Teaching Philosophy
The word school comes from the Greek scholē, which meant leisure: time set apart from the work of making a living. The ancient idea of school was a place to think and try things, away from the anxiety of the working world, with its exacting standards and assessed outcomes. The working world will hold you to those standards soon enough. These courses try to give you the older kind of school first, a place to experiment without fear of failing.
Where these ideas come from
My thinking about teaching started when my first child was born. I took a deep interest in different models of teaching and learning, trying to understand how people really learn. The longer I looked, the more out of date the Prussian model behind K–12 schooling seemed to me. In 2015 I was working to start a Sudbury school in Volusia County, Sudbury Beach School, and I wrote a series of essays (opens in a new tab) arguing for it.
Several thinkers shaped what I brought from that work into these courses. Sudbury Valley School (opens in a new tab), founded in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1968, rests on trust: students direct their own learning, and the adults don’t set a curriculum for them. John Holt spent years watching children in classrooms, and his book How Children Fail (1964) traced much of what schools call failure to fear, boredom, and confusion. The Reggio Emilia approach grew up in that Italian city’s preschools after World War II. It gave me the provocation: a question or a material set out to invite exploration, with no single answer waiting at the end. And David Kolb described learning as a cycle. You have an experience, reflect on it, draw a general idea from it, and try that idea out in the next experience.
What that looks like here
Each activity is built around doing something with the law. You interview a simulated client, reconcile a firm’s trust account, or grade a court order an AI drafted. Then you look back at what happened and what it taught you. The readings and Key Concepts are there when you need them, but the doing is the lesson. Because this is a place to experiment, a mistake is part of the work, not a mark against you.
AI changed what a provocation can be. A simulator can play a client, a judge, or opposing counsel and answer back. A chatbot’s legal answer can be put on the table and tested against the statute it claims to follow. I’m not teaching you the machine. AI is going into more and more kinds of work, and it’s worth something only to people who know what it can and can’t do and how it tends to behave. Knowing the law is what lets you judge what it gives you. Answers are easy now, so the value is in the question, and in knowing which problem to solve. And working with AI shows you what only a person can bring. You learn all of that while you learn the law, not in a separate unit. I use AI the same way to build this site, and the About page says exactly how.
Each other
The most important part of these courses is the other students in them. In 2015 I met Daniel Greenberg, one of the founders of Sudbury Valley School, to talk about starting Sudbury Beach School. For him, the special sauce of a Sudbury school was the cross-pollination between ages: students of every age learning from one another.
Lev Vygotsky gave a version of that idea a name decades earlier. His zone of proximal development is the distance between what a learner can do alone and what the same learner can do with help. He counted help from more capable peers, not only from teachers. In LexED2 the cross-pollination happens between learners sharing their work. You post what you did, your classmates read it, and a classmate a step ahead of you on one idea shows you how they got there. Next week you may be the one a step ahead.
That’s why the most important thing to understand about these courses is who your posts are for. They’re for your classmates. I’m not the primary audience. A post written for the professor turns dull and professor-centered, and it tempts you to paste in AI output that seems like what the professor expects to read. Nobody learns much from that post.
I require two things: post on time, and post what the activity asks for. Everything else is yours: your voice, how you style the post, your insights, and the asides you work in along the way. So is your own reinterpretation of the activity, when it fits where your learning is going. That’s what I expect from you, and it’s what makes a course worth coming back to after the activity is done. How activities work has the details.
Write the post you’d want to read.