Legal Commentary

Like most other schools, Arizona State has a number of faculty workshops each semester.  Our workshops follow the traditional pattern:  a speaker will speak for 20 or so minutes, followed by 30 to 45 minutes of questions from the assembled faculty.  The speakers are usually faculty members (either from our own faculty or invited from other law schools) who talk about a current article or book project.  We have occasionally invited non-academics to speak on various topics --- the most successful of these slightly less traditional talks being (in my opinion) when then-Solicitor General Paul Clement spoke to the faculty about recent trends in the Supreme Court docket and decisions.

But yesterday our faculty held a completely different type of workshop --- a workshop on teaching methods.  The member of our faculty who organized it picked a topic --- he chose laptops in the classroom --- and those few of us on the faculty who have elected to ban laptops spoke very briefly about what prompted our decisions.  The rest of the workshop consisted of a casual back and forth on the issue.  The workshop seemed to be a big success, and I expect that we?ll have more of these teaching workshops in the future.

There are several reasons that I liked the teaching workshop.  First, it allowed a wide group of people to talk about student-related issues without having to vote.  Unlike discussions at faculty meetings --- which are usually focused on a particular proposal, which we have to either accept or reject --- the workshop was not designed to determine whether we as a faculty should ban or allow laptops.  Instead, it was simply a time to talk about teaching and share our thoughts and observations.  Second, the format of the workshop --- balanced participation by all, rather than a discussion dominated by one speaker --- indicated that all of us, as teachers, had something of value to say.  Third, while I think that some of us in the academy are able to listen to and participate in similar discussions on blogs, there are a lot of faculty members that don't read blogs.  Finally, for those faculty members who place the most emphasis on their teaching duties (rather than scholarship or service), the teaching workshop gave them a forum in which their enthusiasm and contribution to the school were publicly valued by the entire institution.

As I said, I enjoyed the teaching workshop, and I recommend that all of our faculty readers think about suggesting something similar at their own schools.