To Lecture or not to Lecture

I fully believe I know more than my students do. While the set of things I know my not fully overlap with the set of things any given student knows (limiting outselves to academic subjects) its certainly a lot bigger. As a result, I am very comfortable lecturing. I'm good at it. Students tell me they learn a lot from my lectures and told me that they wished other teachers taught like I do.

Educational theory would argue that I am noticing students with a particular learning style. It would hold that students of other learning styles are ill-served. It is my general contention that overall, it is possible to do some things so well that they "cross over". In entertainment, we know of country artists who attract a popular or rock audience while performing in the country style. Without playing country-rock or country pop, and without the audience abandoning its taste, the artist has cross-over appeal. This is usually because they are very good, and quality is recognized even by those who otherwise don't value the genre. Likewise, I think that any teaching style can be done at a level of excellence that reaches most students regardless of their prefered learning style. (This raises another question, that teachers are optimizers, which I will get around to at a later date.) This is why advocates for anything in teaching can find some exemplar and point to real results. The problem with such anecdotal evidence is that, in my contention, anything done by someone who is really good will yield results, hence the practice may not be generalizable.

Professor Baimbridge has questioned the utility of the Socratic Method and refered to Brian Leiter’s attack upon the practice. Educational thoery likes things such as the Socratic Method because it requires active thinking. It opposes lecture because its easy to tune out and ignore the speaker. Of course in law school, one hopes that after paying all of that tuition, one desires to aquire the knowledge of the professor, something that cannot be assumed for all students in public school. In fact, I don't consider it exageration to say that some educational theorists go so far as being willing to abandon content all together in favor of active thinking about anything. The hope is that thinking skills, once developed will be transferable to life problems.

I have no problem with the Socratic Method, and use it in short bursts during lecture when students ask questions that I want then to reason through rather than provide an answer for. I don't and wouldn't conduct whole classes Socratically unless I was addressing a values question. Generally, students don't know enough to reason well about things, because their knowledge base is so incomplete. My own suspicion is that Plato's Dialogues are most analogous to graduate seminars, not high school classes. For reasoning excercises, I prefer simulations, (what law students would recognize as a hypothetical) not socractic reasoning.

Certainly, when you can assume that students want knowledge, giving it to them in the densest form, lecture, is best. If, and I think this is what I do, you can motivate students to want to know, lecture works well.

One of the things I see, is students who expect to be given the specific answers to the questions that they will be tested on. Leaning for learning's sake does not occur to them. When we know why something happened, I feel we understand it better and retain memory of it longer. Socratic questioning can solve that problem, both pushing studets who are used to being handed answers (often the brighter students) and getting students to understand the why questions and answers.

One of the weaknesses of Socratic Questioning, and I have alluded to this a few lines up, is that student knowledge is weak, and used poorly, you just provide a platform for ignorance. One also finds this in the so-called persuasive essay, which are almost always not.