Law Teaching During the Pandemic: What Profs Want Their Colleagues to Know

In my (unscientific) survey of law teaching during the pandemic (see here and here), I asked colleagues an open-ended question: Reflecting about your personal experience or about the experience of faculty generally during the pandemic, are there things you would like your faculty colleagues in general to know?

Representative responses after the fold.

• My colleagues may know this, but I would say that distance learning is not an excuse to compromise on the Socratic method
• For those faculty who almost literally phoned it in, the students saw you for what you are -- privileged hypocrites. And for those faculty who hung in there and worked your tails off, the students were grateful for your commitment, care, and concern
• Hiding from technology is no longer optional - everyone needs to get up to speed with this type of technology, full stop.
• A great deal of what teaching and learning experts declare to be best practices for distance education - particularly when it comes to "engaging" students via "edtech" platforms and/or corporate videoconferencing platforms - also doesn't work very well.
• Empathy is a valuable tool to use and model.
• Some of us are dealing with extra burdens that we do not share with our work colleagues.
• You must work really hard to keep students engaged. I called on 20+ students each class.
• Work-life balance was already difficult and became even more difficult
• Online teaching certainly takes more time and effort up front to prepare adequately, because you can't rely on performance ability, and it's more difficult to be spontaneous. But, if you put in the extra time, I think students can learn just as well.

I'm interested in colleagues' experiences with the Socratic method. Calling on 20+ students per class during online sessions in a large course such as Corporations & Partnerships, for example (I had 98 students this semester) is a level I did not even come close to approaching. I tried to encourage as much participation as possible through polls, practice problems and the like, but I stopped calling on students in large part after the switch to online teaching in response to student feedback about that making their learning more difficult. (Most students probably would say that the Socratic method makes their learning more difficult during non-pandemic times, too.) Given all the other stresses faced by students, I let go of any cold-calling, except for our customary reports of what was appearing in the business news. (Students have to read the WSJ every day as a course assignment.)

I am interested to know more about the experiences of teachers who were calling on 20 students per session. In my Feminist Legal Theory seminar of 39 students, I probably had close to 100% traditional "participation" (in the form of speaking, separate and apart from participation in the simultaneous online chat) during every session. But in Corporations & Partnerships, I did not cold call during synchronous Zoom sessions.