Law School Large Classes

Opportunities

Invariably we find ourselves bringing forth prior experiments to our core course offerings. We have reaped tremendous benefits from applying what we did in a small seminar to a larger law school classroom. We have been exposed to students’ diverse learning styles, communication techniques, backgrounds and creativity. We have learned about our own blind spots and have come to realize that our assumptions about what people think or know are often false. We have discovered that breaking a large class into smaller groups takes the pressure off the teacher who otherwise feels she must perform or entertain in order to motivate students or retain their attention.

Innovative pedagogical formats in a large class setting often promote a more robust exchange with our students, enriching our own scholarly work and research. Our analysis of legal problems and our orientation toward thinking about conceptual puzzles has changed as a result of our teaching. Many students have come to law school from other public policy work. When people with degrees in other fields are given the space, their diverse backgrounds can inform what happens in the classroom and can also generate research ideas or lead to student participation in projects that interest the faculty member.

Some professors might not want to invest the energy and the time in this kind of participatory learning, particularly if they don’t think they will learn anything from their students. They may, given the “right out of college” trajectory of many students, view their students as vessels to be emptied and refilled. It is certainly difficult to do more than one class like this in a semester or even a year. When this is purely about teaching as a process of conveying information and skills, it may be too demanding to do on a regular basis. When classes are larger than 65 students, the default position is to resort to conventional panels to lead off the discussion within the large class or to rely on out of class opportunities for informal interaction through lunch or meetings in the faculty member’s office. This is not surprising, since the willingness to take risks and experiment with new classroom formats does not always gel in very large law school classes.

Schools with substantial teaching demands or schools with high student/faculty ratios may not be able to sustain this kind of intense preparation and commitment by faculty members to teaching. There is a trade-off between teaching a small group really well, which we both enjoy, and teaching a large class that stimulates critical thinking but does not permit as many opportunities for active learning as might be needed to create long-term retention, relationships of trust, or innovative problem-solving approaches. There is also a trade-off between teaching and producing numerous scholarly publications in a particular academic year. Nevertheless, we continue to experiment in large class settings and have seen others do so with great success as well.
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What follows are thumb nail sketches of these techniques in a range of courses including professional responsibility, first year civil procedure, and employment discrimination. Except for the professional responsibility course and law and lawyering in the workplace, we have used these techniques to supplement rather than to supplant traditional pedagogies in large classes.