Improving Our Ability to Engage Students – Variations on the Socratic Dialogue

From: http://www.postcardfromholland.com/still_life_pear.html.

I have sat in the back of the classrooms of accomplished, engaging, beloved law professors who routinely receive excellent student evaluations, and watched as 70% of their students turn unceremoniously away from their notes, instead perusing gmail, ESPN, and Zappos during class.  Not for the whole class, and not during the portions of class where the professor is lecturing.  Instead, laptop screens flip en masse at one, distinct moment: when the professor is engaging another student in socratic dialogue.

Professor Langdell vs. the Feminine Mind

“Journey with our Fearless Explorer into the carnivorous depths of the Feminine Mind!” (A still from Nara Denning’s film, “Neurotique.” Image and review found at The Moving Arts Film Journal, themovingarts.com.)

“[T]he law is entirely unfit for the feminine mind—more so than any other subject . . . .”

—Professor Christopher Langdell (as attributed by Charles W. Eliot).

See Bruce A. Kimball and Brian S. Shull, The Ironical Exclusion of Women from Harvard Law School, 1870-1900,  58 J. Legal Educ. 26 (2008).