Reflections on Socratic Teaching IIIA: Why Teach Socratically?

This is the third of three posts inspired by Tanya Monestier‘s blog post on Socratic teaching.   The first post is here.  The second is here. While you’re thinking about this, you should check out the rest of Professor Monestier’s blog, which has great content for law students and law professors alike.

As noted in Part I, Professor Monestier summarizes three common reasons why law professors use the Socratic method: tradition, it’s more interesting than lectures, and it teaches students to “think of their feet.”  She presents three critiques of the Socratic method: its inefficient, it forces students to prepare for Socratic exchange rather than learn the law, and it can be demeaning or humiliating for students.  As I am writing, I realize that I have too much to say for one post, so today, I will just focus on Professor Monestier’s characterization of the reasons for teaching Socratically and the next post will address her criticisms.

In this two-part post, I respond to these claims, all of which are at least partially valid but which I view as pitfalls to be avoided rather than grounds for abandoning Socratic teaching.  And again, it bears emphasizing that to the extent that Professor Monestier and I disagree, our differences are matters of degree rather than of kind.  Both of us use the Socratic method.  Both of us use other teaching approaches, but for me Socratic teaching is central, at least for teaching contracts.

First, tradition.  I concede that I when I was a law student, I did enjoy feeling that I was part of an educational tradition.  I was reading at least some cases that my law professors read when they were law students.  I was becoming conversant with a canon; learning the lore along with the law is a rite of passage as one enters a professional community.  I am aware that I was an aspiring law professor and so my experiences may not be representative of those of my classmates.  Still, I can still partake of conversations with my friends who are practicing lawyers, confident that they will know what I am talking about when I joke about the good ship Peerless, and I can also assume that they will know what I am talking about when I reference Pennoyer v. Neff, the hairy hand, or Marbury v. Madison, even if none of those cases are relevant to our daily lives.  And these experiences link us, even if we studied at different law schools in different generations.  As Tevye could tell you, it is nice to be part of a community of the mind.

There are also downsides to tradition, especially a tradition that arose during the highpoints of Eurocentrism, colonialism, patriarchy, imperialism, and racism.  One could chuck the tradition altogether, but I prefer to keep some of the traditional cases while introducing and encouraging critical perspectives on them and also supplementing them with newer, non-canonical cases and approaches.  

But I did not adopt the Socratic approach because it was all I have ever known.  I had twenty years of schooling before I set foot in law school, and I had taught undergraduates full-time for four years as well.  Even teaching history to smallish sections of 30 students, I had mostly lectured, and I expect that my students’ attention sometimes wandered during those 75 minutes of lecture.  Socratic teaching was a revelation to me — if you move quickly through a large classroom and get a lot of students involved, they are far more likely to remain focused and alert.  This is why I have reluctantly come around to cold-calling.

If you solicit their opinions and take those opinions seriously, Socratic exchange can be exciting and empowering for students.  When I was in law school, I made a comment in a seminar, and my teacher, Ronald Dworkin, responded by saying, “That’s a perspicacious observation.”  That meant a lot to me, and there are lots of opportunities for exchanges like that in a Socratic classroom.  I am not Ronald Dworkin, but then again, most of my students don’t know who Ronald Dworkin was, and getting encouragement from me can mean as much to them as a few kind words from Ronald Dworkin meant to me. 

I won’t spend a lot of time on Professor Monestier’s point that professors prefer Socratic teaching to lecture because lecture is boring.  She doesn’t really seem to dispute the point, and it seems undeniable to me that Socratic exchanges are more interesting, dynamic, and engaging than the typical lecture.  But Professor Monestier jokes that Socratic teaching is more interesting for the professor.  I think she underestimates how much we professors enjoy the sound of our own voices.  No. Joking.  The serious point is that I think she is a bit ungenerous here.  I teach Socratically because I think it’s better for students.  That’s the only reason.  Lecturing is much easier.  Contracts law doesn’t change much.  I could write a set of lectures and keep 90% of them year after year.  But I never know what’s going to happen in a Socratic classroom.  It’s a challenge, but a fun and rewarding one.

On a more practical note, I concluded early on that Socratic teaching is a great solution to the problem of teaching in a large-classroom setting.  I have yet to be convinced that there is a better solution, although as I have said,  I recognize the need to mix things up in the classroom. In addition, I give a lot of homework and provide written comments to students throughout the semester, so non-Socratic teaching continues outside of the classroom.

The third defense of the Socratic method that Professor Monestier discusses is the claim that it helps you to “think on your feet.”  I almost completely agree with her criticisms of that defense of the method, and the notion that Socratic teaching helps student think on their feet plays almost no role on my thinking about why it is a good teaching method.  Some students will have jobs that will sometimes require them to come up with answers on the fly, but that skill is not important enough to justify the time devoted to Socratic exchanges. 

One difference between my approach and Professor Monestier’s is that I don’t think of Socratic exchanges being about thinking on your feet as much as they are about synthesizing information in real time.  That is something that lawyers need to do all the time.  You read through some materials and you think about how to apply law or perhaps competing legal regimes to new facts.  Doing so orally and public is not very important for most students, but knowing that you can do it and seeing how others do it is of supreme importance.  Since I don’t have the time or resources to do one-on-one tutorials with students, Socratic teaching is the next-best option.

Tune in tomorrow for (I hope) my last post in this series.