Classroom Management, Body Language, and "Power Poses"
Good classroom management is not just about having your technology sorted and your exercises well timed. It is also about the rapport you establish with your students through body language. Because the professor occupies a position of power and a prominent spot at the front of the room, students take important cues about the professor's worthiness on that day from his or her body language. We have heard from other sources that as social creatures, we tend to look for just the right balance of caring, consistency, and control from our leaders. And in those all-important early days of the semester, the first impression is so strong that it can influence the students' learning for the rest of the course, not to mention the experience of teaching. Long-standing research shows that the first impression of a person accounts for at least 55% of one's overall impression.
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Our Development as Teachers - Plan It, Do It
As summer moves along, way too quickly, and the academic year approaches, the time is right for us to think about our professional aspirations for the year. How will we serve the profession, the community, the school? What scholarship do we hope to produce? What goals do we have for our students - the knowledge, skills, and values we hope they take away from each of our courses? Those questions get to the heart of our role as legal academics.
If we are serious about continuing to grow as teachers, we should ask another set of questions as well. What will we do to:
* Deepen our knowledge of teaching and learning principles?
* Articulate and refine our teaching philosophy?
* Heighten our level of confidence in our teaching?
* Increase our enthusiasm and passion for teaching?
* Make appropriate changes in our teaching practices?
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Nancy Rapoport, Rethinking U.S. Legal Education: No More Same Old Same Old, 45 Connecticut Law Review 1409 (2013)
Professor Rapoport begins this article with the well-supported premise that, "Teaching students how to think about the law is no longer-and probably never was-enough." But she doesn't stop there. The article presents a well thought out, empirically supportable, alternative to the current, typical (and empirically unsupportable) law school curriculum.
Law School, according to Professor Rapoport, should be divided into three distinct phases, each with a specific outcome in mind. This outcome based curriculum provides lawyers with the actual skills they need to be practicing lawyers rather than the very limited skill of gleaning fine details from court opinions honed by the Socratic Method."
The aim of the first year of law school should be dedicated to "Creating the Skilled Novice." The second year of law school should result in students becoming "Novice Problem Solvers." Finally, the third year of law school should be devoted to "Creating a Novice Professional with Basic Judgment." Professor Rapaport describes in detail the aspect, aims, and characteristics of this three-phased law school curriculum.
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