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> | | | | Collaboration in Theatre and the Law | |
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> | | | | In law school, we may be told that lawyers succeed when they collaborate, but we are not taught to work together. At the risk of drawing a grand and imperfect metaphor, I’m going to look at how collaboration works in a field that I know fairly well - the theatre - to see how we could improve it here in law school. | |
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> | | | | The Theatre as Collaboration | |
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< | The most innovative theatre of the past thirty years has been created by small ensembles in which all members share responsibility for the group’s projects. It matters little which member contributes what. The spirit matches almost a truism of the theatre – that it is a collaborative process, and its product is built by the creative influence of many people working together. Being seen as the standout performer in a mediocre show, among theatre people, is to be seen as a failure. | >
> | The most innovative theatre of the past thirty years has been created by small ensembles in which all members share responsibility for the group’s projects. It matters little which member contributes what. The spirit matches almost a truism of the theatre – that it is a collaborative process, and its product is built by the creative influence of many people working together. The standout performer in a mediocre show has nevertheless failed. | | | | |
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< | This does not mean that artists are not competitive – they believe their show is and must be better than the one down the street, and they can be as cutthroat and catty as the worst moments of The Paper Chase. But within one rehearsal room, artists depend upon each other – they will sink or swim together. Their goal, competitive as it may be, is to make the performance better, and they will not do that by showing off to each others’ detriment. | >
> | Of course, artists are still competitive – they believe their show is and must be better than the one down the street, and they can be as cutthroat and catty as the worst moments of The Paper Chase. But within one rehearsal room, artists depend upon each other – they will sink or swim together. Their goal, competitive as it may be, is to make the performance better, and they will not do that by showing off to each others’ detriment. | | | | |
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< | Lawyers collaborate; Law students compete. | >
> | Lawyers collaborate; Law students compete | | | | |
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< | Lawyers too do their best work in teams, working together to serve a client or idea. Even solo practitioners collaborate when they need to -- the criminal attorney in Boulder worked alongside SFLC. If in law school we mainly worked together to come up with more innovative solutions to complicated problems, then, they would be learning to be more like lawyers. | | | | |
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< | But we don’t. We may meet for the occasional study group or join teams for moot court, but we measure our success or failure individually. We then turn to each other and moan that competition is forced on us. And when our peers ask for advice, we tell them to play it as it lays – a 2L who is a fan of this course and who advised me to take it, answered, when I asked, “What is the point of the elective?” that “The point of the elective is to get an A.” | >
> | Lawyers too do their best work in teams, working together to serve a client or idea. Even solo practitioners collaborate when they need to -- the criminal attorney in Boulder worked alongside SFLC. If in law school we mainly worked together to come up with more innovative solutions to complicated problems, then, they would be learning to be more like lawyers. I am fairly certain, however, that any group of five students in the first year class working together on the writing competition would turn in a final paper that was “better” than anything that any individual submitted. Some of the competition is forced on us, and some of it we seek out. By the time we start our second years, most of us accept uncritically that working in isolation is the norm. | | | Reform to Foster Collaboration | |
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< | Incentivizing collaboration is a different challenge than reforming grades or the curve per say – the arguments for and against metrics to measure us by are familiar and don’t really need rehashing. Even with grades, even with a curve, the school could measure how we work as parts of a team, rather than as artificially isolated individuals. The American spirit of individualism infests our entire educational system, of course, but is particularly inappropriate to the law school, where it paradoxically is most manifest.
One simple scheme would be to divide a class (of a hundred students for example) into randomly selected groups of five, and assign each group a detailed writing assignment to be done during the reading period. The members of each group would all receive the same grade. The system would not produce extra work for professors, since it is hard to believe that reading 20 papers is more time consuming or less enjoyable than reading 100 exams. It would not de-incentivize students from reading or studying, because they would not know their topic before the end of the semester. There may be some freeloading, but members of the group with the freeloader in it could be expected to deal with the situation as adults. The teams, like teams in any field--like little theatre companies--would rely on each other, and compete, if competition is desired, with the other groups. | >
> | Incentivizing collaboration is a different challenge than reforming grades or the curve per se. Of course, even with grades, even with a curve, the school could measure how we work as parts of a team, rather than as artificially isolated individuals. | | | | |
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> | One simple scheme would be to divide a class into randomly selected small groups and assign each group a detailed writing assignment in lieu of an exam; everyone in the group would get the same grade. Professors would have no increased workload -- reading 20 papers is no more time consuming than reading 100 exams. Teams would be forced to collaborate as a team in order to succeed as a team. Competition would not be absent, as each group would have an incentive to outperform the others. | | | Hurdles to Reform | |
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> | If the dean were to propose the above reform tomorrow, however, the howls of protest would most likely come not from the faculty, but from the students. Students worried that unprepared peers would drag their grade down would complain, and work-averse students who realize that the plan would be in fact more challenging than cramming may also raise a stink. It is easier to complain about competition (all the while competing fiercely) than to get together to change it. | | | | |
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< | If the dean were to propose the above reform tomorrow, however, the howls of protest would most likely come not from the faculty, but from the students. Students worried that unprepared peers would drag their grade down would complain, and work-averse students who realize that the plan would be in fact more challenging than cramming may also raise a stink. What we collaborate best on is creating a culture anathema to the very idea of working together -- the fault is not in our school but in our selves.
Even in this class, given a wiki and a blank slate for topics, we have had many debates, but the only thing we have created as a group is the music list. We are too protective of our own work, too worried about encroaching on the work of others, and too focused on some perception of a bottom line to truly collaborate with each other. | >
> | In this class, given a wiki and a blank slate for topics, we have learned only slowly. We have had many debates, but the only thing we have created as a group is the music list. It is hard to get used to simply writing over someone’s work rather than commenting on it, and it is hard to get used to feeling that the person writing over your work has done you a favor. So it’s not easy, and it’s not simple, and we have taken a few baby steps. But the music list, after all, is not for nothing. And after all, learning slowly is the best way to learn for good. | | | So What? | |
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> | This class is over; no matter what classes we take over the next few years, the majority will offer fewer tools for collaboration than this one did. So if I want to make collaborating with my fellow students a priority, I have to reach out to them and ask them for help, and offer my help to them. We can learn how to work together with or without the technology, if we choose to do so. We can turn the ocean liner if we take small steps and commit to them, just like the small theatre companies that work together with virtually no technology at all. | | | | |
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< | It would be easy for me to say this is because so many students are young, or have not collaborated before, or are listening to a voice from above telling them what to do. But this would conveniently exclude me from the problem, and thus smacks of the very individualism that plagues us. If we want things to change, we have to take it upon ourselves to change them. If I want to learn from my fellow students, I have to reach out to them and ask them for help, and offer my help to them. We will only turn the ocean liner we are on by making personal choices and implementing them on whatever scale we can.
As a first tiny step, I have incorporated significant comments and edits from three other students in this class in this paper. In return, I will be offering what comments I can on each of their papers. It is a small step on a small assignment, but who knows, it might be habit-forming.
-- AndrewCase - 08 May 2009
- This is a characteristically clear-headed analysis of the problem. You've gotten it right, in my view.
- But you are too hard on yourself and your colleagues. Learning to collaborate in wikis is an acquired skill, as learning to collaborate in putting on shows, and one gets better at the craft of collaborating as time goes by. I said at the beginning of the term that my third goal was to begin peoples' education in using wikis to collaborate, because that would make them better lawyers. Students who work with me in different courses using wikis in different ways show increasing skill in working together: Students collaborate in historical document editing in EngLegalHist, and will be doing the same in other ways in American Legal History this fall. Take a look at the form of seminar discussion evolved this term in CompPrivConst for an example of how a group can use extended discussion to help one another's thought evolve.
I don't mean to be overly critical of myself and my fellow students -- I mean to say that we have something to learn about how to work together, and our best teachers in that regard are each other. I appreciate the fact that you provide the wiki as a tool for us to learn collaboration on, but part of the reason I was interested in discussing theatre (a low-tech enterprise) is to tease out the difference between the act of collaboration and the tool used for it. A wiki is not a collaborative tool if it is not used as such, and a room full of people can collaborate with no technology whatsoever. The students in the seminars are indeed working together, but they should not be the only ones -- I hope we can learn to trust each other and learn from each other whether in courses where there is no wiki. I will go back to the essay to try to make this clear.
- Now, ask yourself a question: what will happen when children grow up using this sort of technology for collaboration from their earliest schooling? What will it be like when such people begin to join the workforce in large numbers? That's when the Web really begins to change society.
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> | As a first tiny step, I have asked for and incorporated significant comments and edits from three other students in this class in this paper (and have now responded to Eben’s critique as well). I exchanged revisions and met with the other students on their papers, and hope that my notes were as helpful as theirs were. Whether we learn to work together in the medium of the Wiki or sitting across a table from each other is less important, I think, then the fact that we learn to work together at all. It is a small step on a small assignment, but who knows, it might be habit-forming. | | | | |
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< | Having just spent the year placing a two-year-old in what is already called "school," I have some reservations that technology alone is going to form the next generation's sense of collaboration. The next generation will have enormous opportunities to use new technologies, but they will also have enormous pressures to out-perform each other from a very early age. Twitter can be used as the platform for an unimaginably ambitious democracy movement or it can be the means by which marketers reach teenagers spending their parents money on junk. I am glad that my children will have the tools to work with others substantially more effectively than, say, the members of the Constitutional Convention did. But will that technology alone turn a generation into the first society in the history of humankind not to trick, beguile, and backstab? Wouldn't it be pretty to think so. | >
> | -- AndrewCase? - 08 May 2009 | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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