Outside Counsel

To a workshop on teaching at the law school last night, presented by four winners of the Faculty Award, an honor bestowed each year by the graduating class for excellence in teaching. The story I tell about my Discovery class is that it had its genesis one evening as I drove home from an unusually contentious deposition in Syracuse. "You couldn't teach the skills that were on display in that room," I thought to myself, and then, "But if you were going to try to teach it the transcript from today would be a good place to start." From there I worked up an outline, and from that I developed a class that actually does teach something that I'd thought could only be learned by trial and error. That's how I learned it. I read a lot of transcripts, and watched what other lawyers did, and from time to time a partner or a senior person would make a suggestion, but for the most part I learned by screwing up. The students I teach get the benefit of a conceptual framework to start from, and some practice at the specific skill set that the discovery process draws on. It is teachable-- I just had to figure out how to do it.

Effective teaching is is similar, I think. There are pedagogical practices that can be taught, but a lot of the time they are not, at least at the university level. There seems to be an assumption that mastery of the discipline being taught should be sufficient, even though we all know that it is plainly not. How many classes have we taken from experts which were simply dreadful after all? It's funny, actually-- the one job we have watched performed for most of our lives is teaching, and we all "know" what the difference between good teaching and bad teaching looks like, but we seldom systematically consider the overall conceptual framework of what we are doing in front of the classroom. Some things work, some don't, and when they don't the students blame us, and we blame the students. Last night's session was a helpful step towards correcting that, and I'm really happy that UB is doing this. The approaches offered amounted to organizational suggestions-- one professor talked about how part of what he does is to explicitly teach how to construct an argument; another had some suggestions about how to get students to talk (talking is the equivalent of thinking in law); another showed us the sorts of handouts he uses to demonstrate how to reason through a statute. Quite a bit of it was stuff that I already do, but it helps to quantify this sort of thing, and even if some of it was familiar it was validating to hear that people who are obviously excellent teachers employ the same techniques.

When I think back on my law school experience it seems to me that I had a peculiar mix of great teachers and teachers who were simply hopeless. One of the things we talked about last night was "losing" a class. It has never happened to me-- small class size helps-- but I've certainly seen it happen. My Corporations class was lost pretty early on, for example. It is ugly, and a little scary, even if you are just sitting in the room, and I'm sure it was horrible for the professor. There are a lot of things that can prevent this, and one of the best, it seems to me, is to enlist the students as your allies. One of the adjuncts asked, "How important is it to know the student's names?" and I was reminded of the penultimate scene in "The Paper Chase" when Hart tells Kingsfield how much he'd enjoyed his class. Kingsfield says, "What was your name again?" and we are left to wonder if Kingsfield is playing with Hart's head one last time. It's actually not hard to address the students by name-- their photos are part of the class list, and they pretty much all sit in the same place every time. I like to address them as "Mr." or "Ms.", and I feel strongly that referring back to something that they have said earlier in the class, or even earlier in the term-- and attributing the point to them, by name-- helps keep their heads in the game. Someone else wanted to know what part of the class they should be teaching to. Usually by the third meeting I have a pretty good idea of who is getting it and who may never get it, and I've found that the best way to see to it that everybody gets something is to make more available to the students that want it. I always have supplemental readings available, and I make a point of touching on them in my lectures, but my lectures are mostly focused on the core points I am trying to make to the middle of the bell curve. Again, small class size helps, as does the rather specialized nature of what I teach-- it was harder with my undergraduate Lawyers in Movies class.