Wanting the Wrong Answer: The Ironic Benefit of Student Participation
posted by Daniel Solove
In a post today, Kaimi responds to a fequent student criticism of law school pedagogy. That criticism is that many students don’t learn much from hearing other students speak in class. In large classes (not seminars), many students think that time is wasted when so much class time is devoted to other students talking. They feel that they are taking the class to learn from the professor, not from other students.
Kaimi’s response is that student participation functions as an “accountability mechanism” to ensure that students have “actually done the reading.” But more importantly, Kaimi, writes, “[f]acilitating student participation allows many students to learn more effectively.” He notes that students learn in different ways, and some learn best through active participation.
I agree with the mix of learning approaches. My classes all now involve a mixture between lecture, Socratic-style participation, and problem-method participation.
But I’m not sure Kaimi has really answered the student’s skepticism. Students often view the Socratic participation process as inefficient. Why not have the professor just lecture the answers? This way, some students think, they will get the correct answers faster and not have to wait while classmates struggle with the material until the right answer emerges. In a large class, Socratic participation seems like a very inefficient way to help the students who learn best by participating. After all, with many students, the average student participates about 2-3 times per semester — not frequently enough to get much benefit.
However, there is a benefit to having some Socratic participation as opposed to all lecture. And this benefit requires me to reveal a deeply-guarded secret of law school pedagogy: Law professors sometimes want the wrong answers.
Of course, professors don’t want wrong answers stemming from lack of preparation (these are not wrong in the right way), but they want certain wrong answers because the right one might be counterintuitive or very tricky and they want to explore why the wrong answers are wrong first.
Even when a student is not participating, it can be helpful to hear another student answer the questions. This gets other non-participating students thinking about how they will answer the questions. In a lecture, it is easy to just sit back and soak in all the information. But when students listen to other students participate — especially when other students are struggling to answer the questions — they are thinking about how they would answer them. And it is this thinking that is helpful. So there is a benefit to not having the answers come too quickly.
There are times when I’m exploring hard issues that I want to take a bit of time and explore a few false starts before getting to the right answer. I think that this can reinforce the lessons learned — and it can demonstrate to students why particular alternative answers are not the best ones.
Thus, ironically, the benefit of Socratic participation is its inefficiency in getting to the right answers quickly. What many students discount as wasted time — exploring wrong answers, waiting while another student struggles to articulate a concept or argument correctly — is actually very valuable time. It often doesn’t get memorialized in the notes students take in class. The time is often forgotten. But it is important time to allow the concepts to ferment in the students’ minds. Sometimes the seemingly inefficient teaching method can be the most effective one.
October 9, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Posted in: Law School (Teaching)
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Responses (10)
MIchael Keyes - October 9, 2006 at 5:09 pm
Physicians (I am one) seem to learn best in clinical situations when the Socratic method is used because it allows them to go through the process of becoming a physician without harming a large number of people because they learn by making mistakes in the abstract. The primary advantage is what you mentioned, learning the process of making decisions and parsing out the significant details when making decisions. This practice as a student and resident reaps benefits in the long run and teaches you to deal with (often) life changing decisions using incomplete information.
Of course, we have to learn a lot of information which is a never ending process because the body of medical knowledge changes at a rapid pace the the entire fact base is impossible to assimilate fully. So you have to be able to research, learn, and apply that knowledge very quickly if you want to keep up. (And we have numerous tests to pass – school, licensure, boards, more boards.)
I suppose that the law is somewhat the same, at least as far as the extent of knowledge goes, but I wonder how helpful the Socratic method really is if your goals are to be at the top of your class and then to pass the bar, since that is the way schools and jobs are structured. As far as I can tell, there is no practicum component to law school (at least not a mandatory one) and no reason to learn to think like a lawyer until you are really in practice. Maybe those students who want to be lectured to the answers are right after all.
Cathy - October 9, 2006 at 6:14 pm
The problem is when you get Socratic Method + Hide the Ball. Students would probably be more tolerant of the methodology of “getting the wrong answer first” if they felt they would also get the right one at some point.
Mark - October 9, 2006 at 6:28 pm
Most first-year law classes are the same across the country. Professors use the same books with the same cases. Students are forced to brief cases. The socratic method is supposed to make us “think like lawyers.” Eighty percent of the class never speaks unless called on. Presumably, because each student may only be called on once or twice a semester, the socratic method is useful for the whole class, not just the student being questioned.
So I thought to myself yesterday, why do we need all of these law schools? Why not just record live classes at Harvard and Yale and sell the tapes? Most students just read the cases and sit in class anyway. But then students would not be forced to prepare for class, you say. This is true. So, the only thing we really need the professors for is to make sure we read the cases, and grade the exams.
Not to mention that law school could probably be cut from three years to one and a half years with little effect. I would bet that most third year students learn more clerking the summer prior to their third year than they learn taking third year classes.
Of course, I don’t want these changes to occur. As a third year student who is well aware of the monopolistic nature of the legal profession, I think law school should be five years, and much, much harder.
Chapin Cimino Cody - October 9, 2006 at 10:13 pm
These questions beg another: what are we teaching? Are we teaching substantive doctrine, or even “how to think like a lawyer”, or something else? Admittedly I’m new at this, but so far I don’t mind the wrong answers first because I think that if I do my job right, and lead the student, through questions, to think of the right answer on her own, then I’ll have given that student a lesson not in contracts, but in the value of perseverance. Hopefully the process will instill some confidence in the student as well. That isn’t going to happen if I lecture. Whether the students “get this” or not I have no idea, but I imagine/hope that they appreciate my patience when it’s their turn on the hot seat. (I’m sure this philosophy is not unique but it seemed to be missing so far in these threads.)
Jamie Spencer - October 10, 2006 at 8:25 am
Not that I have a vivid recollection of law school anymore, but I also think that we should focus less on the right/wrong answer dichotomy, when trying to discover the benefits of the Socratic method. Sometimes, if memory serves, it’s “OK answer”/”better answer”. And those are truly the “learning to think like a lawyer” situations.
Specific cases are about two things: (1) the specific set of facts in the instant case, and (2) the reasoning that will be applied in future cases. The Socratic method helps students figure out how the Court came up with #2, and the ability to discern that doesn’t always meet a right/wrong test.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - October 10, 2006 at 9:15 am
I think this thread is going in the right direction. Certainly with Socrates himself, it wasn’t a question of which answer was simply right or wrong, as there were truths to be gleaned from all the answers, and the search itself was intended to speak to, and exemplify, what was necessary in the proper conduct of–in his case–philosophical inquiry. One hears so much about the ‘Socratic method’ in legal training but I’m not sure there’s a widespread understanding and appreciation of precisely what such method meant to Socrates (or Plato). Socratic dialectic and dialogue is open-ended, the aporia is not ‘resolved’ in any definitive sense, and what distinguishes Socratic dialectic from eristic is to be found ‘not in its results nor in the formal validity of its reasoning, but in what it manifests through the very method of its argumentation.’ (Francisco Gonzalaez, Dialectic and Dialogue, 1998). More might be said here but this will have to suffice.
Annonymous for Obvious Reasons - October 10, 2006 at 10:51 am
There’s one crucial variable that’s being overlooked–the abilities of the students who are being taught. Down where I am, at a 4th tier law school, if a teacher is waiting for a right answer, or even a “right wrong answer”, that wait could last for the entire class period and beyond. Many times, the inability to come up with the “right” answer, or even a “right wrong answer” stems from a lack of preparation. From what I’ve heard and read from many of my colleagues at other schools, that is a widely shared problem. Other times, however, the wait is occasioned by the simple inability of many otherwise prepared students to understand the point. That is not to say that all or even most of my students fall into that category, or that some students at more highly “ranked” law schools don’t also have that problem. It simply means that you are more likely to run into more of such students at a lower tier law school and you’ve got to factor that into to your teaching methodology. For example, I tend to use more lecture and directed questioning and less open ended questioning in my classes than I would if I were teaching a class at my alma mater. If you don’t factor in the abilities of the students, the end result is likely to be frustrated students, a frustrated faculty member, and very little learning taking place.
Jennifer Garten - October 10, 2006 at 3:59 pm
In many cases, there is no right answer. There are competing concerns and policy considerations. The state of the law is often in flux. Protagoras, not Socrates, should be the philosopher that law students admire.
Furthermore, no one questions that participation is 50% of one’s grade at Harvard Business School, which uses Socratic inquiry and proceeds by the case-method. No one there questions the abilities of their classmates. Nor that there might not be right answers to any particular question.
Frankly, many law students just wanna make moolah and their conception of the law is plain wrong. Instead of reflecting on what rationales justify the process, they blame the professor. BECAUSE THEY’RE THE KIND OF PEOPLE WHO WANT TO MAKE THEIR LIVELIHOOD BY BLAMING OTHER PEOPLE.
Paul Horwitz - October 10, 2006 at 4:14 pm
I, for one, never saw my job as a practicing lawyer as being about blaming other people. Rather, I saw it as being about why my clients ought to be blamed in federal and not state court; why the fact that plaintiffs also blamed a nominal local defendant didn’t mean we were all stuck in a state court class action or some miserable Mississippi multi-plaintiff case; why the fact that many people were simultaneously blaming my clients demanded consolidation by the JPML; why federal law so comprehensively covered the field within which my clients were allegedly to blame that any state law claims were preempted; and, failing all that, why the many ways in which my clients were allegedly to blame were so complex and varied that plaintiffs should be required to line up to blame them one at a time, rather than proceeding as a certified class.
Cathy - October 11, 2006 at 12:38 am
I can grasp that there may not be a “right” answer, necessarily. But when questions are posed in such a way as to suggest that the right one (or at least a specific one) is in the professor’s head, and then he doesn’t share it, well, that’s annoying.
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