He did find that 97% of the respondents reported using Socratic method teaching “at least
some of the time in first year classes.” Id., 28. There is no attempt to define Socratic teach-
ing in the survey. The law professors who responded to this survey also reported using a
variety of other teaching techniques, particularly in upper-level classes.
- Id., 28 n. 77; see also Kerr as an example of someone who includes more specific
constraints in his definition:
I consider “traditional” Socratic method to be a teaching style in which the professor
selects a single student without warning and questions the student about a particular
judicial opinion that has been assigned for class. Often the professor begins by ask-
ing the student to state the facts of the case and then asks the student to explain how
the court reasoned to an answer. The professor might then test the student’s under-
standing of the case by posing a series of hypotheticals and asking the student to apply
the reasoning of the case to the new fact patterns. The purpose of this questioning is
to explore the strengths and weaknesses of various legal arguments that might be
marshaled to support or attach a given rule of decision. To that end, the professor’s
inquiries are often designed to expose the weaknesses in the student’s responses. (Kerr,
“Decline,” 113 n. 3)- See Shaffer and Redmount, Lawyers, Law Students, and People, 166.
- Id.
- Friedland, “How We Teach,” 28.
- Id., 28–29.
- Kerr, “Decline,” 122–123.
- For example, one alternative teaching method mentioned by Friedland is role-
playing. “How We Teach,” 30. As we will see, however, depending on one’s definition of
role-playing, it is possible that some kinds of role-play are viewed by many professors as
inherent to Socratic teaching. Again, sorting this out and determining with any accuracy
just how much change has occurred is close to impossible in the absence of detailed ob-
servational data from earlier eras. - The three classrooms are in law schools that range from the second largest to the
smallest schools in our study (ranging from more than 1,500 students to under 800). Class
#1 is the classroom where our research began, and Class #8 was the last to be studied.
Class #1 had 115 students and was a standard, large, first-year Contracts class in an
urban local law school in the northeastern United States. The teacher was a European
American male in his late forties, a graduate of an elite law school with more than ten years
of teaching experience at the time we taped his class. He conducted the class in a format
that conformed relatively closely to the stereotype of Socratic law school teaching, calling
on students using formal address (Ms. or Mr. + surname), and then asking them to de-
scribe and discuss assigned cases. The overall tone in the classroom was noticeably hu-
morous, with repeated laughter by the students and joking by the instructor. With 11.3%
students of color, the class was less diverse than the national average (see Table 3.1) and
fell into the middle range of the classrooms in the study in terms of diversity. Asian Ameri-
cans constituted the largest minority group (7.0%) and African Americans the smallest
(4.3%). There were no Latino students in the class. In terms of gender, this classroom was
again in the middle range relative to other classes in this study and had a slightly higher
percentage of women (43.5) than the national average.
Please note that the total percentages given for students of color in each class may
include students who were not African American, Asian American, Latino, or Latina,
but who also would not be identified as white or Caucasian. We recognize that the kind
of classification necessary for quantitative studies of this kind is necessarily crude and
254 Notes to Pages 143–144