One facet of my efforts to promote excellent teaching and learning has been to support faculty who wish to expand their teaching techniques beyond simply asking Socratic-style questions every class. All class. Expanding one’s teaching repertoires engages students, improves learning, and, for me at least, keeps the class preparation experience challenging and stimulating. To be clear, I do not believe we should abandon legal education’s signature pedagogy; effective questioning can stimulate deeper thinking, challenge assumptions, and expose doctrinal quagmires. Instead, I believe we should just bring a larger teaching technique toolbox to class each day. 

I do have to confess that a toolbox metaphor is an odd one for me to choose because I have no skills in using tools and very few tools behind a hammer and a few screwdrivers.

On occasion, I hear from faculty who say they have listened to the critiques of Socratic-style questioning, abandoned it, and now just lecture every class. That choice makes me want to cry. I believe that lecturing is a less effective teaching technique than Socratic-style questioning, not a better one. While lecturing can be a valuable teaching tool, hour-long lectures were not what I have had in mind when I encouraged faculty to move beyond simply asking endless Socratic-style questions. Confession time: long lectures often bore me, and I start doodling.

This post details alternatives. The word “catalog” best captures the list below. Just as a course catalog lists courses with short descriptions, this post provides a list of eleven alternative teaching techniques with short explanations of each. 

• Talk to a Neighbor Before You Answer. This technique would probably be best categorized as a type of cooperative learning. I offer it here separately because it is a toe-in-the-water option. When your first responses from students reveal that they are struggling to productively respond to your beautifully-constructed, complex hypothetical, give them three minutes to compare answers with a peer and then try again. The answers will be better. 

• Cooperative Learning Groups (variety of alternatives). In two prior posts on cooperative learning in legal education, I detailed the keys to creating effective cooperative learning experiences and four commonly-used cooperative learning techniques. Bottom line, any time you engage students in working with peers under your close supervision to ensure quality, you are engaging them in cooperative learning experiences.
• Cognitive think-alouds. In a prior post regarding this technique, I explained that cognitive think-alouds are an effort by a professor to trace and speak aloud every facet of the professor’s thinking as the professor analyzes a complex problem. It is an effort to make the problem reading/analysis/evaluation/solution problem as transparent as possible so students can emulate it.
• Free writing. In this prior post, I explained that students learn when they write so engaging them in writing during class supports learning.
• Classroom Assessment Techniques. In this prior post, I focus on Classroom Assesment Techniques, which I describe as “in-class tools for discovering whether your students have learned what you tried to teach them that day.” The post focuses on the technique as a formative assessment tool. It is also a teaching tool because it engages students in  
• Simulations. This idea will be the subject of a future post. For now, I offer four examples. You can put students in pairs to negotiate a settlement of a dispute based on the legal concept you are teaching. You can put your students in triads and have them do a mini-oral argument (with one serving as the judge/decider). You can have them work in teams to draft a contract clause to draft around a doctrinal barrier. You can have students review an answer or complaint for compliance with federal or state rules of civil procedure. (Hat tip to Professor Rory Bahadur of Washburn University for this last example.)
• Integrated multiple choice. I have created dozens of sets of ABCD cards so that my students are forced to commit to a single answer and hold it up. This approach allows me to see every student’s answer at once. I use the questions as pre-tests to benefit from the pre-testing effect, to review key points in their assignments for that class so I can adapt the class session to the facets of the subject my on which students need help, as a way of teaching certain subjects, and as an end-of-class review. I will detail these uses in a future post. 
• Discovery sequence instruction. This technique will also be the subject of a future post. It involves providing students a series of examples and non-examples of factual scenarios, half of which include all the elements required to satisfy a particular rule (and are identified as having all the essential elements) and half of which lack one essential element (and are identified as lacking one essential elements). The students work individually or in teams to identify the requirements via inference.
• Student-generated examples and non-examples. This exercise is more or less the flipside of discovery sequence instruction. Discovery sequence instruction requires the professor to provide the examples and non-examples and the student to infer the rule. For this exercise, which I use after students have learned a concept, students come up with their own, original paired hypotheticals, one that meets the requirements of a rule and one that is identical in all trivial respects but lacks an essential element of a rule. For example, compare “I reject your offer to sell me your home for $200,000, title and money to be exchanged Monday, August 3” and “I am still thinking about whether to reject your offer to sell me your home for $200,000, title and money to be exchanged Monday, August 3.”
• Student-created concept maps. This exercise can be done in teams or individually. It would be best used at the end of a unit, e.g., subject matter jurisdiction or negligence. Students’ task is to create a concept map of the relationships among the doctrine/cases.
• Student-taught mini-reviews of the prior class. This technique, explained in this prior post, engages students in reconceptualizing themselves as capable of becoming experts in your subject. When I use this technique, I take volunteers and give them five minutes to review the key concepts from the prior class.

I hope this toolbox is useful for you. In its spirit, maybe I will head to the hardware store and buy some kind of saw . . .