Algorithms Can Take Flow Charts to Next Step for Complex Situations
by
Source
The Law Teacher, Volume 3, number 2 (Spring 1996), p. 2.
About the Author
Richard G. Fox is an associate dean at the Faculty of Law, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia. Contact him at Faculty of Law, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia 3168, FAX: +61-3-9905 5305, E-mail Richard.Fox@law.monash.edu.
Law teachers who use white boards, overhead projectors, or other visual aids know the value of using diagrams and flow charts as powerful means of conveying relationships between ideas.
Visual aids help students to see the components of a rule and the situations it is intended to cover. One sophisticated visual aid is the algorithm -- a flow chart containing more specific instructions for the application of the rule to fact situations. It serves as a checklist indicating what is required by the rule at each step and what follows if that element is, or is not, satisfied.
Over the years, I have encouraged my students, particularly first-years, to adopt this technique to help them understand new and complex legal rules. I have been willing to accept student research papers in this form where the task I have set for them is to prepare an algorithm analyzing majority and dissenting judgments in some new and important case and to defend their diagram by providing accompanying notes explaining and critically evaluating the major choice points represented in it.
Some years ago, in order to illustrate the merits of algorithms, I started to sketch out the class survival skills required of first-year students and invited members of the class to assist in finishing it. The algorithm on the opposite page is the product of successive generations of student inventiveness and the application of computer-aided design skills in law schools in both Australia and the United States. It is now distributed routinely to my first-year students during discussion of study methods in law. It serves both as an ice-breaker in the first week of classes and as an illustration of the value of diagrams in note-taking and briefing.
Teachers as well as students recognize themselves in the illustration, but it contains a troubling message for the teachers. I have taken both it and my Thoughts on Questioning Students (see The Law Teacher, Fall 1995, at 6-7) to discussion groups on teaching methods for new and experienced teachers in order to invite them to consider why there is such an apparent gap between what we think we are doing in the classroom with our Socratic methods of teaching and how the students view the process as revealed in this algorithm.
