Some Questions for Entry Level Canddiates Regarding Teaching

Eric Muller's amusing anecdote got me thinking about the differences between the worldview of those professors teaching at elite law schools, and those of us teaching at nonelite schools.   

My advisers at Michigan and UCLA were (and are very much still) fabulous in every way.  When I began on the entry level market a couple of years ago, they gave me shrewd advice about the job talk and about how to sell my scholarship. 

One thing that they didn't really discuss, though, was teaching.  My advisers were (and still are) fantastic teachers but I think that they might have underestimated a little bit how much those schools outside the top 100 really value teaching. 

As one who doesn't inhabit the same circle of godly influence as Eric's Yale professor, I would recommend that entry level candidates at schools outside the top 100 schools might want to think about how to package themselves as potentially good teachers.  Along those lines, perhaps thinking about answers to these questions might be useful: 

1.  Why do you want to teach?  And, specifically, why do you want to teach students who, based on LSAT and GPA, are very different from the sorts of students whom you knew during your own law school days?  More pointedly, why do you want to teach students who may require more time (and often, a lot of more time) and effort from you than you and your classmates in law school may have expected from your professors?   

2.  What is your proposed pedagogical style?  Socratic?  Lecture?  Or a combination of both?  Multiple choice or written exam?  Why one and not the other?   

3.  Perhaps in deliberating answers for questions 1 and 2, you can incorporate an answer to this question:  What did your best teachers in law school do that was so right and what did the worst do that were so wrong? 

4.  What do you do with an uneven class where some students are getting the answers quickly and others are struggling terribly? 

5.  What would you do to help the school raise its bar passage performance? 

None of the questions are meant--in any way--to suggest that teaching at a third or fourth tier law school is a chore.  It isn't.  The students are often, if not generally, terrific learners and wonderful human beings.  And I can't help but think that their LSAT scores, if lower than those of students at elite law schools, are partly attributable to other factors, like being the first person in their family to attend college, without being privy to a lifetime of Kaplan prep centers and a household full of lawyers, doctors, and professors who can afford the countless benefits conducive to professional success.

Comments

[anon]

Thanks for the information.

[Unworthy Conversant]

Yes, thank you for these thoughts. For reasons I can't really identify, they make me feel slightly more optimistic about my overall chances of ever being hired as a law teacher; now I feel that my chances are "astronomically small" instead of "impossible."

And I have to say that, as someone who attended (and loved) a second-tier school, I found that excellence in teaching was a required metric in their hiring, as bad teachers were not usually retained, and good teachers were highly valued. That isn't to say that there wasn't still a diversity of educational methods employed, nor am I saying that there were no bad teachers there; but bad teachers were a definite minority, and the school was small enough to allow building-wide reputations to develop that effectively steered people away from the bad teachers and toward the good teachers.