Research and reflections on being a ‘good’ teacher

Research and reflections on being a ‘good’ teacher

My teaching is inspired and informed by Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogy as well as, more broadly, by Jean Piaget (Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child) and, in the context of legal education, by critical legal scholarship such as the work of Duncan Kennedy, and by clinical legal scholarship such as the work of Lucie White and Gerald Lopez. My study and use of this literature has been a dynamic process for many years, through which I seek to inspire students to embrace and pursue learning.

Respect

My teaching approach is quite straightforward: respect students as intelligent adults with the capacity to inquire, learn and develop. Informed by Freire, my approach is not to ‘bank’ my knowledge into the minds of students, but to collaborate with them in interrogating propositions to arrive at a shared understanding.  Informed by Piaget, my approach is to foster in students the courage to express and explore their own ideas and values; I validate their experience and insights, and lead them to experimentation and discovery. I am inspired by my students, and I learn from my teaching.

This is not an easy approach, for me or the students.  For me, it takes more time and effort than it would if I were to merely declare my knowledge in their presence; a relationship is much more demanding than a monologue is. As well, the approach requires me to negotiate with the students a balance between the facilitative and collegial role of an critical facilitator, and the inherent and at times necessary authority of a teacher in an institution. Part of what influences, motivates and inspires students comes from my own experience and insights, so I weave my own story into theirs, and into the unit content, to establish a shared narrative to which both students and I contribute.

For the students, too, it takes more effort than it does to sit passively and be a receptacle for delivered content. It can be an unfamiliar, even uncomfortable, approach to education for them, not usually reinforced in other units or by other teachers.  As a result, I am explicit about my approach, discussing with the students ideas of diverse learning styles, responsibility for learning, facilitated and respectful discussion, and reflective practice. The conventional structure of passive learning in Australian law schools is a significant barrier to my teaching approach, and one that manifests most often in the difficulty that some students have in adapting to an engaged and active classroom.

Activity

A further insight from Piaget is the centrality of considered and designed activity to learning; not just any activity will do, and my class activities are carefully constructed to develop progressive comprehension towards learning goals.  Implicit in my approach is an invitation to students to analyse critical legal scholars’ criticism of legal education as the reproduction of patterns of hierarchy and domination. Drawing on clinical scholarship I expose students to ideas of client empowerment, and I support them in reflecting on its concomitant, lawyers’ enabling humility.

I take this approach to teaching precisely to influence, motivate and inspire students to learn. Students’ grasp of the content – necessary in a professional accreditation degree – follows from this approach and the associated assessment.  Watchwords such as respect, engagement, challenge, activity, critique and reflection combine to suggest that my classroom is a place where, through discussion, activity and reflection, students gain deeper understanding and insights, develop personally, clarify professional goals, enjoy learning, and make friends.

Examples of my teaching approach range from compulsory units with large enrolments to small elective units.  Size is no object, and process is essential. The foundation of my teaching approach is students’ engagement with scholarship.  Reinforced by a weekly assessment regime, described below, students bring to class knowledge of what the literature says, and that becomes the subject in class of my comment and explication, and their analysis, critique and application.  The required reading is carefully chosen, diverse in style and perspectives, and manageable in quantity so that I can justly expect it to have been read.

Based on this foundation, my classroom teaching is discursive, using a range of different prompts so that students can use the scholarship and their own experience to examine the subject matter. For example, I design fact scenarios to address what the students recognise as the topic for the day, but I add additional dimensions of other legal issues, social context or personal values that draw the students – working in small groups – into discussions that connect the issues with their own studies, lives and experiences. Differently, I also design large scenarios to run over a number of consecutive classes, adding new content each week to deepen, broaden and complicate the analysis; the students work in the same small groups, developing relationships from class to class that promote collaborative learning.

Other prompts I use to engage students with the topics are current news items, video clips, guests, and students’ own experiences.  To maintain the integrity of  my teaching approach, I choose and brief guests carefully so that they work with the ethos of the classroom.  Guests are ‘prompts’, not lecturers; their role is not present but to be a resource, responding to questions that the students have prepared based on the reading and online discussion.

Assessment

My approach to assessment asks students to think critically and reflectively about law in its social context, and about themselves: their roles, their future and their values. I studied education under Professor David Boud, and have been guided since by his scholarship, not only giving emphasis to alignment of assessment tasks with learning outcomes, but enabling students’ capacity for reflection and self-assessment, and investing in students’ long-term ability to learn.  Complementing this, my approach to feedback is detailed, constructive and engaged, conducting a dialogue with the student in a way that continues their learning.

Underpinning my approach to assessment is recognition of students’ different learning styles. This leads me to offer a range of assessment options, and to provide direction and support for each assessment task. An essential teaching consideration in designing assessment is that it gives students a safe place to learn.  I attempt to accommodate a range of learning styles, and to direct the emphasis away from learning in an exposed public forum. For students who are not able to engage in public discussion, much of their learning is through their exchanges in online forums and small groups in class.

A learning outcome in my teaching is directed towards students’ better understanding of themselves.  This is expressed differently for different units; for example, in a unit that critically analyses the criminal trial: ‘have a better understanding of your own values and moral sense on mechanisms for accountability for criminal conduct’; in a unit that examines processes for law reform: ‘new personal insights into personal and professional direction and development’, and ‘an enhanced ability to identify and respond to legal ethical issues’; in a unit on legal ethics: ‘have a better appreciation of the social role that lawyers play, in particular in providing access to justice’.

To this end I ask students to engage in a reflective writing task, which usually takes one of two forms.  One form is three to four recurring journal entries over the semester, where the first entry marks a student’s starting point in understanding and insight, and subsequent entries demonstrate their increased or different understanding and insights over time, and identify the prompts and sources for that development. The other form of reflective task is a single reflection on an activity, where students examine an issue in the unit through the lens of their experience in the activity.

An example is in a large compulsory unit on legal ethics, where each student prepares and delivers a lawyer’s short oral application to the court, seeking bail or a lenient sentence for a client.  The facts raise ethical issues for the lawyer, requiring the students to actually resolve competing duties to the court and the client. Students’ reflections draw out the students’ appreciation of an ethical dilemma they otherwise only read about, and of their personal values in lawyering.

I grade a reflection credibly, by ensuring that students are prepared for and supported in this approach, which is an unfamiliar one for many.  Students are aware of and are assessed against a clear rubric, and are provided detailed feedback. My use of reflective learning and assessment is supported by scholarship such as that of Michele Leering, and I draw on this to provide students with detailed guidance on and examples of reflective writing. My feedback is essentially a conversation, characterised by my own reflections on and questions about what the student has written (‘I wonder …’; ‘Perhaps …’); for recurring journal entries my feedback can be the basis for the students’ further reflections.

A necessary learning outcome of all teaching is knowledge of the subject matter.  My approach to assessing this is to create opportunities for students to absorb, reflect on and apply new knowledge, in ways that engage their own thinking and help them analyse, critique and choose to adopt or adapt that knowledge.   I use assessment of participation as a device to ensure that students are prepared for class: rather than ‘class’ participation I use ‘unit’ participation, which encompasses not only engagement in the classroom but a required weekly post, before class, initiating or responding to discussion on the required reading.  At worst, occasionally, the posts are perfunctory; almost always – and increasingly over the semester – the posts are thoughtful, insightful and provocative.  From this prior activity, class discussion is off to a head start, picking up on issues students have already raised. Further dimensions to unit participation are small group work in class, and the opportunity for students to post and comment on relevant news and current affairs.

To grade unit participation credibly, I ensure that students are prepared for this approach, are aware and respectful of the ‘rules of engagement’, are aware of and are assessed against a clear rubric, and are supported by my constructive participation in and comments the discussion.  A strong reflective component to assessing participation is a brief mid-semester self-assessment, on which I provide comments and suggestions for improvement.

Importantly, I learn from the students’ reflective writing, and from their online and class discussions.  Their themes and perspectives, their insights and revelations, and their uncertainties and questions, all inform my teaching – in the next class as much as in the next iteration of the unit – and deepen my own understanding of the issues I am teaching.

Another approach to assessing knowledge of the subject matter is to design a substantial, research-based project task.  Depending on the unit, I set this as a group task – supported by material and discussion on group work, and an assessment regime that recognises the possibility of differential effort – and give it an applied dimension, where the task is informed by a current issue or is an actual collaboration with an agency.

Some principles

1. Teach so that others learn. How we teach is a function of how students learn. It’s not about what we want to do; it’s about what they need us to do.

2. Respect epistemic cognition, that is, the relationship between the learner and the knowledge to be acquired (see Timothy Casey, ‘Reflective Practice in Legal Education: The Stages of Reflection’, (2014) 20 Clinical Law Review 317, 318-331).As we grow we go through stages of cognitive development, as well as stages of moral development and development of judgment.  These are not really consecutive stages; they are more like ‘schema’, dimensions of adulthood. We risk defaulting to dealing with students as if they are at the first stage, of dualism (right/wrong) and adherence to authority.  Students’ learnt adherence to authority allows us to resort to and rely on our authority as the main driver of our teaching.  As a result, we ‘bank’ knowledge in students, as Paolo Freire said. We can consciously push past this:

• • to recognise students’ ability to cope with multiplicity, their capacity to hold and resolve multiple and competing perspectives;
  • to aspire to relativism, respecting students’ ability to apply universal principles and to reason from the abstract.

3. In short, treat students like adults:

1. 1. move past dualism and introduce multiplicity.
   2. mitigate your authority
   3. invite them to seek principles
   4. respect and develop their capacity to process experience; that means:

• • expect the students to have done the work
    They can read and write and recall; what that means to them is the stage we want to get to.

• • connect students and their experience with the subject matter
    Teaching jurisprudence, for example, to illustrate deontology and consequentialism, and positivism and natural law, we can invite students to think about decisions they make in social situations, among friends and family; decisions they expect others to make; to see those instances differently through the various lenses the literature offers them

• • help students understand the ‘why’ and not merely the what
    Students can find contemporary examples in current affairs and their own experience – case studies – that illustrate the reality of the principles that we are learning: the causing of harm and damage; the breaking of agreements; the conduct of trials; inquiries into corporate wrongdoing.

• • challenge students’ received world view
    We can invite students to comprehend diverse perspectives, relying on critical readings, guests, and role plays.

• • give students voice
    We can involve students in the experience of learning by using small groups and online discussions to create safe spaces for them to speak. We can seek and validate their views.

• • promote reflection
    Through the practice of reflection we can get students past the passive receipt of knowledge – their deference to authority – to work it out for themselves. We can use the literature, and practice, to teach students to reflect.

• • teach through assessment:
    • we must align assessment with learning outcomes (don’t assess what you don’t teach)
    • we must have transparent criteria (avoid arbitrariness, and promote your own accountability)
    • we must give constructive feedback (‘talk’ to the students in your comments – not ‘no’, ‘wrong’, or ‘X’ – engage in a dialogue and develop their understanding.

First delivered as a Staff seminar at Sydney Law School on 27 April 2022; since published as a blog post on Teaching@Sydney