It is a natural human trait to confuse ‘is’ with ‘ought,’ to think that what currently exists is also how things should be, especially with long-standing practices. The same is true with teaching methods. Once a way of teaching reaches a venerable stage, it is hard to conceive that things could be any different.

This post will be largely excerpts of an excellent article titled Making the Case by David A. Garvin from the September-October 2003, Volume 106, Number 1 issue of Harvard Magazine (p. 56), showing how hard it is to change the way we teach. It gives as an example the way that legal education changed to what it is today, what is now called the case method. Although this has become the ‘standard’ way law colleges operate, initial efforts to introduce this method faced enormous resistance from students and faculty and alumni. This is because all of us tend to be most comfortable with doing what we have always done and fear that change will be for the worse.

The article suggests that to succeed, the changes must be based on a deep understanding of education and require support and commitment over the long haul.

Christopher Columbus Langdell, the pioneer of the case method, attended Harvard Law School from 1851 to 1854 – twice the usual term of study. He spent his extra time as a research assistant and librarian, holed up in the school’s library reading legal decisions and developing an encyclopedic knowledge of court cases. Langdell’s career as a trial lawyer was undistinguished; his primary skill was researching and writing briefs. In 1870, Harvard president Charles William Eliot appointed Langdell, who had impressed him during a chance meeting when they were both students, as professor and then dean of the law school. Langdell immediately set about developing the case method.

At the time, law was taught by the Dwight Method, a combination of lecture, recitation, and drill named after a professor at Columbia. Students prepared for class by reading “treatises,” dense textbooks that interpreted the law and summarized the best thinking in the field. They were then tested – orally and in front of their peers – on their level of memorization and recall. Much of the real learning came later, during apprenticeships and on-the-job instruction.

Langdell’s approach was completely different. In his course on contracts, he insisted that students read only original sources – cases – and draw their own conclusions. To assist them, he assembled a set of cases and published them, with only a brief two-page introduction.

Langdell’s approach was much influenced by the then-prevailing inductive empiricism. He believed that lawyers, like scientists, worked with a deep understanding of a few core theories or principles; that understanding, in turn, was best developed via induction from a review of those appellate court decisions in which the principles first took tangible form. State laws might vary, but as long as lawyers understood the principles on which they were based, they should be able to practice anywhere. In Langdell’s words: “To have a mastery of these [principles or doctrines] as to be able to apply them with consistent facility and certainty to the ever-tangled skein of human affairs, is what constitutes a true lawyer….”

This view of the law shifted the locus of learning from law offices to the library. Craft skills and hands-on experience were far less important than a mastery of principles – the basis for deep, theoretical understanding
. . .
This view of the law also required a new approach to pedagogy. Inducing general principles from a small selection of cases was a challenging task, and students were unlikely to succeed without help. To guide them, Langdell developed through trial and error what is now called the Socratic method: an interrogatory style in which instructors question students closely about the facts of the case, the points at issue, judicial reasoning, underlying doctrines and principles, and comparisons with other cases. Students prepare for class knowing that they will have to do more than simply parrot back material they have memorized from lectures or textbooks; they will have to present their own interpretations and analysis, and face detailed follow-up questions from the instructor.

Langdell’s innovations initially met with enormous resistance. Many students were outraged. During the first three years of his administration, as word spread of Harvard’s new approach to legal education, enrollment at the school dropped from 165 to 117 students, leading Boston University to start a law school of its own. Alumni were in open revolt.

With Eliot’s backing, Langdell endured, remaining dean until 1895. By that time, the case method was firmly established at Harvard and six other law schools. Only in the late 1890s and early 1900s, as Chicago, Columbia, Yale, and other elite law schools warmed to the case method – and as Louis Brandeis and other successful Langdell students began to speak glowingly of their law-school experiences – did it diffuse more widely. By 1920, the case method had become the dominant form of legal education. It remains so today.

What we see being tried in SAGES has interesting parallels with what Langdell was trying to achieve. The idea is for students, rather than being the recipients of the distilled wisdom of experts and teachers and told directly what they should know, to study something in depth and to inductively argue their way to an understanding of basic but general principles. The Socratic format of the instructor interrogating students is not used in SAGES, replaced by the somewhat more gentle method of having peer discussions mediated by the instructor.

Taking a long view of past educational changes enables us to keep a sense of proportion. The way we teach now may seem natural and even the only way but usually when we look back it was deliberately introduced, often over considerable opposition, because of some developments in understanding of the nature of learning. As time goes by and our understanding of the learning process changes and deepens, it is natural to re-examine the way we teach as well.

I believe that SAGES takes advantage of what we understand now to be important new insights into learning. But we need to give it a chance to take root. Abandoning it at the first sign of difficulty is absurd because all innovations invariably run into difficulty at the beginning as everyone struggles to adapt to the new ways.

POST SCRIPT: ‘Mission Accomplished’ by the numbers

As usual, I am tardy in my recognition of anniversaries. But here is a sobering reminder of what has transpired since the infamous photo-op three years ago yesterday on the aircraft carrier.

When I talk about the SAGES program (see here for a description of the program and how it came about) to faculty at other universities they are impressed that Case put into place something so ambitious. They immediately see how the program addresses the very same problems that all universities face but few attempt to tackle as comprehensively as we have sought to do.

Of course, the very ambitiousness of the program meant that there would be challenges in implementation. Some of the challenges are institutional and resource-related. Creating more small classes meant requiring more faculty to teach them, more classrooms (especially those suitable for seminar-style interactions), more writing support, and so on. This necessarily imposed some strain on the system.
[Read more…]

As might be expected, some people at Case are all of atwitter about the snide op-ed in a newspaper supposedly called the New York Times by someone supposedly called Stephen Budiansky. (Note to novice writers hoping to develop their snide skills: Putting words like ‘supposedly’ in front of an easily discernible fact is a weak attempt at sarcasm, by insinuating that something is sneaky when no cause for suspicion exists. Like the way Budiansky says “SAGES (this supposedly stands for Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship)” when he has to know this for a fact since he says he has been reading the SAGES website.)

But my point here is not to point out the shallowness of Budiansky’s article and make fun of it, although it is a good example of the kind of writing that uses selective quotes and data to support a questionable thesis, and uses a snippy tone to hide its lack of meaningful content. My purpose here is to articulate why I think SAGES has been the best educational idea that I have been associated with in all my years in education in many different institutions. It is clear to me that many people, even those at Case, have not quite understood what went into it and why it is such an important innovation, and this essay seeks to explain it.

I have been involved with SAGES from its inception in the summer of 2002 when I was appointed to the task force by then College of Arts and Sciences Dean Sam Savin, to investigate how to improve the college’s general education requirements (GER). American colleges have these kinds of requirements in order to ensure that students have breadth of knowledge, outside their chosen majors. Case’s GER were fairly standard in that they required students to select a distribution of courses from a menu classified under different headings, such as Global and Cultural Diversity.

While better than nothing, the task force felt that these kinds of requirements did not have any cohesive rationale, and result in students just picking courses so that they can check off the appropriate boxes. The task force wondered how we could make the distribution requirements more meaningful and part of a coherent educational philosophy. In the process of studying this question, we learned of other problems that were long standing but just lurking beneath our consciousness. Almost all these problems are endemic to many universities, not just Case.

One of these was that students entering Case tended to come in with a sense of identity that was identified with a specific program rather that the school as a whole. They saw themselves primarily as engineering students or nursing students or arts students and so on, rather than as Case students. This fragmented identity was aided by the fact that in the first year they had no common experience that transcended these disciplinary boundaries. So we wondered what we could do to help create a sense of oneness among the student body, a sense of overall belonging.

Another problem we identified was that it was quite possible, even likely, for a first year student to spend the entire year in large lecture classes where they were largely passive recipients of lectures. This could result in students feeling quite anonymous and alone, and since this was also their first year away from home, it was not felt to be a good introduction to college life, let along for the emotional and intellectual health of the student. Furthermore, we know that first impressions can be very formative. When college students spend their first year passively listening in class, we feared that this might become their understanding of their role in the university, and that it would become harder to transform them into the active engagement mode that was necessary when they got into the smaller upper division classes in their majors.

Another problem was that students at Case did not seem to fully appreciate the knowledge creation role that is peculiar to the research function of universities. While they had chosen to attend a research university, many did not seem to know what exactly constituted research, how it was done, and its value.

Another thing that surprised us was when even some seniors told us that there was not a single faculty member they had encountered during their years at Case whom they felt that they knew well, in the sense that if they walked into that faculty member’s office that he or she would know the student’s name and something about them. We felt that this was a serious deficiency, because faculty-student interactions in and out of the class should play an important role in a student’s college experience. We felt that it was a serious indictment of the culture of the university that a student could spend four years here and not know even one faculty member well.

Another very serious problem that was identified was that many students were graduating with poor writing and presentation skills. The existing writing requirement was being met by a stand-alone English course that students took in their first year. Students in general (not just at Case) tend to dislike these stand-alone ‘skills’ courses and one can understand why. They are not related to any of the ‘academic’ courses and are thus considered inferior, merely an extra hoop to be jumped through. The writing exercises are necessarily de-contextualized since they are not organically related to any course of study. Students tend to treat such courses as irritants, which makes the teaching of such courses unpleasant as well. But what was worse was that it is clear that a one-shot writing course cannot produce the kinds of improvement in writing skills that are desired.

Furthermore, some tentative internal research seemed to suggest that the one quality that universities seek above all to develop in their students, the level of ‘critical thinking’ (however that vague term is defined), was not only not being enhanced by the four years spent here, there were alarming hints that it was actually decreasing.

And finally the quality of first year advising that the students received was highly variable. While some advisors were conscientious about their role and tried hard to get to know their students, others hardly ever met them, except for the minute or two it took to sign their course registration slips. Even the conscientious advisors found it hard to get to know students on the basis of a very few brief meetings. This was unsatisfactory because in addition to helping students select courses, the advisor is also the first mentor a student has and should be able to help the student navigate through the university and develop a broader and deeper perspective on education and learning and life. This was unlikely to happen unless the student and advisor got to know each other better.

Out of all these concerns, SAGES was born, and it sought to address all these concerns, by providing a comprehensive and cohesive framework that, one way or another, addressed all the above issues.

The task force decided on a small-class seminar format early on because we saw that this would enable students to engage more, speak and write more, get more feedback from the instructor and fellow students, and thus develop crucially important speaking, writing and critical thinking skills.

Since good writing develops only with a lot of practice of writing and revising, we decided that one writing-intensive seminar was not enough. Furthermore, students need to like and value what they are writing if they are going to persevere in improving their writing. In order to achieve this it was felt that the writing should be embedded in courses that dealt with meaningful content that the students had some choice in selecting. So we decided that students should take a sequence of four writing intensive seminars consisting of a common First Seminar in their first semester, and a sequence of three thematic seminars, one in each subsequent semester, thus covering the first two years of college.

The need for a common experience for all students was met by having the First Seminar be based on a common theme (which we chose to be on The Life of the Mind), with at least some readings and out-of-class programs experienced in common by all first year students. The idea was that this would provide students with intellectual fodder to talk about amongst themselves in their dorms and dining halls and other social settings, irrespective of what majors they were considering or who they happened to be sitting next to. The common book reading program for incoming students was initiated independently of SAGES but fitted naturally into this framework. The First Seminar was also was designed to get students familiar with academic ways of thinking, provide an introduction to what a research university does and why, and provide opportunities for them to access the rich variety of cultural resources that surround the university.

The decision that the First Seminar instructor also serve as the first year advisor was suggested so that the advisor and student would get to know each other well over the course of that first semester and thus enable the kind of stronger relationship that makes mentoring more meaningful

The University Seminars that followed the First Seminar were grouped under three categories (the Natural World, the Social World, and the Symbolic World) and students were required to select one from each category for the next three semesters. Each of these areas of knowledge has a different culture, investigate different types of questions, use different rules for evidence and how to use that evidence in arriving at conclusions, have different ways of constructing knowledge, and develop different modes of thinking and expression. These seminars would be designed around topics selected by the instructor and designed to help students understand better the way that practitioners in those worlds view knowledge.

By taking one from each group based on their own interests, it was hoped that students would learn how to navigate the different academic waters that they encounter while at college. Taken together, we hoped they would complement each other and provide students with a global perspective on the nature of academic discourse.

In order to prevent the risk of content overload that eventually engulfs many university courses, it was decided that the University Seminars would have no pre-requisites and also could not serve as pre-requisites for other courses, thus freeing instructors from the oft-complained problem of feeling burdened to ‘cover’ a fixed body of material and thus cutting off student participation. Now they were free to explore any question to any depth they wished.

For example, in my own SAGES course The Evolution of Scientific Ideas (part of the Natural World sequence) we explore the following major questions: What is science and can we distinguish it from non-science? What is the process that causes new scientific theories to replace the old? In the process of investigating these questions, I hope that students get a better understanding of how scientists see the world and interact with it. And I do not feel pressure to cover any specific scientific revolution. I can freely change things from year to year depending on the interests of the students.

A senior capstone experience was added to provide students with an opportunity to have a culminating activity and work on a project of their own choosing that would enable them to showcase the investigative, critical thinking, speaking, and writing skills developed over their years at Case.

Next in this series: Implementation issues

POST SCRIPT: Talk on Monday about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo

On Monday, May 1 at 4:00pm in Strosacker Auditorium, Janis Karpinski, who was a Brigadier General and commanding officer of the Abu Ghraib prison when the prisoner torture and abuse scandal erupted and who feels that she was made a scapegoat for that atrocity and demoted, and James Yee who was U.S. Army Muslim Chaplin at Guantanamo, was arrested for spying and later cleared, will both be speaking.

It should be interesting to hear their sides of the story.

The talk is free and open to the public. More details can be found here.