Lawson, G --- "Making Workshops Work" [2005] LegEdDig 47; (2005) 14(1) Legal Education Digest 20

Making Workshops Work

G Lawson

[2005] LegEdDig 47; (2005) 14(1) Legal Education Digest 20

54 J Legal Educ 2, 2004, pp 303–312

The internal faculty workshop is a staple of the modern law school environment. It serves both social and intellectual functions within the faculty community. Socially, workshops are among the few occasions when large numbers of faculty assemble in the same room to do anything other than argue about appointments or the academic calendar. They are also often the primary — or even the only — way in which faculty learn what their colleagues in different fields are doing. Intellectually, workshops are intended to improve the work product of the presenters and to sharpen or expand the thinking of the audience members.

In practice, however, workshops are often intellectual disappointments. This is not at all surprising. There is a powerful tension between the social and intellectual functions of workshops. The features of workshops that make them useful social events often prevent them from being useful intellectual events, and vice versa. And in workshops as they currently exist, the social function tends to dominate at the expense of the intellectual. The real wonder is that workshops function as well as they do. They are virtually destined to fail as intellectual events.

Because everyone is aware of the constraints facing the audience, workshop presenters traditionally spend a good part of their designated hour, both in their presentations and in their answers to questions, describing their papers rather than exploring potential problems, extensions, or improvements. Furthermore, because of the increasing specialisation and use of interdisciplinary analytical tools in legal scholarship, even those who read the paper carefully may not be able to absorb much of it. So a good portion of the remaining workshop time must often be devoted to providing methodological or substantive background for the lay audience. The participants, as we all know, are not always good judges of their own limitations.

Of course, some participants will have read the paper carefully enough and will have enough expertise to offer useful comments. Even these exchanges, however, are not likely to be of much benefit to the presenter. First, preparation and knowledge on the part of workshop participants are not, by themselves, enough to ensure that comments contribute to the production of the best possible scholarly product. Second, the knowledgeable participants who have the most to contribute to the workshop will probably already have provided comments, or be about to provide comments soon after the workshop, in writing or in one-on-one conversations. If not, they probably should do so, because those other forms are far better vehicles for the transmission of comments than are the unwieldy, unstructured conversations that characterise workshops.

The presentation format of workshops also often contributes to a lack of intellectual success. Workshops are generally structured around that model of thesis defence. To some extent, many of the problems facing workshops are inherent in the enterprise. In a community of highly specialised scholars, there are likely to be very few people who can actually offer useful suggestions on any given paper. Moreover, the sheer size of a faculty-wide workshop makes constructive dialogue difficult.

It is a simple fact that workshops are generally more useful intellectually when they are held at an earlier rather than a later stage of an idea’s development. This means rejecting thesis defence as the primary model for workshops. That model seems appropriate when a presenter already has a well-formed project and is simply looking to spruce it up for publication or submission. The traditional model, however, is badly suited to a would-be presenter who does not yet have a well-formed argument but is trying to structure one. And it is precisely this type of presenter who can benefit most from the collective knowledge of a large faculty group.

Workshop participants also need to know the kind and level of comments that will be most useful to the presenter. A comment may be highly appropriate for a rough draft but useless for a polished product. If the paper appears to be somewhere in between these extremes, participants may have a problem calibrating their comments to the presenter’s needs. The simple answer is for each workshop presenter clearly to identify, in advance, the level of development of his project and the kind of comments that are appropriate. This identification needs to go well beyond the perfunctory references to ‘work in progress’ or ‘in early stage of development’ that one often sees. Accordingly, the author proposes that presenters identify in advance the degree of development of their workshop papers along the following scale: raw, rare, medium rare, medium, and well done. The purpose of identifying the character of the paper, of course, is to instruct audience members about how to tailor their comments.

Setting the proper tone and direction for workshops is important, but it is not enough to make a workshop successful. The format of the workshop also has to serve the goal of producing the best possible product. The standard workshop format does this across a range of cases, but the workshop process needs to be more flexible in order to be an intellectual success. The standard format for a workshop has the presenter speak for about twenty minutes — typically to explain the motivation behind and background for the project and briefly to summarise the argument. Then the process is opened up to questions from the audience, generally on a first-come, first-served basis.

One obvious alternative is to dispense with the initial presentation altogether and go straight to questions. If the paper’s author thinks that an hour of questions will be more useful than twenty minutes of talk and forty minutes of questions, it is hard to imagine why that option should not be available. Another possibility is to split the presentation time between the author and a preselected commenter. There can, of course, be many variations on these formats. The point is to foster a culture in which workshop formats are flexible rather than fixed, so that presenters can operate in the environment that will be most productive.

The preceding discussion assumes that the principal goal of a workshop should be to help produce the best possible scholarly product. Oftentimes, achieving that goal will require that less time be spent communicating to the audience the background and general content of the paper. More attention to the goal of development of a scholarly project can thus mean less attention to the goal of exposing faculty to ideas from fields about which they may hear almost nothing except through workshops.

Workshop presenters, of course, can gain from the perspectives of colleagues in other fields, but audience members might also find that insights from the presenters’ fields can add to, or even inspire, their own projects. Too heavy or narrow a focus on using workshops to improve papers might lessen the opportunities for cross-fertilisation offered by a faculty-wide gathering. The answer is that some workshops should have as their sole function keeping colleagues informed about other disciplines.

In the final analysis, of course, the critical ingredient for good workshops is a good faculty that is committed to the collaborative scholarly enterprise. No tricks with labels and formats can turn a bad intellectual environment into a good one, and a good intellectual environment will make itself felt regardless of the format. But even the best chefs benefit from good utensils.