Professorial Style in Context 141

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Professorial Style in Context

141

I

n this chapter, we survey the variety of classroom styles found among the pro-
fessors in the study. It is important to remember that there are continuities to
be found across these differences in style, as outlined in Part II. These continuities

were not only matters of the content of the lesson conveyed or of common orien-
tations regarding the correct reading of legal texts, the importance of hierarchies
of legal authority, and so forth. As we’ve seen, there were also similarities of dis-

cursive form and structure. For example, even teachers who employed a great deal
of lecture nonetheless replicated aspects of dialogic form within their own turns,

and when they did call on students there were similarities of approach to be found
in the questioning. And all of the professors employed exegetical lecturing, some-
times for long periods of time, sometimes interspersed with ongoing questioning
of students. At the same time, there was considerable variability among the pro-
fessors in terms of discourse style. After surveying the variations among classrooms
in detail, we return at the end of this chapter to the question of assessing similari-
ties and differences in professorial style, seen now in terms of the contexts pro-
vided by social patterning.

A Diverse Range of Styles

One of the most fascinating aspects of law school classroom discourse uncovered
by this study is the combination of underlying structural similarities with, on the
surface, a startling array of diverse teaching styles. At one end of the spectrum, we
find the most highly stylized Socratic classroom, with heavily structured dialogue
dominating (represented here by one of the pilot study classrooms). More com-
mon in this study were mixed formats of various kinds. For example, in modified