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< | | | | The Mythology and Ultimate Poverty of the Curve
-- By ScottThurman - 26 Feb 2009 | | | also possible that the right way to go is to start at the end,
and figure out what your idea of the self on sale means to
you.
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Teaching, coercion, examination
-- By ScottThurman - 15 Apr 2009
Teaching and coercion
School is a normative environment. We attend school because we do not know things; we expect our teachers to tell us these things. This instruction, at its core, is instruction in how a teacher believes some thing should be done.
A school is not, however, a passive transmitter of these norms. School is coercive – it disciplines us, it applies force to us, it shapes us. Instructional moments between teachers and students, at their base, consist of the teacher’s belief that there is something incorrect, wrong, ignorant, or less than optimal in the student’s performance, and the teacher’s attempt to demonstrate what’s wrong, what should be changed.
The presence of coercion is not itself problematic. As discussed in the opening paragraph, we are in school because we want to learn. We have voluntarily submitted to the coercion of schools, and we’re willing to submit to the discipline, to the occasional reminders that we have not, in the eyes of our teachers, mastered our subjects. The ideal student wants to feel the force of the ideal teacher, even if it is painful. The ideal student wants to be changed. And, I think most importantly, the ideal student wants to know how he or she is going to be changed before submitting to force.
Evaluation as the fundamental coercive element of school
While every lecture and assignment has the capacity to affect or influence the student, the evaluation stands as the greatest coercive element in school. Here I mean for evaluation to extend beyond a single test or a set of exams (though in many classes there is only one evaluation - the final exam). Evaluation is any contact between student and teacher in which the student’s performance is reviewed and feedback is given as to how the student could more closely approach the teacher’s ideal. In this sense, evaluation is the medium of teaching, or at least the most intimate and direct form of it. While students may be able to infer from readings or lectures how to modify their behaviors and actions to converge with the teacher’s expectations, evaluation is the most direct way a teacher can indicate where and how a student should change.
The conventional law school class
It’s been well established that most law school professors, at least in the 1L year, do a poor job of teaching. To build on the discussion above, law school professor seem to fail in two areas: there is no strong normative stance and there is little evaluation.
When I’m sitting in most classes, I am not sure what I am supposed to be learning. I can tell from the teacher’s questions that I should know cases’ facts, judges’ reasoning. I know that I should memorize relevant sections of Restatements and codes. I have only vague ideas of how any of this connects to what lawyers do – changing society with words.
The usual excuses offered for the ambiguity of law school instruction are unpersuasive. We are told that law school instruction is ambiguous because the practice of law is complex and ever changing. But that mistakes the type of normative stance I want the teacher to take. I understand that legal arguments are rarely absolutely right or wrong. I understand that our professors cannot give us easy answers about when a set of facts meets some standard or passes some legal test. I understand that a case does not, necessarily, have a stable, universally understood holding. But I don’t want to know if I’m right or wrong; I want to know if that path I took to get to the answer was more or less effective. And, given the range and diversity of legal arguments, I want to understand as well as I can what criteria the professor has used to evaluate that efficacy. Such feedback gives me the tools to both determine how I can further change and, perhaps more importantly, if I agree enough with the professor’s stance to want to change.
Of course, to be in a position to offer us feedback, professor must give us opportunities to demonstrate our legal skills. In most of our classes, students will be given at most two or three opportunities to demonstrate their progress in legal reasoning before the final. Or, more accurately, we’ll be given two or three opportunities to recite some facts from a case, or to sniff out whatever ball the professor is hiding. With no ability to get real, meaningful evaluations before the final, our study becomes more exhausting (because we have no normative goals, we do not know the parameters of the evaluation -- neither what content will be covered on the final exam, nor, more openly, what skills we’re supposed to be developing) and our performance more arbitrary. Maybe this sort of evaluation mirrors the management style of a large law firm: vague directives, little over-sight, and idiosyncratic standards. But that seems like a bad way to run a law firm, and a worse way to run a school.
Evaluations as resistance
It’s been suggested (maybe I’m straw-manning) that all this discussion about grades and exams is sound and fury. I disagree. Evaluations are the heart of teaching. By allowing teachers to give vague normative standards and no substantive feedback, students have excused teachers from teaching at all. Currently, teachers wait to teach until exam day – the exam can easily be the first time that a student realizes, “I’ve not learned this right.”
In a law school where teachers were forced to give frequent evaluations, students could experience several substantive teaching moments. Moreover, teachers would be under a harder-to-ignore burden: they would have to determine much earlier in the semester what their normative goals for the class were and whether their teaching methods were effective moving the class toward those goals.
I don't mean to make it sound like teachers must bear an inordinate amount of the burden in ensuring learning. Learning is a collaborative effort, which requires a heavy investment on both parties. Rather, I think that by extending the evaluation process, teachers would be making it more possible for students to determine both if they wanted to learn (that is, if they wanted to be changed in the way the teacher offered) and if they actually were learning. |
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