In “On Grading Oral Exams with AI,” I asked:
Should the teaching profession re-consider the long-standing assumption that faculty autonomy in the classroom defaults also to faculty responsibility for pedagogy-plus-subject-matter-expertise-plus-sociotechnical design? I have co-taught courses with other full-time faculty. I have never co-taught a course with a sociotechnical expert. I don’t know what that might look like. …
[That] leads to my wondering whether schools (and by extension, professional services organizations of many sorts) might imagine investing in a tier of technical experts who are compensated fairly for providing a kind of “faculty collaborator” status, without faculty accountability for student outcomes (or lawyer accountability for client results). In law firms, this would involve a pivot from “paralegal” or “legal assistant” roles; in law schools, a pivot from “faculty support” or “law librarian” roles.
In short, why do we, as law professors, persist with a professional model that puts the professor(s), and only the professor(s), in front of the students?
More thoughts, and an illustration of what a different vision might entail, below the jump.
In response to that post, I heard from Greg Duhl (Mitchell Hamline), already noted here at TaxProf Blog for his thoughtful redesign of his Contracts course to account for the effects of AI on his teaching and his students’ learning.
Greg pointed me to this short manuscript of his on SSRN, “Teaching Contracts: My Journey with Spellbook and AI Pedagogy.” In this piece, he writes about the substantial, substantive contributions to his course revisions made by an instructional designer at the Mitchell Hamline law school, Amanda Soderlind. And Greg told me that Mitchell Hamline has a six-person in-house instructional design ID) team.
Pause there. A question for the audience: how many US law schools have in-house instructional designers?
Many law schools are located in larger universities, and many universities have instructional designers on staff in centralized organizations focused on teaching support. Mitchell Hamline is a stand-alone operation. So the fact that it has its own ID team is, in a way, unsurprising. But my experience at my own university (Pitt) is that the ID team in the central teaching support organization knows precious little about things that might distinguish legal education from undergraduate education (which is its main focus). And things that might not. In my mind, there is no question that having a law-focused instructional designer on the team, situated within the law faculty, would be a good thing for both faculty and students. The emergence of AI, in its multiple instances in school and in practice, makes that abundantly clear, at least to me.
Of course, who would pay for that resource? Where would those people come from (that is, how would they be trained, and how would they find positions)? What would a career in that field look like? How might it relate to related functions emerging in law practice?
Those questions lead me to wonder and wander a bit farther.
I convene and host a monthly University of Pittsburgh gathering of faculty and staff here who are interested in any/all uses of AI in higher ed (teaching, research, admin). It’s a grass-roots, opt-in, voluntary thing; we get about 30-35 people per gathering (we meet over a pizza lunch) based on a mailing list of about 135 people. Pitt has well over 2,000 tenure line faculty, many more than that number of contingent faculty, and well over 10,000 staff, so this is a small, self-selected group. The subject matter range is about as broad as the university itself: we have folks from multiple medicine and health sciences units, social scientists, computer scientists and information scientists, humanities colleagues, librarians, IT, etc. A number of instructional designers and senior teaching support folks have been regular attendees. The “AI literacy” baseline is quite high across the board. We’re not uncritical. We’re just engaged. It’s name is PASTA. You can read more about it here.
I asked PASTA last week: does anyone here know of an instance where the design professional and the subject matter expert (the faculty colleague) collaborate in the classroom to teach a course? For the first time that I can recall in 2 ½ years of hosting these lunches, there was … silence.
Hmmm.
As faculty members, we inherit a culture and set of practices that allocate control of the classroom to the faculty. Teaching effectively is, as all teachers know, a combination of pedagogical skill, subject matter competence, and sociotechnical skill and imagination. That last category includes things like: do we use a chalkboard? whiteboard? projector and screen? slides? audio enhancements? do we quiz or assess in class or out? how? That’s three roles in one professor. That “bundle” is a thing that some of us cherish (we’re great at all three!) and that some simply accept. But having taken the professorial role, it’s integral to that role. We might borrow and blend expertise from others, but at the end of the day, our syllabi, our pedagogy, our subject matter scope, our learning outcomes, and our student assessments “belong” to us. “Academic freedom” is largely a fancy 19th century / early 20th century phrase denominating an antique idea: the principal locus of “decision-making control” relative to teaching resides in the teacher. To use the au courant word of 2026: “governance”: the teacher, presumptively, determines the character of teaching governance. Contemporary arguments about whether faculty members “own” their syllabi (a pseudo-copyright question; any copyright in a syllabus is almost certainly limited, and thin) can be reduced (and should be reduced) to policy questions about decision-making control.
In last week’s PASTA lunch, we kicked around a metaphor for this phenomenon: commercial aviation. The left seat pilot is the pilot in command. Flying is enormously complex and collaborative; that pilot cannot be expected to have mastered all of the relevant technical skills. But the pilot ultimately is in control, meaning that pilot makes decisions about who is flying the plane and how the plane is flown, is responsible, and is accountable.
My out-loud-wondering here goes to whether that model is out of date (in academia, not in aviation). Accreditation aside (and accreditation can be changed, even with the ABA Section and – now – its rivals), if you have built a course significantly relying on the expertise of your ID colleague(s), then why not have the ID colleague(s) – or some distinct sub-cohort of ID-trained folks, or other technical/imagination collaborators, in the room with you? Wouldn’t the students be better off – have a better learning experience; see a model of collaborative professional practice – by having the curtain pulled back on how the proverbial sausage was made and is being made in real time? (I had a version of this conversation recently with a senior lawyer in a commercial law firm in Pittsburgh: shouldn’t the law firm be bringing expert IT strategists (and training expert IT strategists, internally) into client counseling conversations, to guide collaborative practice around AI use cases?)
Even commercial airplane passengers can see, usually, that the left-side pilot is not sitting up there alone, and that the plane does not fly without the visible help of a ton of other trained experts.
Should we, as legal academics, reconfigure control of our teaching? Not “give full control to the ID folks (or whatever other professionals might be engaged in these projects).” For example, for ethical reasons, at least one faculty member should be accountable for the content, quality, and validity of assessments. But in light of AI, how might we re-organize decision-making relative to the classroom or other teaching environment in a variety of possible ways? Should we?
