Professors Michael Hunter Schwartz, Sophie Sparrow, and Gerry Hess, leaders in legal education, have collaborated to offer a second edition of their book. Applying the research on teaching and learning, this book guides new and experienced law teachers through the process of designing and teaching a course. The book addresses how to plan a course, design a syllabus, plan individual class sessions, engage and motivate students, use a variety of teaching techniques, assess student learning, and how to be a life-long learner as a teacher. New chapters focus on creating lasting learning, experiential learning, and troubleshooting common teaching challenges.
Using 10 ready-made lessons, this book equips school leaders with a professional development curriculum to train teachers in areas of educational law that affect their everyday work.
This pioneering book is the first to identify the methods, strategies, and personal traits of law professors whose students achieve exceptional learning. Modeling good behavior through clear, exacting standards and meticulous preparation, these instructors know that little things also count--starting on time, learning names, responding to emails.
"The abrupt move to online legal education in Spring 2020 accelerated the move to online legal education that has been slowing gathering steam in recent years. As more institutions consider the potential to expand their reach with online courses and programs, law professors must move past "pandemic teaching" and seriously consider how they can create and deliver quality legal education online. Law Teaching Strategies for a New Era: Beyond the Physical Classroom, the first comprehensive book on online legal education, explores techniques, tools, and strategies that can assist all types of law professors in that endeavor. The 34 chapters, authored by law professors from across the country, provide a comprehensive look at expanding legal education beyond the traditional classroom experience. Divided into four sections, the book starts by offering tips for getting started and fostering inclusion in online courses. It then moves to suggestions for course design of blended, synchronous, and asynchronous courses, including a chapter on measuring success through empirical research. Finally, it concludes with two sections on course-specific topics covering the range of legal education-from large first-year courses to seminars to skills-based courses and bar preparation. Both new online educators and seasoned veterans of online education will find tips and strategies to improve their online teaching"--
Designed for law teachers who want to improve their teaching and students' learning, this book offers general teaching principles and dozens of concrete ideas. The first two chapters present foundational principles of learning and instruction as well as insights from students. The next 12 chapters address classroom dynamics, technology, questioning, discussion, collaborative learning, experiential learning, feedback, assessment, and continued development for teachers. Each of these 12 chapters introduces the topic based on educational research and then offers classroom-tested exercises, approaches, material, and methods contributed by veteran teachers. The co-authors/editors, Gerald Hess (Gonzaga), Steven Friedland (Elon), Michael Hunter Schwartz (Washburn), and Sophie Sparrow (New Hampshire) are experts in legal education pedagogy. Techniques for Teaching Law 2 retains the format of the first volume, but introduces new content and new ideas that instructors of any level and background will find useful.
Written by an award-winning professor with over 25 years of experience, this book explains comprehensively the different facets of law teaching from the law teacher’s perspective. It uniquely covers numerous topics which have been ignored by the legal education literature so far, but which are of immense importance for the success of law students, law schools and—last but not least—the day-to-day work of law teachers themselves. These topics include the goals of law teaching, the factors that lead to successful law teaching, special characteristics of good law teachers, different ways of preparing for in-class success, face-to-face versus online teaching, the in-class teaching experience, assessments, teaching evaluations, the design of new courses and programmes, the teacher–student and the teacher–teacher relationship, the importance of teaching administration as well as the future of law teaching in the digital age. The author approaches various themes from the viewpoint of his own experience. He tells his very personal stories of classroom success and failure, of enthusiasm, fun and disappointments when dealing with law students, of accomplishments and frustrations when considering learning outcomes and of surprises when dealing with red tape. He thus allows the readership to grasp different aspects of law teaching in a very hands-own way and facilitates the understanding of the underlying often rather complex human-to-human relationships. This book should be in the bookshelf of any law teacher. As it covers a wide spectrum of so far unexplored legal education issues, it is also an invaluable source at the start of a law teaching career, but also for established law teachers who wish to reflect on their own teaching approaches. A rich body of cross-references to the existing literature makes the book a powerful tool for research on any aspect of legal education. Last but not least, the author’s ironic sense of himself and of the law teacher profession makes the book a very entertaining read for anybody who always wanted to know what law teaching really is (and is not) about.
This book provides concrete suggestions for adjunct professors about how to design and conduct all aspects of teaching law students, based on the enormous body of research on teaching and learning to legal education. New and experienced adjuncts can apply the book's principles from sequencing a course to grading an exam. Updated and revised chapters provide a legal education-focused overview of the research on teaching and learning, students' perspective on law teaching and learning, course design, class design, student motivation, teaching methods, assessment, and professional development as teachers. New chapters focus on experiential learning, lasting learning, and troubleshooting.
This volume provides a resource for teachers interested in learning about the field of law and literature and shows how to bring its insights to bear in their classrooms, both in the liberal arts and in law schools. Essays in the first section, "Theory and History of the Movement," provide a retrospective of the field and look forward to new developments. The second section, "Model Courses," offers readers an array of possibilities for structuring courses that integrate legal issues with the study of literature, from The Canterbury Tales to current prison literature. In "Texts," the third section, guidance is provided for teaching not only written documents (novels, plays, trial reports) but also cultural objects: digital media, Native American ceremonies, documentary theater, hip-hop. The volume's forty-one contributors investigate what constitutes law and literature and how each informs the other.
This collection of essays presents an authoritative and penetrating comment on the use of the computer in teaching law. The authors have taught and developed instructional materials for many years; they are intimately familiar with the substance of the law, as well as with the teaching techniques that have proven successful.
