Return to Teaching: Reflections on Socratic Teaching I

After a hiatus from the blog and a brief break from teaching, I am brimming with blogable thoughts to share.  If you are new to the blog this year, welcome.  If you are already a regular reader, please recommend the blog to your students and contracts-loving friends and colleagues.  Finally, if you think you are so inclined, the blog thrives on diversity of input, voices, and perspectives.  We welcome guest posts from members of the contracts law teaching profession.

I recently came across a blog post by friend of the blog and Contracts Prof Tanya Monestier (right).  Professor Monestier uses Socratic method but not exclusively and she lays out the pros and cons.  Her opening comment is that the Socratic method is not inherently better than other approaches to teaching law, and although I too do not use Socratic method exclusively, I do think it is the best way to teach law in large, common-law doctrinal courses, at least for me.  Professor Monestier did not learn law through the Socratic method, and clearly she is proof that other ways also work. Her post spurred me to re-examine and re-articulate my commitment to Socratic teaching.  I share a version of this with my 1Ls at the beginning of each school year, but I am hoping that blogging about it will render my presentation less haphazard.  There’s so much to say.  

I should state at the outset my view that every teacher has to find the teaching method that works for them.  I have seen magnificent teaching that I could not possibly replicate.  My teaching persona is different from my actual personality, but I can only stretch so far.  I have come to accept that there are lots of different effective teaching methods (and at least as many that are ineffective); one has to marry up one’s teaching persona with the right teaching method.  Socratic teaching, often sandwiched between mini-lectures, supplemented with Limericks and PowerPoints, works for me.  I should also note that my teaching method aims to meet my students where they are.  I might teach differently if I taught at a T14 law school, but I’ve never had that experience.  That said, I attended a T14 law school.  The teaching there was exclusively Socratic in doctrinal courses, and even in some seminars.

As to the mini-lectures, the best teacher I ever had was Frank Cardulla, who taught me high school chemistry.  Mr. Cardulla summarized good teaching as follows: “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, and then tell ’em what you told ’em.”  In Socratic teaching, I leave out the “tell ’em” part, because that’s the part that they work out for themselves through the Socratic process.  Still, because Socratic dialogue can be a bit ragged and students tune in and out while others are speaking, it’s helpful to bring it all back together with a summary, often in the form of a PowerPoint slide featuring take-aways.

I’ve explained how Limericks fit into all of this here and the concept is summarized in a series of Limericks here.  I won’t repeat myself on the blog today.

I had plenty of education before law school, and I taught undergraduates for four years before I went to law school.  Socratic teaching was a revelation to me when I first experienced it as 1L.  Professor Monestier offers three explanations for the persistence of Socratic teaching: tradition, lecturing is boring/less interesting than dynamic exchanges with students, and it helps student develop public speaking skills or learn how to “think on their feet.”  She doesn’t find these reasons justify the persistence of Socratic teaching given that: (1) Socratic teaching is “inefficient”; (2) thinking on your feet is only one of many lawyerly skills, and for many students it is not among the most important; and (3) Socratic teaching can be counter-productive because it causes so much anxiety and diverts students’ energies in unproductive ways.

These are great criticisms of the Socratic method.  My response is to work on improving Socratic techniques and students’ understanding of the enterprise.  I use a version of Socratic method because I think that active learning in the classroom setting, while perhaps not as efficient as lecture, is more valuable and effective than lectures (although I emphasize that I supplement Socratic teaching with lectures, break-out groups, non-Socratic discussion, formative assessments, and flipped classrooms). 

I have adopted various mitigation strategies to head off student anxiety.  I move fast so that I get between twenty and thirty students involved in each class session (not including volunteers), and I do not dwell on students’ errors but move on to another student if the student is really at sea. This happens rarely with 1Ls, because they are highly motivated to keep on top of the material.  Upper-level students sometimes try to get by without reading, but they also are less apt of be ashamed to admit they haven’t read.  To them, I say, “Okay, you’re up next time,” and they know I mean it.  The main thing (and this is what Parts II and III will be about) is that Socratic teaching is, for me, about building students’ self-confidence.  It is not about putting them on the spot; it is about convincing them that they belong where they are.

This is the first in a three-part post, which will proceed as follows:

In Part II, I will set out my idiosyncratic take on the Socratic method as applied to law teaching and describe the range of ways in which Socratic exchange can be valuable as well as what one can do when they go wrong.

Finally, in Part III, I will return to Professor Monestier’s comments and explain that my justifications for using the Socratic method differ from the one’s she discusses and how I think it is possible to teach Socratically in ways that would address her concerns about the method.  I think our differences are simply a matter of the degree to which we feel committed to Socratic teaching.  Neither of us are teach purely though Socratic dialogue.  Neither of us thinks it has no value.