Socratic teaching is a primary pedagogical technique in American law school education. In this episode, Jamie Abrams joins us to discuss barriers this method can impose and strategies for a more inclusive approach to Socratic teaching.
Jamie is a Professor of Law and the Director of the Legal Rhetoric Program at the American University Washington College of Law. She has published numerous books, chapters, and articles, including several on legal education pedagogy. Jamie is the recipient of teaching awards from Blackboard, the University of Louisville, and the American University Washington College of Law. She also co-founded the Brandeis Human Rights Advocacy Program at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law which works to advance the human rights of immigrants, refugees, and noncitizens.
Show Notes
- Brandeis Human Rights Advocacy Program at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law
- Abrams, Jamie R. (2024). Inclusive Socratic Teaching: Why Law Schools Need It and How to Achieve It. University of California Press.
Transcript
John: Socratic teaching is a primary pedagogical technique in American law school education. In this episode, we discuss barriers this method can impose and strategies for a more inclusive approach to Socratic teaching.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guest today is Jamie Abrams. Jamie is a Professor of Law and the Director of the Legal Rhetoric Program at the American University Washington College of Law. She has published numerous books, chapters, and articles, including several on legal education pedagogy. Jamie is the recipient of teaching awards from Blackboard, the University of Louisville, and the American University Washington College of Law. She also co-founded the Brandeis Human Rights Advocacy Program at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law which works to advance the human rights of immigrants, refugees, and noncitizens. Welcome, Jamie.
Jamie: Hello.
John: Our teas today are:… Jamie, are you drinking any tea?
Jamie: I am. I have a very simple green tea, but it’s in a special mug that one of my research assistants gave me that has a picture of the cover of a book I wrote and my research assistant worked on. So my tea is pretty basic, but my mug is pretty special.
John: And it’s on theme, because we will be talking about that book very shortly,
Rebecca: I have Scottish afternoon tea, despite the fact that we’re recording this in the morning. [LAUGHTER]
John: And I have Lady Grey tea today.
Rebecca: That’s a good choice, John. We invited you here today, Jamie, to talk about your most recent book, the one that’s on the mug, Inclusive Socratic Teaching: Why Law Schools Need It and How to Achieve It. Socratic teaching has long been a hallmark of legal education. Why has there been such a high level of curricular conformity in legal education?
Jamie: Yeah, it’s really kind of shocking, right? If we think for a second about what lawyers do. We hire lawyers to be innovators, problem solvers, creative thinkers, storytellers. So the idea that we educate in such a lockstep way is really kind of befuddling to me. You would think that schools, especially in a competitive market packed in fighting for these students, would find ways to differentiate. So I think personally, the US News and the larger than life role that the rankings processes have played over the years is one piece of the story. I also think it’s a lot of mimicry. So I became a law professor, and I started teaching how my law professors taught me, who were teaching how their law professors taught them. And also, I think there’s very little incentive to innovate. You have to sort of cross a certain threshold and be a quality and strong teacher, but at the end of the day, most of the incentives in academia generally, are skewed toward publication and other things, and there’s not a lot of incentive within our institutions. There’s no one to tell that you’ve innovated. There’s no one celebrating it or putting it on the website, but they’ll put your book on the website, and they’ll put your publications on the website. But I do think it’s ironic that the Socratic method was innovative at one point, that it was revolutionary to legal education, and now 100 years later, I’m not sure we can call it revolutionary anymore.
John: What is some of the harm done by this focus on Socratic teaching?
Jamie: Yeah.So first, let me just define Socratic teaching, just to make sure. So folks might define it different ways, but it’s typically a large lecture hall full of students, one professor situated at the front, and that Professor holds all of the power and engages in sort of serial Q and A with one student, than another, than another. So it might last the whole class with one student, some professors might do cold calls, where everyone in the room is sitting there scared, waiting to be on call, or others might take volunteers. And so this method of teaching is very distinct to legal education, and it has wielded the exact same criticisms, frankly, for 50 years, criticism that it marginalizes some voices and magnifies others. If you think about a classroom design, that’s literally true, like certain voices just carry dominantly on those microphones in our classrooms, others are harder to pick up, harder to hear. There are quantitative studies going all the way back to the 90s that male students, and white male students particularly, are much more comfortable engaging in this sort of intellectual sparring with the professor and other students might find that culturally dissonant to the way they would engage with the professor. It can be very abstract, sort of talking in the air about what the law is, which can cause students to sort of leave their identities at the door. We sort of pretend that the law is neutral, and while people in the room have been harmed by some of the legal rules that we’re teaching, and we don’t often acknowledge that, or we leave those students to raise the critiques directly. So those are some of the most concrete harms. But the other thing I would just briefly mention, those are the harms that I think are sourced to the Socratic method of teaching, this abstract perspectivelessness, sort of marginalizing hierarchy. But the thing that I’ve wrestled with in my work is: what are we protecting here? Are the rest of the students just thriving and loving this method of teaching? And that’s where I think it’s important to note that we have a real wellness crisis, in general, in legal education and the practice of law, with one in 10 students reporting self harm, one in six students with clinically diagnosed depression, one in four students with alcohol dependence. And so I sort of look at that data and like, “What are we protecting here? Why are we so afraid to innovate or try something new?”
Rebecca: Law school student bodies have also become more diverse. Has legal education evolved to support these more diverse student populations? It’s sounding like it’s not.
Jamie: It really is not, or the way that I describe it is we’re innovating around the curricular core. So it’s like we’ve bought a house and we’re doing beautiful renovations to closets and third floors and guest rooms, but we’re leaving the kitchen and the living room, where people spend the bulk of their time, untouched, and so we have beautifully more diverse student bodies, faculties, and our communities. But honestly, most of the reforms that have happened along with the diversification of who’s studying law have been more structural and less curricular. So we’ve popped up all of these support mechanisms, mentoring programs, pipeline programs, scholarships, affinity organizations, academic success programming, named chairs and all of these things are helpful. They provide structural support, but again, those are really incremental supports that risk giving the message to students that students are the problem, not the pedagogy. It’s saying, “Well, if any students are not thriving in this pedagogy, we’ll hire all these people to help support you through it,” instead of maybe reflecting that maybe the pedagogy isn’t working for everybody. So those kinds of support systems are helpful, but they’re sort of more harm reduction than transformation, and so our curriculums have not changed dramatically, other than seminars and ad hoc things like that.
John: Going back to the pedagogy a bit, one of the things that has been emphasized quite a bit in terms of inclusive teaching more broadly, is the importance of low-stakes formative assessments. But it sounds as if that has not been the norm in at least the core curriculum in law schools. Could you talk a little bit about how assessment takes place and what type of feedback students get in their core courses?
Jamie: Yeah, and one of the reasons I’m so excited to be on your podcast is legal education is so far behind other fields in pedagogical transformations. And so just about 10 years ago, we moved to outcomes-based assessment, frankly, pretty begrudgingly and reluctantly, but the accreditation bodies moved us in that direction, and most folks did it kind of superficially. We’ve added some learning outcomes to our course, and that was about it. So a typical law school course marches through 14 weeks of these sort of high anxiety, intellectual sparring with your professor, and then it historically culminated in a one time only three- or four-hour exam where you sit and that’s it, and you may not ever get that exam back. You’ll get your grade, you will move on, and from that professor, you’re unlikely to be able to get too much feedback, maybe a sample answer, or maybe a little bit of a summary of what your professor was looking for. But along the way, this outcomes-based education comes along, and frankly, most law faculty adapted very simply by just moving that summative exam that was so stressful and opaque and anxiety producing from the end and then plopped a midterm in October or March that does the exact same thing. It’s just as opaque, it’s just as stressful, it’s just worth less. But we’ve not really adapted in very thoughtful ways to do more no-stakes, low-stakes assessment, or to really help students see an arc, like a course of development of how the Socratic method fits into any of this. Is this a form of assessment, or is it just a method of teaching? I don’t think we’re clear for ourselves what the heck we’re doing with this method of teaching.
Rebecca: So as you brought in more diverse students, and the pedagogy hasn’t changed, and you have these supports here,[LAUGHTER] and that you’ve talked about some things kind of changing along the margins. Has the curriculum changed around the margins? Is that where some of the change has happened?
Jamie: So there’s a lot more dynamic programming. We have many more seminars and interesting named chairs and folks in our institutions who are institutional experts. But that being said, like a typical course in contracts or tort law or civil procedure still looks pretty much the same. The book I use, for example, is on it’s like 15th edition. It’s been around for 80 something years, and so how has it adapted? It shoves some more notes in to offer some more diverse perspectives, maybe eliminating some of the masculinized language or the racialized language in a practice problem or a hypothetical students are wrestling with. So I would say that, generally speaking, our teaching has become less problematic. But that’s not the same as becoming inclusive or excellent.
John: And in your book, you also talk a little bit of how the curriculum reflects the dominant culture, which doesn’t bring in a lot of voices, just by the nature of the curriculum with existing case law. What perhaps should be done to bring in more voices so that the curriculum better connects to the more diverse student body?
Jamie: Yeah. So I think reimagining a Socratic classroom around clients, around skills, and around communities could go a long way. So the one thing that Socratic classrooms offer that is beneficial is repetition, which is very helpful for students learning a new skill. And every class, every time they walk in, they’re going to start with one case, then a second case, then a third case, and they’re going to do that in all of their classes. So there actually is a lot of repetition happening. So what if instead we transformed that repetition into beginning with a client who called a lawyer. Why did they call a lawyer? What did they want? What had happened to that person? What did the law say when the lawyer first researched the law and did that answer the client’s problem, or did it not? And in most of our cases, it didn’t, and so they had to go to court. So there’s just so much more we could do to pull the exact same materials, the exact same law that we’re studying, and pull it down into communities. Like, how is this actually affecting people? And if you think about it, we’re packing classrooms. I have 88 people in my class that starts next week. There’s so many perspectives in that class. There’s going to be international students, students from rural America, from urban America, students from every geography in the country, like there’s so many great moments to just hear from that. But so this serial, I’m going to talk to student one, then student two, then student three, we’re missing all of the great opportunity to bring in. So there’s this famous movie, The Paper Chase. And in this movie, the professor is a legendary Socratic professor, and he says, “You came to me with a brain full of mush, and then I’m going to turn you into a lawyer.” And I think that that mentality, certainly less toxic today, but there’s still this idea that we need to eliminate, eradicate, this idea that our students come with a, quote, “brain full of mush,” and every year we have a room of 88 people from all over who’ve lived different experiences, who are going to read this exact same material and think about it differently, and our classrooms could be so much more engaging and different every semester, and more student centered if we start to embrace that instead of sticking with this serial case participation.
John: And I do have to say, as I was reading your book, I kept seeing John Houseman, both in the movie [LAUGHTER] and in the TV series. A brilliant actor.
Jamie: I think he won an Oscar for it,
John: I believe so, yeah.
Jamie: I have mad respect for anyone role playing a law professor who could win an Oscar. That’s impressive.
John: But I think that series did reflect some of the stress and anxiety that that method of teaching created for the students.
Jamie: Absolutely, there’s this famous scene. I can’t remember where it falls in the movie, but a group of these all white male students get a hotel room, and they lock themselves in, and they take the TV out, and they’re just spiraling into madness as they’re studying for the exam, and they’re talking about murder on the inside, such that the housekeeping staff ultimately gets suspicious of what’s going on in there. But it depicts everything of the toxicity. It certainly doesn’t look nothing like that anymore. But that the same idea of just this brain full of mush and then this frenzied push to an all in exam is certainly still there.
Rebecca: I think, whether you’re in a traditional kind of law faculty or in a different kind of department that still embraces traditional practices, no matter your discipline, introducing more inclusive practices can be daunting, can be hard. What do you see as some of the first steps to make some change? Is it something that you do as an individual? Is it something that you start to do and try to make a departmental change? How did the seeds of change happen, do you think?
Jamie: Yeah, one of the things that I think is a first problem to be addressed is we actually don’t have a community of teachers who teach in this way. And that’s actually kind of surprising. At least in legal education, there are robust communities of folks who teach legal writing, for example, that’s one of my areas of expertise. And we have conferences, we have newsletters, we have our own journals about pedagogy. We have idea banks, we have listservs where we share ideas. And that happens in clinical education. And so here, this is sort of like a rogue industry of Socratic teachers, sort of working as independent contractors, doing their own thing. You walk into a law clinic, whether it’s serving veterans in a private school, in a rural setting, or whether it’s doing housing cases in Manhattan, there’s a certain pedagogy and there’s a certain set of values that drive the work that these clinical classrooms are engaging in. And so I think one huge part of this is we need to build some community for those folks. There are 1000s of law professors, and more than that. My daughter is in AP gov and did a Socratic seminar as part of her coursework as well. And we’re exporting it around the world. A lot of law schools are trying to design themselves in an American tradition. And so I think one huge step is community building and figuring out how we can share ideas and have a sense of identity among Socratic teachers. So I think that’s a big part. Second, I think we also have a huge problem in academia generally, where we bifurcate staff and faculty roles, and so we have staff in our institutions who are working daily with students struggling through our classes, struggling through the bar, struggling through job placement, and then we have faculty just marching on doing their thing, and there’s very little information sharing about what kind of shared experiences, because it can depersonalize it. It’s not my classroom that’s a problem. But if we could hear our students in general are struggling with cold calling, with too much reading, with general anxiety, and we could start to be thinking much more as a community. And then finally, I think one of the big issues is this Socratic classroom props up the entire structure of time management for faculty, specifically. So I’m coming off my summer. I get back to teaching next week. And if I’m being honest, I probably spent 90% of my summer working on scholarship, and 10% working on teaching. And even the teaching, I wouldn’t really say, is working on teaching, it’s working on just rebooting the administrative components of it, updating my syllabus, getting my course learning management site up. It’s not teaching. I’m not transforming, I’m not redesigning, I’m not innovating, I’m marching forward. And I use my summers to do scholarship. And so I think for folks who are interested in innovating, we have to make some space for it so that others can follow.
John: There’s been a variety of critical approaches critiquing legal education. Have they had much of an impact?
Jamie: We have 50 years of scholars across a robust group of adjacent fields of scholarship, from feminist legal theory to critical race theory to LatCrit to queer theory. All of these critical perspectives have different methodologies, different agendas, and the one thing they all align on is naming the critiques of the Socratic method. And so I think, if I’m being reflective, these scholarly communities have had huge effects in building out that seminar programming, making more diverse hiring, and in the law itself, like how we think about what the law should be and scholarship, but at the end of the day, inside of the curriculum, I think the change has been a little bit more incremental, a little bit more add on. And so that’s kind of stressful for students too, to just shove in some extra readings here and there, but it’s not integrated in the book, and it sort of feels tangential or ad hoc. So I don’t think we’ve done a lot. Again, we’ve kind of done it around the core, and there’s great things happening. But I personally think that every person about to enter the legal profession should be thinking about it in more inclusive ways, of how the law affects communities. And just bluntly, every law is an expression of power, and somebody is going to benefit from that law, and someone is going to be harmed by it. And so it should be a part of training lawyers, not just seminar enrollment with your electives.
Rebecca: It’s really powerful just to just even think about that. I’m thinking about what you were saying about needing to shift from a 90/10 to a different kind of percentage, and how you start to make that shift if you also need to start forming community when a community doesn’t actually currently exist, because some of that time would need to be allocated to the community too. So it’s not as clean as a 90/10.
Jamie: That’s exactly right. And so, for example, I’m really excited since this book came out, I’ve done a couple of talks with faculty. Teaching is so vulnerable. Reading course evaluations, you have to be in the right mental space to open those. It’s hard, it’s searing, it’s vulnerable, just like our students’ experience when they open our feedback on their essays and their exams. And so I think here, if it feels like an attack and someone saying your teaching is outdated or your teaching is too traditional, it shuts people down. But if instead, we could bring in a speaker and look at a script of a typical Socratic dialog: what were the facts of the case, what was the holding of the case, what was the issue in the case, and critique it. That’s pretty darn abstract. It actually is abstract. How could we reframe this? And then the legal writing faculty in the room and the clinical faculty might say, “Why don’t you ask who hired a lawyer and why? Because those are the people who walk into our clinic.” And then the legal writing, people might say, “Why don’t you ask what legal sources that lawyer found when they researched on behalf of their client?” And so I think there are just cool ways within our faculty where we can all be learning from each other, but it does, I think, have to be a bit community based, otherwise it just feels too personal. And so one of the things I talk about in the book is this kind of paradoxical opportunity that COVID created, because the very idea that 180 something law schools and all of these faculties, in a flip of a switch, changed how they taught, and it wasn’t right, it was frenzied and it was flawed, but it was necessary, and we did it. And so, similarly, I think here, if it feels less personal, and it feels like we have to do this for our students, because one in 10 of our students is engaging in self harm, and one in four has alcohol dependence, like we can make some changes. I think we feel like we’re doing something together, instead of feeling like we’re attacked by someone critiquing our teaching.
John: You advocate inclusive Socratic teaching, so you’re not suggesting that Socratic teaching be eliminated. What aspects of Socratic teaching would be kept? What are the benefits of it that you’d like to see persisting?
Jamie: Yeah, and first I should say advocating might be a strong word for keeping Socratic method. I think I just approach it from sheer pragmatism… that change, you can’t bludgeon change. Change is hard. Faculties are not the most change oriented groups of people. The critiques are fair, and I think people actually agree with those critiques, but I do not think that the critical mass is there ready to upend the Socratic classroom and reimagine legal education. And so I sort of start from that premise and then say, “Okay, well, what could we do within this?” And so I kind of pitch my thinking on this as we should keep blowing the roof off of legal education, reimagining how we think about teaching. But while we’re doing that, which takes some time, we have to raise the floor and just raise our standards. So the things that I suggest are that we come up with a set of shared pedagogies that shape a Socratic classroom, and I propose that those frame Socratic teaching around techniques that are student centered, skill centered, client centered and community centered. And so my thinking with that is changing books is hard, changing testing techniques is hard, changing your teaching notes is hard, but if we could just reframe our existing dialogs using our existing materials, I think we could go a long way to diffusing that power role that the professor plays at the front. And frankly, it’s kind of liberating to hand a lot of power to the students. It takes pressure off the professor. It’s not this intellectual sparring, it’s a community of soon to be lawyers working together to talk about cases and what happened. And so I think it’s just a much more achievable method of reform. But in bulk, given how much of the time our students spend in these courses, I think the results could be transformative.
Rebecca: It seems like one of the key things that you’re promoting is the idea of the connectedness, that it’s not abstract, and that it’s connected to each individual, and that there’s a way for them to see how it would impact their lives, or the lives of their individual communities, or the communities that they’re a part of.
Jamie: Yeah. And I think the wealth of scholars who are writing about wellness in the profession are really great on this topic, which is, if we were to try to source where is this depression coming from… what’s happening? Law students enter legal education with similar levels of happiness and healthiness to their similarly situated peers, and then something’s happening in that first year. And I think that’s exactly what it is. It is the loss of community. Students are afraid to come into office hours, that someone else might hear their questions. And it varies at different schools how competitive and how individualistic the pursuit is, but when I think about my time practicing law, it was not individualistic at all. It’s sitting in a conference room hashing out ideas, throwing out ideas, brainstorming what to do, coming up with a plan B and a Plan C and a Plan D, and teams of lawyers thinking things through and the study of law is a lot of holeing yourself up in the library and just grinding it out, and maybe you might look to the people to your right and left as your competition. Certainly we need to do a lot more to help see that these are your future collaborators and colleagues, and you’re joining a profession that is a community, and you’ll rely on them much more in your practice than law school gives the impression of.
John: So shifting to more teamwork and collaborative work would be part of this revision. What other changes would you like to see in terms of how classrooms are functioning in a more inclusive approach?
Jamie: I would say, first, we need to be transparent with our students. If we’re using the Socratic method, why? What is happening, and it’s very opaque. So for example, if I were to propose one change to the most cynical or incrementalist of teachers who’s sort of skeptically considering this. Very simply, just tell your students what you’re doing with the Socratic method. Why are you using it? How does it prepare you for the exam? How does it prepare you for lawyering or the bar exam? What is it doing? And that can just be helpful. That’s a first step. Second. I think it’s helpful to start to think about pulling out of our Socratic methods. More clients, community, and skills. And then third, I think we have to tether this to a repackaging of our exam strategies as well. So what we’re doing in the classroom should be a form of no-stakes, low-stakes readiness for what you’re going to ask students to do on the exam. And so similarly, if we can start to ground our exams in more purposeful. So many of our exams are very abstract. You’ll give students a bunch of things that happen. I teach tort law with like personal injuries. So there’s a car accident, and then someone on those college campus scooters leaves it, and someone trips on it, and all sorts of sort of parade of horribles happening. And then we say: analyze. But who’s our client? Who’s paying us? What’s our mission? What was our community? Where did this happen? We could just do more to align what we’re doing in the classroom with these exams. And I think a lot of that aligns with where legal education is heading anyway, which is toward more professional identity formation, more development of cultural competencies. And so I think this, it can fulfill a lot of pedagogical objectives.
Rebecca: I hinted towards this a little bit earlier, about there’s individual things you can do to start to form community around you, or to connect with people who might be interested [LAUGHTER] in pursuing some of these things as well. Those individuals may not be your colleagues within your department. They may be other folks that you’ve met at conferences. How do you start nudging the people around you, maybe, who need the nudging? [LAUGHTER]
Jamie: Yeah, absolutely, I think it’s important to note that Socratic teaching in its traditional form is really hard on teachers too. We’ve talked about how it’s hard on students, but I look back on my early years of teaching, and it is a constant debilitating fear that your students are going to catch you in something you don’t know, or a mistake you made, and that’s just an unrealistic set of expectations. I practiced law. I was a talented lawyer. I’m a talented professor, but I still know only a fraction of the material that I’m teaching. There’s still room to learn. There’s still cases I never had and areas I never practiced in. And so it’s a very stress inducing experience for the professor, too, and particularly the new professor. And so over time, it becomes very sustainable, but at the beginning, it’s actually debilitatingly terrifying,[LAUGHTER] and especially it’s because of that intellectual sparring vibe. You can picture the student who’s like, mission in life is to outspar their professor, and so, that’s just a terrible approach to learning in general. And so I think a little bit of this, more experience sharing of how teaching can be more engaging, right? I teach the same courses every single year, but if we’re teaching in more student-centered, community-centered ways, our students are changing dramatically, how they think about the world, how they think about learning, our communities are changing dramatically, and our communities are, frankly, more polarized and divisive than ever. And so what are we going to do about that? So for tort law, for example, we’re going to go to a jury. Which kind of jury in COVID Are you going to get? The jury that COVID is not serious, or the jury where COVID has the whole community on lockdown? It’s a totally different set of values and norms driving a community. And so I think that it can just be such a more engaging way to teach if we open up the idea that our students are going to engage with the material in different ways every year, and it also takes the professor out of it, like I try to teach in inclusive Socratic techniques, and one of the things that I think is the biggest benefit of what I try to do is I don’t have a line out my door at exam time of panicked students. I do review sessions, and people come to office hours throughout, but if you’re more transparent with your students about what you expect of them and if they know how you’re going to test them at the end, and if every class is a chance to practice that over and over, it also takes a little bit of this tension out of the grades that I give and the conversations that you have with students around exam time, they can start to support themselves. You can start to transfer. They can study in groups and take practice problems together. And so in some respects, I think it’s less fatiguing and it feels less high stakes, because I can’t have all the answers. I have my lived experience. But when someone else engages on a topic in the class, the other folks in the class might have a dramatically better answer than I ever could have thought of. So I think just being a little bit more vulnerable and raw in like talking to each other about what Socratic teaching is actually like, especially in these first years, and I should mention especially for women professors and professors of color, because we have this image and this bias in our head of what a law professor looks like. And so if you stand there with a quieter voice, a smaller frame, if your voice doesn’t carry in the same way across the classroom, if you’re a person of color, there’s great series of talking about presumptions of competence, and how students on bulk don’t give a presumption of competence to their professors of color. And then you imagine that intellectual sparring and what that’s like when you have someone who looks like what you thought your law professor would look like, and someone who doesn’t. It’s a dramatically different experience. And so that was a very long answer, but building community and more honesty about what teaching in this tradition feels like.
Rebecca: So I feel like you might have some folks who might just say, “but Jamie, I’ve got my habits and I’m tired [LAUGHTER]…
Jamie: Yes, yes. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: …and I don’t wanna,” but I feel like those same folks might buy in if you say it’s really important for the new people, or for the diversification of the field, to make a little bit of room for these new folks and to establish some of these other kinds of patterns so they don’t get the pushback, and that they don’t have some of this stress. A lot of times, I think some of our seasoned faculty actually are really willing to budge a little bit so that some of the people that they really want to see succeed can, if they understand why those people can’t succeed. Sometimes you have to be really explicit about why they can’t succeed though, they just don’t get it.
Jamie: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I think is important too, is, despite everything we’ve talked about in our time together, about the critiques and the harms, course evals are great for these professors, right? Like these are beloved professors. They’re revered, people aspire to be in their classrooms. There is tremendous peer pressure in teaching to conform. So one of the things I talk about in the book is, at a minimum, we just need to stop putting Socratic teaching on a pedestal and making it immune from accountability, even if you don’t want to change. Just stop pretending that your classroom is the default, and just make space that there could be other classrooms. And because what’s happening is anyone who wants to try to innovate or approach it in a different way is going to be evaluated by folks teaching in that traditional perspective. So there’s some room for academic deans to give some structure to what are we doing when we do peer evaluations, it’s not mimicry and conformity, like we should have some objective criteria that could be fulfilled in any number of teaching techniques, but there’s a lot of just this conformity. And so I think making some space to liberate peer evaluations, to rethink the questions we ask on our course evaluations, like the dominant questions on a law school course: “Was your professor knowledgeable? Was your professor available? Did your professor handle difficult topics well?” It’s all Professor centered, instead of, “Did you feel welcome in the classroom? Did you have the tools you needed to succeed?” Even our questions could be more student centered to start to measure things from the student perspective instead of let’s just assess whether you thought your professor was smart enough, which is an incredibly narrow and subjective and infused with bias way to approach it.
Rebecca: You mean like a question, like, “Did you receive feedback throughout the semester?”
Jamie: [LAUGHTER] That’s a great question. That would be a great question. One quick anecdote I would love to mention. As I was working on this book, I had the chance to present… every year, there is a new law professors conference that takes place in Washington, DC, run by the American Association of Law Schools. And so, I don’t know, maybe 150, 200 people come. These are the new hires. They’re entering. They’re going into academia all over the country. First of all, as a slight aside, everyone calls it the baby law profs, which already tells you that we are not embracing the idea that new people come in with new ideas. But anyway, putting that aside, I got the chance to do a session on the Socratic method there, and I would describe it as pretty raw, because in that room are people who want to change, like they’re at that moment, and they’re actually at a conference that’s doing some of the assimilation, and saying, “Let me teach you how to teach in the Socratic method,” like, “let me teach you how to handle exam writing.” And so that kind of tells you that there’s just this assimilation process, and on the topic of the Socratic method, it was quite raw, because many of those faculty, they’ve been in practice, and they see the flaws of it, they see the limitations of it, and they’re excited to innovate. And then slowly, we kind of dull that instinct and start to channel toward conformity in a way that I think is really problematic. That’s a great place where we could start. And let’s open it up, let’s hear from innovators. Who’s not teaching in a Socratic method? Let’s get them in front of these students and these new law professors, and let’s get a more diverse panel of what other techniques folks are using, what’s working, what’s not.
John: Following up with that issue of diversity, in your book, and you alluded to this just a few minutes ago, there seem to be some pretty substantial gender inequities in terms of legal instruction. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Jamie: Yeah, absolutely. And I honestly would love to talk about it a little bit more from the perspective of personal narrative, because I think that will tell the story quite representatively. So I’ve been in teaching for 17 years. I have two children, and I’ve had zero maternity leaves. One I was lucky enough to have in June, and so it worked out. The second was born in September… didn’t work out… and I kept teaching through that semester. I was a term faculty member, as many women faculty are, so I was not full time, not eligible for FMLA, and I hadn’t been there for a year. And I remember talking to my academic dean. I remember coming home and being like, “he’s gonna let me teach.” And I was so grateful that I was gonna be allowed to come in after giving birth and keep teaching. And I look back on that, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, there are so many layers of problems with that….” that I actually sincerely felt that, and that I was so grateful to just have a job through that. And so anyways, so I was in legal writing, which is dominated by women, as is clinical faculty, and really limited in its opportunities for tenure-track positions. And so I ultimately went on the tenure track, and you have to be geographically mobile often to do that. And so that landed me in the middle of Kentucky, in Louisville, Kentucky, from Manhattan, and my spouse was a financial services guy working in Manhattan, and somehow did not seem as excited about Louisville, Kentucky’s financial services market as I was, and so we ended up living there 10 years, and seven of them he commuted. Seven years of solo parenting. And like when you start to add that up, schools get out at three o’clock. You get the kids on the bus, you get to school. How many conferences is that? How many more papers could you have published? How many more networking dinners and Bar Association events or award if I were able to be a full time… I was a full-time professor, but solo parenting, just to have a job, not to rise in the job or thrive in the job, but just to call myself a professor. Quite candidly, it nearly destroyed our family. Seven years of commuting is financially taxing, it’s emotionally taxing, it’s very hard on relationships, and that experience is so typical. I could name dozens and dozens. We are not great at spousal hiring. We’re not great at childcare. We’ve got lots of issues and just lots of stunted opportunities. And then the last thing I’ll say is all those things we talked about, the mentoring, the support programs, the affinity groups, those are often led by women and professors of color. And so there’s a piece of legal scholarship that I really like that says the women professors do the housekeeping at home and the housekeeping institutionally. And so women faculty and faculty of color doing disproportionate amounts of service, particularly the kind of service that isn’t really counted very well. Certain kinds of service are quite well distinguished and coveted, but mentoring students can kind of fall off the grid, and being the person that people just come to for support is not really tracked, but that’s time lost. So those are some of my personal experiences with it. I think the most raw example of it is I will never forget the day I found out I was awarded tenure. We had multiple days of the meetings, and so I didn’t know which day would be the day my package would be considered, but the day we found out my spouse was out of town, and there’s a tradition of a champagne toast at the end for folks who were just awarded tenure. And I couldn’t be there for the champagne toast because I had to go home, and then I went home to solo parenting, and I just remember I was very upset about it, and I just remember feeling like that’s the stuff, that community and that I was there and I was thriving, but I was not able to engage in the ways that we would want our faculty to under those circumstances. That was a raw, dark note to end on.
Rebecca: Those are the realities, I think, of a lot of complexities of higher ed that we’re still trying to untangle.
Jamie: And I think the thing that excited me so much about you inviting me to join the podcast is we don’t talk very much across schools. We don’t talk across fields. And legal education is pretty darn far behind. We have a lot to learn from peers, if we’re open to it. And so I think that these struggles are not unique to legal education, and other fields and areas are much more ahead of us. And so if we could just open our minds to more learning,= 360 from those around us.
John: And your book should help contribute to that, at least in the legal profession.
Jamie: I hope so. My favorite thing to do with the book is do faculty presentations that are conversations where, similarly, where I begin with the presentation, and then I’m out of it, right? Just like I’m describing we should be doing in our classrooms, where, what’s happening at your school, what could you be doing? And it’s a really rewarding feeling to see faculty talking among themselves about pedagogy and not being talked at.
Rebecca: …sounds like a great place to get to our last question, which is: we always end by asking, what’s next?
Jamie: Well, I think if I were talking to colleagues listening who are teaching in the Socratic tradition, I would say, start with something. We often set such high goals for ourselves that it feels like too much. Just pick a couple of things, the transparency, try a different method of assessment, or talk to your colleagues about what methods of assessment might be more helpful to give feedback to students. My first message would be to start with just a couple of things and just see how it feels. We don’t need to rewrite our books or rewrite our syllabi, but I also think there’s a lot of institutional work that needs to be done. I think this grassroots and this coalition of the willing is one strategy. But also, I would love to see more leadership at the top of academic deans and institutional structures, just doing a little bit more. Like, what if we promoted in our marketing some of our great teachers? What if we could do some spotlighting on students talking about what they love about their great teachers. I think there’s a little more we could be doing to create a culture that values innovation in teaching. Lots of our teaching awards are kind of popularity contests. What if we had awards for innovation, where we start to incentivize in that direction? And so I think institutionally, there’s a lot of work we could do to start to set the tone at the top that this is something that actually matters, and we can actually differentiate in the kind of pedagogy we’re delivering.
Rebecca: Well, I hope your book sparks some great change in the spaces that you want the change to happen.
Jamie: Thank you so much. Conversation about teaching, I think, is the answer to the beginning of all of this. So I’m so grateful to be on this podcast and to see the work you all are doing in bringing folks together from various fields and traditions, and it’s really inspiring.
John: Well, thank you. I really enjoyed reading your book. It’s an area that we had not really talked about before, and it sounds like it’s an area where there could be some very productive changes made.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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