Return of the Sage (on the Stage)?

Abstract

The Covid Care Crisis had an enormous impact on the legal academy, and specifically on the way that law professors conducted their classrooms. It is unquestionable that the March 2020 nationwide emergency conversion to remote teaching, followed by the commonly experienced year or more of hybrid teaching changed the way faculty structured their law classrooms. These changes led to some rocky teaching seas for many, as faculty adjusted to the need to find new ways to interact with students and ensuring learning, even while physically separated. While many professors have touted the experience as a challenge, one that reenergized their teaching techniques through the incorporation of skills, assessments, and new ways of structuring material, and have vowed to continue these newfound ways of interacting with students, not everyone saw these changes are a move in the right direction, or as having any lasting power. As such, the full time return to the classroom sparks a debate in legal education—whether faculty will embrace a return to the old ways, a continuation of new ones, or creations of entirely new paths forward.

This work focuses specifically on the premise that the pandemic caused the transition of many faculty from being a traditional “sage on the stage” where they were the center of learning, to instead being a skills based “guide on the side” in the law classroom, where they created different kinds of opportunities for student learning because of these new teaching situations in which we all were operating.

Keywords: legal education, pedagogy