Legal Commentary

A friend of mine from Harvard?s education school expressed surprise that law professors had no explicit course in teaching techniques.  It is a shame that pedagogical tips of the trade have to be discovered by trial and error or, at most, get passed down within faculties or existing academic social networks.  Can we use this forum to do better?  I'd like to ask people to share successful pedagogical tricks they?ve used in the comments section.  I think this would, in particular, benefit the whole new crop of people with little or no experience teaching law (myself included) that are about to start doing so.  To get us started, let me share a couple I've used.

First, I often produce an ?agenda? like outline for my students which are elaborations of the list of topics on the syllabus, hard copies of which I pass out at every class.  When I am pressed for time, and especially when it is not a first year class, I will sometimes actually set out the fact patterns for the cases I will cover that day in the outline. I can then ask the students to take ten seconds reading the facts and jump right into holding.  True, students are losing out on the important process of picking out which facts are important.  However, when necessary it seems a fair trade off to have more time for analysis.

Two others tricks I use that I picked up from Jonathan Zittrain when he was my prof.

The first comes in when I?ve explained something rather complicated or get a sense that a number of students might not have gotten it, but am not sure.  Rather than asking ?does anyone need this explained further?,? which is a question more likely to produce a false negative, I ask my students to cover their eyes, and raise their hands if they feel they fully understand it.

Because they can?t see one another, the social pressure not to show weakness is reduced.  The framing of the question also reduces the chance students on the fence won?t indicate their feelings, since the affirmative act is required to show understanding, not a lack of understanding. To be sure, it looks a little childish, so I normally preface it by saying "I know you are going to think this is silly, but," and the students seem to be good sports.

The second trick is feedback while the course is going on.  I print sheets of paper with a few questions on them and blank space for students to handwrite answers at the 1/3 and 2/3 point in the course.  Typical questions I ask include ?tell me something I am doing in my teaching that you like.  Tell me something I am doing that you don?t like.? I sometimes ask more specific questions for things I am worried about like ?please comment on the make-up (cases, philosophy papers, law review articles) of the assigned reading, as well at its length.?  The idea is that feedback should always be bi-directional.  Just as I am evaluating my students and (at least in response-paper evaluated course papers) trying to help them improve on their tasks, I want to give them an opportunity to help me in an ongoing way.  I think it is also useful, once I?ve taught a course a couple of times, as a reminder that different cohorts have different needs and take on a different mood, and I need to change up my game appropriately.

A new trick I am thinking of trying is some mechanism for more immediate free-flowing anonymous feedback.  One possibility is setting up some kind of anonymous emailer by which the students can feel free to give feedback or ask questions without any fear of identification.  While I could get IT services to set this up, it always leaves open the possibility that at an institutional level I could de-identify the students at some point, which might be chilling.  It would be easy enough to set up a hotmail account and give all my students the password such that they could email me from this account without me knowing who they are.  One fear I have is that the students might use this address to email one another anonymously. It is an unfortunate truth that the use of these kinds of systems has sometimes led to inter-student harassment, etc. I am wondering if others have experimented with this or other means of "real time" feedback?

As I said, I'd love to hear about other techniques people use...