Professorial Style in Context 143swers or explanations be proffered by the professor, and that the students be called
on at random without warning. For others, some subset of these characteristics is all
that is necessary. Others rely on a generalized combination of discourse structure
and discourse content in defining Socratic teaching: “For many professors, the term
‘Socratic’ describes a question and answer method in which the professor asks a se-
ries of questions of the students, uncovering both preconceptions and cogent legal
analysis.”^5 We really have no systematic information on the actual distribution of
particular characteristics in classrooms considered to be strictly Socratic. It seems
possible that even professors considered to be classic Socratic teachers occasionally
broke into explanations and lecturing, or that some may have approached the ques-
tioning with less ferocity and animosity than one would infer from the stereotype
and associated anecdotes. It is unclear under the stereotype how to classify profes-
sors who combine classic Socratic questioning with a predictable pattern for calling
on students (rather than calling on them with no warning) or with a heavy reliance
on volunteers. It is similarly difficult to label a professor who in essence follows the
same thread of question-answer sequences that would be found in the typical Socratic
classroom (i.e., asking for statements of facts and reasoning, using hypotheticals to
test students’ understandings) but who does so with a series of students rather than
remaining in tight dialogue with just one or two students.
Interestingly, a study published in 1977 by Thomas Shaffer and Robert
Redmount seemed to indicate that the Socratic method was on the wane.^6 Their re-
search found that first-year law teaching at Indianapolis, Notre Dame, and Valparaiso
(and possibly also UCLA) was heavily oriented toward lecture. Teachers in first-year
classes in the Indiana schools spoke “four-fifths of the time,” whereas teachers in
public-policy-oriented classes spoke “only two-thirds of the time.”^7 Shaffer and
Redmount seem to define Socratic dialogue in terms of “probing” methods of
questioning, which they found to be “not used much at all”; when these methods
were used, it was most frequently in the smaller schools and in the generally smaller
third-year classes. As I’ve noted, we don’t have quantitative observational data from
early Socratic classrooms, and so we don’t know to what extent even the most pure
examples of Socratic teaching involved a mixture of lecture and questioning. From
one perspective, one could look at Shaffer and Redmount’s findings as evidence
that a nonlecture method of some kind was still very much in use in first-year class-
rooms: nothing close to 100% or 95% of the time was spent in lecture (by contrast
with a straight lecture-style class). This was true in all but one of the classes of this
study as well. Friedland’s 1994–1995 survey of law professors similarly found that
97% of the respondents reported using Socratic method at least some of the time
in first-year classes.^8 In contrast with Shaffer and Redmount’s findings, Friedland’s
respondents recount using Socratic method to a greater degree in first-year classes
and lecture method more in upper-level courses.^9
A third complication lies in the fact that the impact of Socratic teaching may
not be attributable in any straightforward way to the amount of floor time it occu-
pies. It may be sufficient that the method is used to some degree in most class hours;
this may be enough to convey to students any particular form of reasoning that it
embodies, or to intimidate them with the fear of possible public humiliation often
mentioned as one of its disciplining functions.