Epistemology and Teaching Styles
85
Transcript 5.2 [3/3/5]
Prof.:
By the breach of contract. Okay. The plaintiff rented this land to the uh
defendants
in exchange for money, all right? And, in addition to getting
one hundred thousand dollars or whatever it was he got, re-leasing the
land, he also asked for the land to be returned to the uniform grade, okay?
So the first argument- and that the um plaintiff, or the court really relies
on behalf of the plaintiff um, is- it’s not the first one, it’s actually the
second
one on page eleven, um- and this is the one I assume you’re
referring to, paragraph number two, second full paragraph on page eleven,
um, the law aims to give the disappointed promisee what he was promised,
and then the court wanders into a discussion of a- of a case, but that
argument is an argument that we saw in
Hawkins
and
Sullivan v.
O’Connor
, namely a claim that the purpose of contract damages is what?
All together now?
Class:
Com // pensation //
Prof.:
// Compensation, comp // ensation. The purpose of contract
damages is compensation. Now, that statement
is going to turn out to be
the most problematic issue of the evening. The purpose of contract
damages is compensation. And so the plaintiff says, “I want my expecta-
tion compensated. I thought I was gonna get a uniform grade for my land,
how can I get that if you don’t give me the money I need? So if you’re
really going to compensate me for breaching the contract, you didn’t do
the grading; I can’t get the grading done unless you give me the money for
it.” The purpose of contract damages is compensation, so he again relies
on the
purpose of contract damages, which is to compensate, right? But
there’s another additional argument that is made a part of the general
claim of compensation
[ . . . ]
As these excerpts indicate, a tightly controlled Socratic style of turn-taking
is by no means the only form of discourse found in the classrooms of this study.
In Transcript 5.1, we hear a professor apologizing to a student for interrupting
him; in Transcript 5.2 the professor invites the class as a whole to chime in mid-
way through a lengthy monologue about the purpose of contract damages. Even
in more Socratic classrooms, it is not uncommon for
the professor to break into
this kind of mini-lecture, taking off from a particular point to explain an issue at
some length to the class. There was a wide range of variation among the eight
classes in the degree to which professors used lecture, focused Socratic dialogue,
and more diffuse styles of discursive interaction with the class. In this section we
explore these differences in terms of an underlying similarity: despite stylistic
differences, we can find across all of these classrooms the same fundamental
approach to text, reading, and authority that is so clearly
delineated in Socratic
teaching. In Chapter 7, we will focus more on dissimilarity, exploring these di-
vergent teaching styles in terms of the differing patterns of student engagement
and participation that appear across the classrooms of the study. But here we focus
on a shared message to students found across all of these otherwise differing
classes.
86
Similarity
Saving a more detailed description of the variations in teacher style for Chap-
ter 7, here it will suffice to note that three different, broadly defined styles of teaching
are discernible in the classes of this study. First, one professor (Class #7)
used largely
lecture. He spoke 95% of the time and spent 91% of the time in monologue, or
lecture. This is in marked contrast with all of the other professors of the study, who
spent more time in dialogue with the students and far less time lecturing. This was
the class in which the professor exercised the most control over the classroom talk.
Next in line along the spectrum of professorial control were the classes in which
professors utilized some Socratic dialogue. None of the classes conformed as strictly
to the Socratic style of teaching as did the classroom from the pilot study, analyzed
in Chapter 4. However, a number of teachers used what could be called a modified
form
of Socratic teaching, in which there was a relatively high proportion of dia-
logue focused on one person (focused dialogue). These professors spent between
45% and 60% of class discussion in focused dialogue with individual students. These
classes are also identifiable as Socratic in terms of qualitative features of the pro-
fessor-student exchanges. Finally, we can identify classes in which there was a higher
percentage of shorter professor-student exchanges (nonfocused dialogue), with
professors spending only between 21% and 29% of the time in the more extended
focused dialogue exchanges. In the subsections that follow, we will see how a simi-
lar message about legal readings is imparted despite these differences in teaching
styles.
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