“Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end,
if not always in the way we expect.”
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Early on, I studied and trained with the purpose of taking up teaching as my profession. Adult-sized responsibilities loomed, however, and I made an adjustment to my career goals. Rather than stepping from college into a teaching career, I entered law school. Thereafter, I embarked on the path of a public interest litigator, a twenty-five-year career that covered a spectrum of publicly debated, hot-button issues of keen public interest.
Sixteen years into my career, I had had breathtaking opportunities. I participated in the presentation of cases in the United States Supreme Court, state Supreme Courts, federal appellate and district courts, and state trial courts around the Nation. Cases torn from national headlines, disputes discussed above the fold of daily newspapers, and the opportunity, in representing clients, to address substantive, fundamental questions regarding our Constitution, federal civil rights law, and novel applications of both.
Now, my employer threw me an unexpected curve.
With less than two months to prepare, my supervisor advised me that our office would host a program, a Washington DC Semester for Law Students, in cooperation with Regent University School of Law. Regent is an ABA-accredited law school situated in Virginia Beach, Virginia. My employer and Regent had crafted a relationship over time, mutually beneficial, by which we employed law students as clerks and interns. In addition to the substantial benefit obtained by the students -- working with a prominent public interest law firm -- I had the occasional opportunity to dip my toe into the teaching pool. Those early opportunities included teaching seminar-level courses on litigation of federal constitutional law issues, and team teaching a course on the First Amendment.
I was given principal responsibility to direct and lead an off-campus program, in our Washington DC office. The semester experience would allow students to take three substantive law instructional courses, as well as to participate in an externship program for credit toward graduation. The challenge of standing the program up on its feet with short notice was compounded by the disinterest of the two other attorneys assigned to this task with me. We three were highly experienced in our assigned areas, experts, though none were bar members in states that provided special skills certification. Two, however, had not taught previously, though they had made presentations in the setting of continuing legal education classes.
Faced with these challenges, I was excited nonetheless at the prospect of a regular and active program of teaching, and the opportunity to mentor students through the externship program.
Ultimately, after a selection process for the text I would use, and developing syllabi for the advanced course in constitutional law and the externship program, we welcomed our first class of students. My models for instruction were former law professors from my schooling. I deliberately sought to emulate in teaching the approach, though not the particular style, of those professors that had most aroused and energized in me an interest in, a love for, the subject matter of their courses. In practical terms, that emulation meant I committed to drawing students into a conversation about the principles and ideas represented in the cases, statutes, and constitutions we studied.
The capacity to do so began with setting high expectations, and with recognizing in these students their commitment to the success of the venture we commenced together. I set clear expectations both in the syllabi and in our first class together. Students who would be attorneys should plan to read and understand assigned materials and should be prepared to discuss them in class, just as an attorney would be expected to do with a client or in court. The only proper ways to honor their efforts and preparation, for me, was to bring my own best preparation and inquisitiveness to our class times, to treat students with decency, and their contributions with respect.
I was not surprised, honestly, with the outcome of settling expectations at the start. Students, I found, consistently rose to the challenge. Their internal drive to succeed, to be prepared for a profession the entry to which was creating small mountains of indebtedness for them, converged with the opportunity to discuss, as with a peer, the doctrinal implications of the cases and materials before us.
Teaching a substantive course in the law, such as advanced constitutional law, could be done in many ways. I employed a modified Socratic dialogue with students. This approach is stereotypical, I suppose, of the law school setting, nonetheless, when undertaken with humility and real interest, I have found, draws students into the materials with which they must have familiarity, and draws out of students the engagement, the participation, that makes for a successful instructional program.
During lecture courses, it is still possible to measure aspects of learning.
Student attentiveness, and absorption in the material, are evident if you watch for the signs. While visual clues may not be completely reliable, some are: both the intense eye-to-eye contact and the muffled yawn serve as keys. My experience with the lecture setting was found in conducting a weekly, hour-long lecture associated with the externship portion of our program. In that context, visual clues were helpful, but weekly writing exercises and the interaction with students as they completed those assignments allowed a much more effective evaluation of student comprehension.
Of course, in a law school setting, there was still the requirement that a method of measuring student success be devised. Toward that end, I tried three approaches and settled on two.
In the externship program, I measured student progress and success through a series of written assignments and oral exercises. Students crafted case memos, complaints, scheduling orders, discovery devices, and motions to dismiss and for summary judgment; they orally argued the summary judgment motion; and they conducted a mock deposition. By reviewing the written product and observing the oral exercises, with an eye both to the substantive development of ideas and the stylistic method, I could mark the progress of students over the semester.
In the substantive law course, I employed two different methods. Initially, students prepared an in-depth paper on a topic within the scope of the course. This approach allowed students to bring scholarship and persuasion to historical controversies involving constitutional law in America. A significant shortcoming became obvious: the research paper did not provide me sufficient feedback regarding the instructional materials and student mastery of them. Ultimately, I employed a hybrid of the typical university exam with objective questions and the typical law school essay exam and found that approach well-suited to completing the picture I needed as a teacher of student accomplishment.
After eight years of directing the program, and teaching both the substantive law course and mentoring students through the externship component of it, I knew that teaching students was my calling, my vocation. I could practice law, and no doubt would continue to do so. But there is no moment -- in even the best of my courtroom successes-- to compete with any of those finest teaching moments: a conversational engagement with students in class, in which, despite the more cynical suspicion that a teacher is being shined on, there is evident that fiery spark of genuine interest and grasp; the contact had with a student after time has passed, learning that the student had put to professional use the ideas and materials that had been shared in class; and similar such affirmations of the value of the effort.
