At its core, my teaching methodology is developed to actively involve students in philosophical thinking. This is evident in both classroom instruction and assignments.

Classroom Instruction

Socratic discussion to develop thought

Perhaps the defining feature of my methodology is use of the Socratic method. By Socratic method, I understand teaching by asking critical and carefully chosen questions. A typical class discussion begins with me asking students why something is important; what a term or idea means to them. Sometimes this involves in-class quizzes to help them reason through what they think of some complex topic—for example, a quiz to provoke them to think critically about what health and disease are, a quiz to provoke thinking about what it means to say something caused something else, or a quiz to think critically about what race is (see Classroom Assignments). Other times, we may ask a big question as a class: for example, “What is law?” I spend an hour and a quarter trying to solve this problem with them on the first day of Philosophy of Law. Since this is the animating question of the class, the purpose of asking the question is to give them a more realistic understanding of the extent to which they already know the answer. Socratic discussion sometimes demonstrates that we know more about something than we might have guessed, but it also often shows that we know less about it than we thought and that subsequent investigation is warranted.

Cases and stories to ground thinking

A major part of any practical or applied ethics course is the use of cases and stories. Typically, I use very short thought experiments (using cases) in class to quickly illustrate surprising truths or insights. More substantially, we look in detail at particular historic cases—such as the development of vaccines at Willowbrook School for disabled children, or the design of HIV trials in sub-Saharan Africa—to explore methods of inquiry about complex and often controversial real life cases. These cases give us a venue from which to practice applying concepts and theories from class, and also to gain appreciation for the importance of facts in moral evaluation and the complexity of real-life moral problems. 

Modeling respect and careful listening

Perhaps the most important part of successful interaction in philosophy is respect for others and careful listening to positions and ideas. I try to model these skills by frequently eliciting student feedback and by putting student thoughts into my own words. This gives students a chance to reformulate imprecise, vague, or ambiguous contributions, and so to practice philosophical reasoning. Frequently, I ask the rest of the class to help individual students out when individual students have difficulty communicating their ideas. This also incentivizes students to listen carefully to each other. 

Immediate testing of new concepts and ideas

Students often think that they have “learned” a concept because it made sense to them when they wrote it down. They often don’t “understand” the concept in a way that would allow them to apply it to novel cases, however. In order to solidify student understanding I usually give examples to illustrate major concepts, and then ask students to apply the concept or definition to several novel examples. They write down their answers quietly in their notes, and then we go over the answers with the class. This gives students a low-stakes way of assessing their own comprehension, and also some familiarity with applications that sometimes re-appear on tests. 

Analysis and distillation of complex arguments

Philosophical essays are often complex pieces of writing, with major claims, supporting evidence and arguments, analysis of premises, consideration of objections, use of examples to clarify or motivate major points, etc. When I ask students to struggle through these assignments carefully on their own, I usually follow it up in class by distilling major arguments for them into small parts. I may give them these points in a handout, designed with space for their comments and notes, such as when we try to summarize Locke’s argument for private property or Devlin’s argument for the enforcement of morality.

Class preparation and simple lesson structure

A good lesson in philosophy is ideally well prepared and very simply structured. I typically provide students with a prospective outline at the beginning of class, with three or so major points, and then stick to this outline. I usually develop the class by following a Harvard outline system (I, A, 1, a., etc) on the blackboard.

Assignments

Accountability in learning

Philosophy, like other humanities, is ultimately oriented towards asking very large questions and promoting certain habits of critical and creative thought. But philosophy also contains much basic content that is important to master on the way to reaching the ultimate ends of the discipline. I accomplish this by holding students accountable (in quizzes or tests) for learning carefully selected definitions and theories—sometimes even requiring memorization, or at least very close reproduction of original wordings—so that when students engage in higher levels of philosophical thought they can do this responsibly and productively.

Scaffolding assignments

Many students need to work not only on philosophical skills but also some of the more basic skills on which philosophy builds. Careful scaffolding of assignments helps introduce students to important content and skills throughout the course of the semester and can result in projects or essays that are far beyond what students could have accomplished when entering the course. For an example, please see the Case Analysis Project.

Practical steps for success in assignments

Because students often lack experience in academic skills, like finding relevant research or creating an annotated bibliography, I supply them with very practical classroom instruction. For example, when they do research for term projects, we often open up a library database in class on the overhead projector and then do a sample literature search, talking about which articles are a good fit for our research question. Students are also supplied with detailed instructions that explain, step-by-step, how to succeed in these projects.

Disincentivizing use of generative artificial intelligence

As a result of recent developments in artificial intelligence, students increasingly face the temptation to use generative AI as a way of circumventing assignments designed to help them to learn philosophical skills like critical thinking and analysis. As a first step towards mitigating this problem I use class time to discuss the relationship between AI and academic integrity. Students are required to read my academic integrity policy (and the discussion of AI) and take a brief quiz on this. 

However, I am also in the process of redesigning my courses in ways that disincentivize the use of AI. Scaffolded assignments are already more AI-resistant than others, but they can be made more AI resistant by requiring some significant steps of the scaffolded assignment to be completed in class. I am currently testing one such method (see my explanation of the Argument Paper assignment for Philosophy of Law) and I hope to roll this out to other courses in future semester.