The Laptop Debate Continues

Faculty members in all disciplines have debated for years whether students who use their laptops during class actually benefit.  Some claim that permitting laptops in Internet-enabled classrooms leads to students distracting themselves with Facebook, email, Twitter, etc., rather than focusing on the lecture or discussion.  I once visited an adjunct professor's class, and figured out that around 60% of the students were not using their laptops to take notes or do anything else related to that class.  When I mentioned this to the professor, he was surprised, thinking that all the clicking of keys meant that students were taking copious notes.  This was not the case.  The ease of distraction has led some professors to switch off Internet access altogether during their classes, which has always seemed rather paternalistic to me.  Law students are adults, and should be permitted to make their own decisions, even if the decisions are poor.  The other concern about laptops in the classroom is that students, instead of participating in the class, become scribes who take down every word that is said and do not retain anything they hear. 

When I was a student, I always found that I learned best by taking copious notes by hand.  I even chose my bar review course because it didn't have a lot of printed materials, but required students to attend lectures and take notes.  Something about taking down the information by hand seemed to help me retain it.  It wasn't just taking notes in class that helped me; I also went through my notes after the class and amplified and organized them.  It was the only way I could truly master the material. 

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education presents a study done by two researchers on students' note-taking preferences and supports those who believe that laptops are more hindrance to learning than help.  The researchers found that laptop users took more than twice as many notes as students who wrote longhand, but that "While more notes are beneficial, at least to a point, if the notes are taken indiscriminately or by mindless transcribing content ... the benefit disappears." These findings will be published soon in an article entitled "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard:  Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note-taking," in the journal Psychological Science.  This article is sure to fuel the ongoing debate over laptops in the classroom.

Sharing with students - a fine balance

Janis Joplin: Take another little piece of my heart (YouTube clip)

Over the years that I have been teaching, I have walked a fine line about how much of my personal life to share with students.  The times that I have shared my personal life, though, students have been so grateful, it is something to contemplate. 

Some years ago, when my hands were very painful with arthritis, I was, for a while, wearing the plastic splints that occupational therapists fashion.  I was following the doctor's (not very well-thought-out) advice to wear these ALL the time.  It was only after my physical therapist questioned the advice that I myself thought to question it.  Joints need to move to stay healthy.  Even when they are sore, they need to move and exercise in order to retain the maximum mobility and strength.  I knew that and so did my doctor -- when I asked about it.  So eventually, I just wore the splints at night to hold the joints in a neutral position when they were especially sore.  But when I was wearing the splints constantly, my students were very curious when I came to class looking like the crab woman!  So I told them why I was wearing the splints.  Afterward, several students told me about relatives in similar straits and thanked me for sharing with them.

Then, more recently, I had a student who volunteered for a project.  Completely a volunteer thing, where he was supposed to update a memorandum of law.  I didn't hear from him for quite a while, and then had an e-mail apologizing.  His brother had gotten horrifically sick on the West coast.  All his family had rushed to the brother's bedside, and were keeping vigil, including my student.  It played havoc with this student's semester. Fortunately, he worked with the dean of students, took a leave of absence, and just dropped all those courses.  He was not even sure for a while that he was returning to law school or coming back East.  Eventually, the brother recovered, almost entirely well again.  The student returned to our law school and is working on his project again.

When he popped back up on my e-mail, all apologies, I told him not to worry and that I certainly understood. Then I told him about when my daughter got bacterial meningitis in her freshman year at college.  I just dropped everything.   Projects dropped in mid-stream, e-mail conversations dropped in mid-sentence, I think.  Very unprofessional of me.  I think I must have continued to teach my class, but I am not sure at this point.  I can't imagine how.  I fell completely apart and pretty much lived at the hospital, fortunately in the same town where I live and teach.  So I told my student now, that I certainly understand how one can just drop things, and that I thought he had the right priorities.  I said that afterwards, when my daughter made a complete recovery (a miracle, and thank heavens for Beth Israel hospital and their ICU staff!), I came back to my projects & conversations and explained why I disappeared, that people were so supportive and so kind.  I also began to find out how extremely lucky we were.

My student has been so grateful to have my story back in exchange for his own. I got much more detail as I traded my own story for his.  I completely understand why he dropped away from view. And he seems like a much more sane and reasonable person than when he just "disappeared" from my view on the volunteer project.

And yet this sharing of oneself is a delicate thing and very easy to overdo.  There is a real reason for that imposed formality of the classroom.  It is an unfair thing to invite students to presume too much friendship with a teacher until they are graduates.  I want my students to feel comfortable with me, and feel they can come to me with problems.  But if there is a perception that they can expect favors because I am their friend, or that one or another student is a special friend, that will lead to all sorts of problems.  I am not their friend (yet).  I am their teacher.  Whether I like it or not, I am obliged to judge the quality of their work, to sort the relative merit of the class's output. I would be happy to be the friend of many of my students -- after they graduate. 

Image decorating this is from http://www.weddingbee.com/2011/01/10/wedding-slump/#axzz2gUIijDVh

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.

Teaching Differently

Some years ago, I attended a program with Jill Ramsfield, of Georgetown's LRW faculty. She spoke about teaching her students principles of rhetoric, and about the importance of context. I went back home inspired. I re-worked the first class of my Advanced Legal Research class.

When I first started teaching, I had the happy presumption that students would read the assignments for the first class. I am now disabused of that notion, and no longer rely on readings for the first session. Instead, after an orientation where I go over the syllabus and warn students of the level of work involved, I take a completely different direction.

Nearly every class session is built on a worksheet that the students are responsible for completing ahead of class. They are to use their textbook to work through the worksheet, which usually involves examining, evaluating and comparing various resources for the type of research covered that week. But now, the first worksheet, which has always been statutory research, is based on the students, as a class, interviewing me, as their client.

I role-play the client, and students must ask questions to pull out details for their research. I am always amazed at the ingeniousness and energy this method brings out. I want the students to understand that part of research is fact-finding, and that the quality of their research and analysis depends on their questioning and listening skills. It works pretty well. But it's so artificial to just drop in client interviewing for one class and then stop any connection to real legal practice! I am thinking of expanding the program beyond the first class, but we have so much to cover... Maybe it's time to re-organize the entire class into a single research problem that we work on a bit each week. Wow! That will take some effort!