VI N C E NT B LAS I
OLATU N DE C. JOH N SON
Corliss Lamont Professor of Civil Liberties
Jerome B. Sherman Professor of Law
I am the antithesis of a techie and in fact was terrified at the prospect of having to teach online. I’m finding teaching via Zoom unexpectedly congenial. My class sessions feel more genuinely Socratic than in a large classroom. By that I mean more like the two-person conversations of the original Socratic dialogues as reported by Plato. Despite the lack of physical presence, the interaction is more personal. I find that the analysis tends to be more open-ended and in that respect more probing. Students seem more relaxed in a productive way. They are not afraid to see where their thought leads. That’s true for me as well.
You have to teach differently to be effective remotely. Some of these changes have been very good. I use more problems and hypotheticals than before. I have students prepare the problems before class and discuss them during our session. We spend less time on lecture and Socratic exchange and more time wrestling with the practical and policy challenges of applying doctrine. We have brought issues related to the pandemic into our study of statutory interpretation and administrative law.
KE LLE N R. F U N K
Associate Professor of Law
4 ANNUAL REPORT 2020
The biggest difficulty is the range of situations my students are facing. Not all have quality access to the technology needed for synchronous classes, and, of course, some are very burdened by care needs for family members working in health services or otherwise affected by the spread of the virus. One benefit of moving online is the ability to bring up a common text on all students’ screens and walk through it line by line in a way that’s not always possible in a cavernous lecture hall. The drawback is that it is much more difficult to know whether I need to slow down or speed up my explanations and take questions.
Socratic Zooming On March 11, when the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, Columbia Law School transitioned its entire curriculum—more than 300 courses—into virtual classrooms. Students gathered online, and professors faced down webcams. Four faculty debrief on teaching remotely.
