groups are “law school gunners,” those law students who insist on raising their hand at every opportunity. Regardless of suggestions to ignore gunners, the reality is that, as irritation caused by gunners increases, students lose focus on the substance of the course and opinion discourse.
Unprepared students comprise another group that abuses opinion discourse. If a student did not do the reading for the class, a well-known strategy to avoid getting called on (and possibly embarrassed) later is to volunteer for the questions that either call for opinion or do not require actual knowledge of the homework. Thus, opinion discourse is often associated with comments that do not require actual knowledge (of the reading).
Although a well-known education tool, opinion discourse has also been abused by professors who are not prepared to lecture for the full class time. Without a willingness to narrowly tailor questions that call for discourse or the ability to maintain an appropriate level of control over the conversation, opinion based conversation leads to tangential comments and stories, i.e., information that could not possibly be on the final exam.
I realize that Judge is not, strictly speaking, talking about Kingsfieldian Socratic method teaching. He's talking about open-ended questions like "what do you think about the case?"
After 20-odd years of watching law teachers in action, however, I have come to believe that the vast majority of what passes for Socratic-style teaching is really what I call soft Socratic, which is basically just glorified opinion discourse. As I explain in my Reflections essay:
[When I was a student], most of my professors used what I’ve come to call the soft Socratic style. Instead of cold calling students, they used panels of students who were on call for a few days per semester. Instead of grilling a specific student at length, each student would be tossed a few questions and then the professor moved on to the next. Students were never told that they had given a wrong answer, let alone told to go and call their mothers as they would never become a lawyer. At most, the professor gently guided the student towards the proper conclusion.
In my early years [in teaching] at Illinois, I frequently sat in on classes taught by colleagues who were said to be great Socratic teachers. Oddly, however, in most of those classes, Socrates did almost all of the talking. Just as at Virginia, the dominant pedagogic style was soft Socratic. In preparing for this lecture, for example, I went back and dug out an evaluation I wrote of one of my Illinois colleagues:
His style is very soft Socratic. He tosses an occasional question out there and waits for answers. If nobody responds, he answers the question himself.
He started today’s session by picking up the thread of a discussion from yesterday. After reviewing the material by lecture, he started the new material As before, he relied on volunteers. He got some participation, but it wasn’t particularly interactive. Students made a comment, he made a comment, and went on.
I thus respectfully suggest that Judge's critique of opinion discourse in fact applies to the vast bulk of law school teaching. Personally, I think students get more value out of a well-crafted lecture that takes them beyond the reading than soft Socratic questioning.
