Reflections on Teaching
By Judith C. Areen

After completing fifteen years of deaning, I have taken to introducing myself to some audiences as a “recovering administrator.” For some reason, it is always faculty who chuckle the loudest. Fortunately, my school has a long tradition of appointing a member of the faculty to serve as dean with the understanding that he or she will ultimately return to the faculty. My colleagues thus viewed my return as a normal occurrence, and have generously given a warm welcome. One of the other joys of this transition is the opportunity it has provided to work on my teaching. Given my interest, and because the 2007 AALS Annual Meeting will highlight Scholarship and Service, I thought it appropriate to focus in this column on the third member of the usual academic triptych by mentioning some books on Teaching.

Most of the literature on teaching concerns college rather than law school, but many of the concepts presented can easily be extended to the law school classroom. In The Elements of Teaching, James M. Banner and Harold C. Cannon begin with the premise that good teaching is an art. In their words, “[w]hat ground, medium, color, form and implements are to the visual arts, so … learning, authority, ethics, order, imagination, compassion, patience, character and pleasure are to teaching.”1 Unlike artists, however, teachers “are rarely invited to think about what they are . . . although some of them eventually find ways to do so.”2 Of more concern, in the judgment of the authors, we don’t spend much professional time discussing these matters with colleagues. Fortunately, we can engage with books in the privacy of our offices if not colleagues in our quest for fresh approaches.

A traditional way to improve any skill is to study those who are masters. Ken Bain, in What the Best Teachers Do, begins by cautioning us to avoid being one of those eminent scholars who spend hours crafting lectures that reflect the latest scholarly thinking only to produce students who understand little of what was presented—and remember less. Recent studies of how people learn are invoked to teach us that knowledge is constructed, rather than merely received. The challenge in teaching is to stimulate students to engage in more than the kind of surface learning in which they remember something only long enough to pass the final examination.

In his chapter on what the best teachers do, Bain provides a useful compendium of approaches that have worked for others. Professor Michael Sandel of Harvard, for example, recommends starting a class with something students care about or think they know rather than simply laying out a blueprint or theory of our own. He compares this approach to teaching his own children to play baseball: I could give them detailed instructions on how to hold the bat, where to stand, how to look for the ball from the pitcher, and how to swing, never letting them hold a bat until they had heard several lectures on the subject. Or, I could give them a bat and allow them to take a few swings, after which I might find one thing that the kid is doing, which if adjusted, would make him a better hitter.”3

Questions can also be a powerful tool. Fortunately, we all were exposed to some version of the Socratic method as law students, but too often it was used merely to embarrass or to explore a single court opinion. The best teachers pose questions in order to encourage students to compare, apply, evaluate, analyze and synthesize. They also are able to put the material into a larger context—one that makes clear why it is important.

One of the best changes in legal pedagogy in recent years is that more of us are moving beyond the case method to problem-based teaching. Bain strongly supports this development by noting that people learn best when they are trying to solve problems that they find intriguing or important, something clinical faculty have long understood.

For a more personal account of how to become a better teacher, I found A Life in School by Jane Tompkins to be an inspiring reminder of the opportunity and freedom we have as teachers to challenge conventional wisdom—even if it is the accepted wisdom of our field. Tompkins recounts how difficult it was for her to reach the point where she was able to attack the sacredness of the literary canon she had been taught as a student. She then felt bold enough to experiment with changing the format of the traditional seminar or small class by assigning students to lead classes. She reports: From this point forward my classes were more alive than they’d ever been before. More students took part in the discussions, they talked more to each other and less to me, and the intensity and quality of their engagement with the course material was gratifying. Not having the burden of responsibility for how things went every time, I could pay attention to what was being said, to who was talking, to how things felt in the class, and I could contribute when I had something really important to say. . . . 4

If you want to do more than merely read about new ideas in teaching, you should consider attending the AALS Mid-Year Conference on New Ideas for Law Teachers. It is being held in Vancouver on June 11-14, 2006. As the organizers explain: “Experienced teachers face challenges that new teachers do not. After years of deepening our expertise, creating materials and lectures, and working with students, we may find that we have stopped taking risks in our teaching—that we have stopped teaching intentionally—and now teach by habit.”

I look forward to hearing from you about books on teaching that you recommend, and hope to see you in Vancouver.

1 James M. Banner, Jr., and Harold C. Cannon, The Elements of Teaching 3 (1997).
2Id. at 4.
3Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do 110 (2004).
4Jane Tompkins, A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned 121 (1996).