Student Learning Outcomes and Hiding the Ball

The ABA has embraced the idea of student learning outcomes (see Standard 302).  I have no objection to the rule as stated.  If law schools are not striving to graduate students who are competent in the areas identified by the ABA, they deserve to lose their accreditation.  

But I am hearing noises of a much more aggressive version of student learning outcomes (SLOs) which entails identifying in one’s syllabus specific SLOs for each class session.  I see great potential in this version of the SLO movement for tension with my pedagogical approach (illustrated at left).  

I already provide a great deal of guidance to my students on my syllabus.  On the day that the word “consideration” appears on the syllabus, I expect them to learn the substantive law of consideration.   On the day “promissory estoppel” appears on the syllabus, I expect them to forget everything they learned about consideration and think that all promises that are relied on ential contractual obligations.  And by the end of the course, I expect that everything will fall back into place, and that they will be able to deploy the reading comprehension, analytical,  and analogical skills that they have been developing all semester (in my course and others) to answer MBE-style final exam questions and essay questions in which I will ask them to apply substantive doctrines to a fact pattern with which they could not possibly be familiar because I have invented it as a test of the skills identified above.  

Apparently, some think I need to go further and identify on the syllabus precisely what skills and doctinal areas will be covered in each 50-minute hour.  There’s just one problem.

I don’t wanna.

And it’s not just because I am a typical academic who begrudges anyone or anything that might force me out of my Socratic comfort zone.  Telling students what they are looking for undermines the basic premise of my pedagogical approach, which I think is a common pedagogical approach because it is a very good, legitimate approach to legal education. 

Yes, I hide the ball.

If I show my students the ball every day, they will fetch it.  But I am not trying to train spaniels; I’m trying to train attorneys, and attorneys need to be able find things when nobody tells them in advance what they are looking for.  They also need to know that this is something that they can do (or learn to do) with nothing more than their own internal resources.  Every teaching day, in every Socratic exchange with a student, I try to get the student to a question she thinks she cannot answer and then, through a series of prodding questions, none of which provide the student with facts or information she did not already have from reading the text, I try to bring her to a place where she can formulate the answer that she thought she did not have.  When the method works, the student has learned both doctrine and a skill — and hopefully she has gained a great deal of confidence in her own native abilities.

Or, when I ask the student a question, she could just consult the SLOs in the syllabus and recite the learning objective for the day, and one of us would leave the class under the impression that she had learned something valuable.

I am not really afraid that the aggressive SLO movement augurs the end of legal education as we know it, because I know that students pay very little attention to what is on the syllabus (and they’ll pay even less if it contains 10-12 pages of detailed SLOs).  I just resent the drain on pedagogical resources that could be spent innovating rather than figuring out how best to march in lock step.