Adapting Your Organizing Style to Your School

Even the most organized person is going to face challenges once in a while adapting to the organizing demands of a particular situation.  School environments really test all of us.  There are many different ways of teaching the same subject matter, different teacher personalities, different textbooks and learning materials, and varying levels of difficulty within each subject area.

My experience in graduate school illustrates how one person can be very organized in one school context and struggle to stay afloat in another.  I pursued both an MBA and a law degree.  Each school had radically different approaches to teaching.

Straightforward Business

In the MBA program, the courses and materials were oriented toward working professionals.  The goal was to teach the concepts in a relatively straightforward way and then challenge students to apply those concepts to new situations likely to be encountered in the business world.  Textbooks were well-organized with each chapter providing a brief introductory overview, sections and examples illustrating each of the main points, highlighted vocabulary words and an end-of-chapter review.  Most professors taught according to the book’s structure, moving in order from chapter 1 to chapter 2, etc. and provided a detailed syllabus with reading assignments and due dates.  Occasionally, a chapter was skipped here and there or a supplemental reading packet was required but generally it was easy to anticipate what was coming next.

The biggest organizational challenge in the MBA program was in coordinating the numerous group projects required.  There was rarely any assignment that was not done in group format or that did nor require a group class presentation.  While an independent worker might find this frustrating, this group structure had a purpose.  It was a great way to practice leadership skills, resolve conflicts and understand different points of view.

Studying in the MBA program was relatively straightforward and similar to what I had done in college and even high school.  There was some memorization, some application of mathematical concepts and some creative thinking.

Hidden Law

In the law program, the Socratic method was used.  Ideally, with this method, the professor uses the class discussion to help students make leaps of knowledge, assuming everyone has already read and understands the material.  In practice, this is hard to achieve.

First, every law textbook I ever encountered was strangely organized, making it difficult to teach yourself the material.  There were always chapter headings but no introductory or closing summaries of law.  Each chapter contained various important cases, illustrating some concept or rare application of law.  After each case were a series of complicated questions illustrating a unique way to apply legal concepts that could only be answered with hours of additional research.  There were no answer keys, no bullet points, no highlighting of key terms.  Each professor had a unique spin on the law and almost never provided a straightforward lecture telling you exactly which points were important to study or whether your understanding of the material was correct.  It was always puzzling to me why professors felt that the study of law was not hard enough as it is and that the textbooks and lectures needed to hide the main points as obscurely as possible.

Second, the professors made it difficult to stay current with the immense reading assignments.  Some professors never provided a syllabus.  Even if they did provide a syllabus, only a few professors would list all the reading assignments on the syllabus, the rest would parcel out reading assignments at each class.  Most professors never went in textbook order.  One day you would start at page 33, the next day you were reading a supplemental class handout, then skipping to page 152 or back to page 12.

It seemed to me that the only reason the readings weren’t listed in the syllabus was because it was one more incentive to get students to attend class.  Believe it or not, some of the best law students my first year almost never attended class!  They read the textbook on their own (or a Cliff’s notes case summary version) and memorized various study guides instead.

Studying in the law program was a challenge.  I found that there was so much information to digest that most of my time was spent summarizing and re-summarizing material.  As an example, first you might read a very long case and write a 1-2 page summary about it.  After you had done this for 50 or 100 cases in a class, you realize that even your summary has too much information and that you need to remember that case only for one or two key concepts.  So you make a summary of the case summaries.  Then, you need to create a course outline highlighting the key concepts of law, drawing from class lectures, the textbook and supplemental study materials.  The outline often was 20 or 30 single spaced pages!  When you prepped for a test, there was no way to remember 20 or 30 pages so you had to take each concept in the outline and boil it down to about 5 points you could remember in case that concept came up on an exam. Multiply this effort times 4 classes at a time and you can see why most law students are a stressed out bunch.

Lessons Learned

These contrasting experiences taught me a lot about the learning process.  The MBA program was focused on teaching for clarity.  The refrain students heard most often was, “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.”  This was the golden rule for presentations and papers.  Essentially, you were presenting the same material 3 times in different formats.  When it is critical that your message be understood, simplicity, repetition and clarity are the guidelines.

Teaching Strategies that Promote Comprehension

1. Textbook Organization. Choose a clearly written textbook with table of contents, index and end of chapter summary reviews.  Follow the textbook order or create your own custom reading packet that is read in page order so there is no guessing what comes next and students can work at their own pace.  Make the textbook and syllabus available as soon as possible, ideally as soon as the prior semester is over and students are registering for class.
2. Lecture Organization. Provide a lecture outline or slides that students can follow as they listen.  Reserve note-taking for fill-in-the blank items, questions or class discussion items.
3. Test Organization. Provide a review or study sheet of concepts to be covered on the exam.  Work through example problems/cases.

Some subjects, particularly those in the liberal arts, don’t lend themselves easily to organizational frameworks.  However, most people cannot make sense of a jumble of information without at least some structure.  If your instructor does not provide the structure for you and you can’t figure it out yourself, seek help from classmates or a tutor.  Look for clues from the instructor’s presentation style.  Does the instructor primarily compare and contrast different ideas?  Is the instructor more focused on the logical or historical progression of ideas?  When your instructor refers back to something you have already learned, what key points is the instructor focusing on? Those are the points to highlight and study.

Strategies to Cope with Unclear Instruction

1. Read ahead in classes where the assignments are given in advance so you will have time to adapt to classes where the assignments are unknown or vary from week to week.
2. Try not to get behind.  Create a running outline summarizing course information that you update after each class.
3. Highlight any information that the instructor repeats in subsequent classes or summarizes.  These are often important topics that appear on the exams.
4. Form a study or test review group and ask questions of the instructor.
5. Try not to get too stressed out. If everyone is struggling with the class, most often grades are curved upward in the end.

What lessons have you learned as a student or teacher?  Which courses were easiest or most difficult for you?  What study methods did you rely on?  Please share in the comments.