Thomas Baker
recently posted
“A Summer Reading List on Teaching” at Prawfsblawg. As someone relatively new to
teaching law, I am often looking for teaching resources, and Baker’s annotated
bibliography (linked in his post) is excellent. I want to highlight three of his recommendations.
Ken Bain’s What
the Best College Teachers Do. I second Baker’s glowing endorsement of
this book. I came across it early
in graduate school and make a point of re-reading it before the start of every
semester. As Baker observes,
Bain’s student-focused approach raises a number of important challenges. Here are three:
Invite Participation.
Bain suggests that “[r]ather than laying out a set of requirements for
students, [the best teachers] usually talk about the promises of the course,
about the kinds of questions the discipline will help students answer, or about
the intellectual, emotional, or physical abilities that it will help them
develop.”
Be Relevant.
Bain highlights mathematician Donald Saari’s WGAD (“Who gives a damn?”)
principle. Saari “tells his
students that they are free to ask him this question on any day during the
course, at any moment in class. He
will stop and explain to his students why the material under consideration at
the moment—however abstruse and miniscule a piece of the big picture it may
be—is important, and how it relates to the large questions and issues of the
course.”
Seek Comprehension.
Bain notes that the best teachers have a student-focused approach to
course evaluations. He quotes one
teacher’s perspective: “High ratings from students indicate success only if I
am satisfied with the quality of what I’m asking them to do intellectually, and
that is reflected not in the ratings but in my syllabus, assignments, and the
ways I grade their work. Low
ratings, on the other hand, usually tell me I’ve failed to reach my
students.”
[Mertz]
suggests that legal education, particularly in the first year, promotes
objective, dispassionate modes of legal analyses, which denude the student of
moral intuitions and empathetic emotion. What’s more, this sort of
disengagement from moral feeling may be necessary for the professional
formation of the contemporary America lawyer. Nonetheless, when legal education and legal reasoning obscure
the fullness of human wisdom in favor of instrumentalism, consumerism, and
fanciful conceptions of autonomy, we should rightly be aghast.
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