Put the Big Rocks in First

My law school is arguing right now about changing from a 14 week semester to a 13 week one. That sounds like a tempest in a teapot. But it will bring a lot of collateral changes with it. Some will be very good, and some will be very challenging. One of the challenging items will be the need for all of us who teach to think hard about what we cover in our syllabus.

When you have been teaching a course that has 14 leisurely weeks to cover a subject, and then are asked to shave one week off that syllabus, you really should consider whether you are going to cover all the same subjects in all the same detail. It’s going to be a hard question, and I know some people are just going to ignore it and cram the same package into the smaller box.

I had a course design workshop last summer that was very enlightening. It was fun, as well. The first thing that really caught my attention was the image of a video that our moderator used (this is a different version, but equally illustrative)

I have read the parable before. You choose the “big rocks” and put them in the bucket first, and then fit the little pebbles or sand around them and it all fits. In most of our lives, we have all the little pebbles (which stand for the little niggling tasks and distractions in our lives) that fill up our days. We need to choose the big rocks – the important priorities that we really want to devote ourselves to, and prioritize those, and then fit the pebbles around those.

In this course design workshop, the same analogy means a slightly different thing. Our courses have big rocks and little pebbles, too. We have a few big ideas that are really important for our students to remember, we hope, in 5 years. Think about a few of your law or library classes, and try to remember one or two of the big ideas from them.... Can you come up with one? If so, that was a successful professor, who managed to communicate one of the core concepts to you – a “big rock” thought! This course design workshop urged us to really focus and pare down our syllabus until we had a handful of these, and then build the course around those.

It took a good deal of courage and a bit of interior weeping to let go of so much of my long-term syllabus. And it takes a GREAT deal of courage to create a syllabus that is really for my students and not at all for my colleagues. The first (MANY) times I created a syllabus for my courses, I really wrote them with the idea in the back of my mind: “What if one of my colleagues sees this? What will he or she think? What if I don't cover Justinian's Code? Will they think I'm ignorant?”

Instead, we should be creating syllabi focused entirely on student needs, and the shape of our semester. That really does call for courage and a lot of rethinking. What is it I really need a student to remember 5 or 10 years from now about this class? What will still be useful for them to know? In legal research, that’s a particularly tricky question, as so many of the publications and databases change more and more quickly. I have come to the conclusion that the most useful thing I can teach is how to evaluate materials and teach themselves. I still teach resources, but mostly in the context of how to evaluate them and how to learn about an unfamiliar resource.

Will you all think I'm ignorant? Gee... I'm trying not to care.

Image decorating this post is courtesy of http://radiantdust.blogspot.com/2011/01/first-things-first.html

Helping Our Students Bridge the Gap: Expert Legal Researchers

I have spent a couple decades by now teaching legal research. I started with the optimistic idea that I could just pour the information into students' heads. Well, not quite that naive, but nearly. Early on, we lectured, and then gave our students worksheets, and reading assignments to introduce them to the various research tools. But over the years, I began to feel that the lecture was really not doing much, and the worksheets were where the learning (if any) was happening. I thought back to my own days as a library school student. The bibliography classes were hugely time- consuming, but we really learned how to understand all those different tools, how to teach ourselves new resources in the future, and how to evaluate and choose them, too. I thought, that is what I think the law students really need. Nearly anything I teach them NOW will be different by the time they graduate. So, I went to work on creating a bunch of worksheets that showed the law students how to look under the hood at various types of legal research tools.

Then, I spent the next decade or so scaling them back... Ahem. Those bibliography classes WERE very time-consuming after all. I do read all the comments on my student evaluations, and take them very seriously. I was practically killing my students. So, after continual tinkering, I have seriously stream-lined the worksheets, but the core of the class is basically the same... For most of the classes, the students have a worksheet to complete beforehand. They have a reading assignment that will help them understand what is going on, if the resources are strange. Then, the class is mostly spent discussing what they found and how they found it, and what they thought about what their experience was. I don't really care WHAT they find, so much as HOW they find it, and there are a LOT of different ways to find things. The discussion is the whole thing. What they liked, and didn't like. What worked and what didn't .... And why do they think it didn't.

I did not really have words to explain this until I was reading a book for a reading group I signed up for at our Teaching Center. Metacognition is one word that explains part of what is going on in my class. Metacognition is thinking about knowing. And it seems to be one step toward deeper understanding of any subject... to think about what you know, and how you know it -- the process of learning. It's a hot topic in cognitive psychology applied to learning theory. The book I'm reading is Why Don't Students Like School: A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom, by Daniel T. Willingham (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass) 2009. (WDSLS)

In WDSLS, Willingham makes a number of points useful to classroom teachers at all levels, from kindergarten through college and post-graduate levels. The book is easy to read, and moderately entertaining, and the points are easy to pull out of the text, laid out in special fonts and boxes. There are entertaining illustrations and puzzles to help make his points. But I did not really catch fire, feeling that I saw a strong connection between this book and my own thinking about the problems of teaching legal research, until about two thirds of the way through.

Suddenly, at page 104, Willingham is talking about the difference between experts and novices:

... transfer [of previous learning to new situations] is so difficult because novices tend to focus on surface features [that is the surface difference between problems] and are not very good at seeing the abstract, functional relationships among problems that are key to solving them [that is, seeing the abstract similarities that make problems analogous, so one can transfer the solution of a previous problem to the new problem]. Well that is what experts are great at. They have representations of problems and situations in their long-term memories and those representations are abstract. That's why experts are able to ignore unimportant details and home in on useful information; thinking functionally makes it obvious what's important. That's also why they show good transfer to new problems. New problems differ in surface structure, but experts recognize the deep, abstract structure. That's also why their judgments usually are sensible, even if they are not quite right.

This is what lawyers and librarians mean when they say, "You get a feel for the shape of the law." They mean that after you do enough legal research, you begin to see the underlying similarities that let you solve the research problem by recognizing the abstract, functional relationship to previous research problems you have solved, which may look on the surface like very different problems. And you can very quickly guess where the answer will lie, and look for it much more efficiently. But it has never been something I could articulate for students any more clearly than the little quip about knowing the shape of the law.

And I now have a way to articulate for my students what I am trying to do with the classroom discussions. If they will discuss and argue about what they find, not to show me or get my approval, but to explain to themselves and help themselves see what they know and how they came to know it, they will be stepping much farther along the path toward making themselves into experts. They will be taking the time they spent on the worksheets and supercharging it, by making it into a much richer experience.