I’ve been thinking a lot of Rebecca Traister’s excellent (and very long) profile in The Cut of US presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and her lengthy career as a teacher, first at an elementary school and then later at Harvard Law School, before being elected as a senator. Among other things, the wide-ranging article talks about Warren’s passion for teaching at a young age (when she lined up her dolls to assign them homework), teaching as a traditionally female occupation, the number of her students who have ended up as progressive politicians, and how her work experience has affected her interactions with voters and donors.
While this piece wrestles with the idea of how Warren’s identity as a teacher could either make or break her candidacy—and Traister makes it feel very possible it could go either way—what interests me, and what makes this pertinent to this blog, is Warren’s teaching methods and how we might use them.
The piece opens with Warren as a student, stumped by an obscure legal term used in the reading assigned for that class. Traister explains that Warren used that same term assumpsit began her law classes by finding students from the class list and asking them for a definition of the term, which “means that the action is in contract rather than in tort.”
This kind of approach of cold-calling students in a lecture hall, described here as the Socratic method, was used by Warren to demand preparation and accountability from students. Traister writes:
With it, she establishes direct communication and affirms that she’s not going to be doing all the talking or all the thinking; she’s going to be hearing from everyone in the room. By starting with a question that so many get wrong but wind up learning the answer to, she’s also telegraphing that not knowing is part of the process of learning.
With the aide of a TA, Warren called on every student, scrupulously going down the attendance list. When I read this section, my mind quickly jumped to course evaluation comments that an instructor might receive about this approach as intimidating or disadvantaging shy students. Here’s Traister quoting a former student to explain Warren’s views on that matter:
By phone, Ondersma remembered how, in a small conference room packed with students, Warren had laid out a case “for how, if you really care about equality in the classroom, if you care about racial justice, gender justice, and you just rely on voluntary discussion in classrooms, you’re only going to hear from the two white guys that love to talk.”
One thing that makes her approach work—Warren has won many teaching awards and is often cited by her students as their best prof ever—is how the now-Senator uses class discussion to deepen discussion. This requires not only good listening but thinking on your feet. Here’s Traister:
It sounds impossible, Shugerman said, to call on more than two dozen people during a class. “Calling on more than 50 people sounds absurd, and like the questions and answers must have been superficial,” he said. “But she was so responsive and such a good listener that she could build on the last person’s answer with someone else afterward so it would build up to more complicated and sophisticated points that would go deeper.
Another thing that I noticed about Warren’s approach that is different from my own is her strictness about rules. I’ve found myself becoming squishier in the past few years about submission dates and absences, which has occasionally been commented upon in students’ evaluation of my course. Here’s Traister on why Warren is such a stickler:
One of Warren’s former students who declined to be named had a theory about the seeming paradox of a woman known as a bold political progressive adhering to an old-fashioned, rule-bound approach to teaching. It reminded him, he said, of Thurgood Marshall, who was known for being punctilious about civil procedure even as he broke revolutionary ground on civil rights. This student talked about how Marshall understood that rules could be used to enforce equality, and that as soon as you introduced flexibility and discretion, those with more power would take advantage of the wiggle room.
Equality and accessibility were important to Warren as a teacher. Warren, who was the only Harvard Law prof to come from a public law school, sat on the admissions committee and tried to find students who were emerging from less privileged places. She was also keen to balance the playing field in her classroom. Here’s Traister again:
Troy Schuler, a tutor now working on an education start-up, took Warren’s contracts class the last semester she taught it, in 2011. He remembered another way she obsessed about equal access: In the run-up to exams, when people came to her office with questions, “she made everyone write up those questions and send them to her, then she wrote up her answers and sent them back out to the entire class. Because if one person has a question, it probably means that a lot of people had the same question, and it was very important to her that people were not going to have any structural advantage because they were the kind of person who knew to come to talk to a professor in office hours.”
Would the Socratic method work in an undergraduate Creative Writing class (versus a room full of aspiring lawyers)? I’m not entirely convinced, or perhaps too scared to find out. But I entirely share Warren’s feeling of being a university teacher: in classrooms full of students with great privilege and intelligence, she would find a way to say, “Come on, get better at what you’ve got and widen it out, because the only mistake you can make is not to get out there and do something with passion.”
You can read the entire piece here:
https://www.thecut.com/2019/08/elizabeth-warren-teacher-presidential-candidate.html
FURTHER READING:
“Cold calling” is a technique recommended by Doug Lemov in the classroom management book Teach Like a Champion. For more on cold calling, check out this link: https://teachlikeachampion.com/blog/cold-call-inclusive/