Professorial Style in Context 163Prof.: Close. He said that you don’t have a promise until the offer’s accepted.
You’re wrong by one word. (.05 pause) You see, a promise isn’t necessarily
a contract. A promise isn’t legally enforceable.
John: Right.
Prof.: Right. What an offer is [... omit rest of 1.49 turn explaining definition of
“offer”... ]Thus, the overall discursive setting can set the tone for professorial responses, and
the student’s joking reply carries on the overall tenor of the professor-student re-
sponses throughout the class. This was the classroom with the most egalitarian
distribution of student speakers in the entire study; it was the class in which 100%
of the students spoke during the semester.^31 At one point in the semester, in a move
unlike any found in the other classes, the professor put one of the students in the
role of judge and two others in the role of attorneys, and had the two students ar-
gue to the judge, who took over the professor’s role of questioning and moderat-
ing the discussion. This was a marked exception to the rule in these classrooms,
where student comments are almost never unmediated by professors’ turns.^32
At the same time, we can also note continuities between the methods used to
attain continuity and coherence in longer traditional Socratic dialogues and in these
more polyphonic exchanges. In the lengthy exchange above (Transcript 7.11), if
one ignores the switching of students and imagines only one student respondent
instead, there is not all that large a distinction between the earlier portions of this
excerpt and many of the Socratic dialogues; the most striking difference is that the
professor keeps selecting different students to respond to her ongoing questions.
Just as in the extended dialogues, we find many professor turns beginning with
positive affirmations such as “right” and “yeah”; we also see repetition of student
responses for emphasis and cohesion (turns 42–43, “expression of intent”; turns
50–53, “solicitation for offers”). As did the professors in the more Socratic class-
rooms, these professors provide significant structuring to the ongoing discussion
through mini-lectures and doctrinal exegesis, as well as through the form of their
questions. When an answer is not quite on point, we also see instances where the
professor recasts that student answer in an encouraging light: “All right, you’ve got
the street-level understanding of why the ad is not an offer. Let’s put it in terms of
offer under contract law.” And where a student is clearly offtrack, the professor
also employs interruption and redirection: “Well, no, you’ve got to be very care-
ful. Don’t say ‘I received this offer in the mail.’” However, when the student does
not come up with a correct answer after one more turn, the professor moves on to
another interlocutor, rather than pressing a single speaker to continue. On the one
hand, this means that there is less need for coaching and cuing than in the more
extended dialogues. One could also say that students are not learning to reason on
their feet to the same extent, and that the quick search through the room for a re-
sponse that will move the conversation along leaves individual contributors little
room to recover and develop their arguments. On the other hand, it also relieves
individual students of the stress of ongoing dialogue when they are not coming up
with the desired responses. In her interview with me, the professor in Class #6 also
pointed to the attentional benefits of this approach: