March’s Faculty Learning Circle will discuss inclusive socratic practices and reducing student anxiety in the classroom. We recommend reading Legal Education's Curricular Tipping Point Toward Inclusive Socratic Teaching, which “proposes a set of shared Socratic values that are student-centered, skills-centered, client-centered, and community-centered.” We will be discussing changes we can make to our own socratic practices that can best serve the needs of a wide range of students.
| Problematic Socratic Performances |
|---|
| Professor-centered teaching with a professor perpetually positioned in the center of the room with students engaging in serial participation with the professor. Students are positioned as subordinate absorbers of the professor’s knowledge. |
| Power-centered with the professor leading the dialogue, holding all the answers—often tauntingly—while the students perform for the professor and their peers. |
| Wielding tools of fear and, to a lesser extent, shame to motivate student participation and underscore the inadequacies of the students. |
| Abstract teaching of rules using teaching notes that rarely need adapting across institution or time. |
| Appellate case focus using a diluted casebook collecting cases from various times and geographies. |
| Summative assessment provided only with little to no transparency of performance metrics. |
| Problematic Performances | Modernized Socratic Approaches | |
|---|---|---|
| Skills-centered | Heavily, if not entirely, focused on teaching students to “think like a lawyer” by progressing through many rules with a final exam assessing students’ rapid analysis of those rules in one penultimate test. | Using formative assessment techniques to move students incrementally through the development of substantive rules and analytic skills, packaged around sensitization to lawyering skills like research, writing, advocacy, civility, cultural competence, and client counseling. |
| Student-centered | Students follow the directional flow of the Socratic dialogue managed by the professor with each student participating serially in one-on-one exchanges. Students rarely understand how they are performing and their “on call” motivates preparation and performance. | Students engage with each other and with the professor. Students’ lived experiences and perspectives are central to their acquisition of legal knowledge and the basis of inquiry. Students are given feedback to direct their own success. |
| Client-centered | Appellate cases shape instruction, leaving the role of clients’ layers removed from the discussion of law. Clients are introduced outside of core courses in courses like clinics, simulations, and experiential learning. | Each Socratic exchange is a chance to explore the role of clients in the case and the work of lawyers using legal rules to achieve client objectives. Each mastered concept is a chance to advise a client responsively. |
| Community-centered | Cases are studied from appellate casebooks “in the air,” neutral to the time, context, or community. Community focuses are left for clinics, externships, and jobs. Students rarely feel connected to an inclusive learning community in large lecture courses. The perspectives of certain voices and communities dominate teaching and learning. | Students examine where the underlying concepts being discussed are present in their communities and how the rules do or do not provide redress. Students are empowered to consider how the law reflects or does not reflect the values of their community. To the extent existing law does not reflect community needs or values, students consider reforms. Learning environments are cultivated with purpose to build welcoming and inclusive communities. |