Teaching the Law School Curriculum - Institute for Law Teaching ...

134 Contracts
interests. All of this helps to establish a class rapport, which should help generate a class atmosphere conducive
to learning.]
2. What kinds of teaching techniques have you found to be most effective for your learning style? For example,
do you learn material best by reading, listening to lecture, monitoring visual aids, discussing material with
faculty or peers, or working with material in a writing assignment, problem method, role-playing, or group
activity?
[Entry #2 encourages students to think about the learning process and to share the responsibility for developing
a class pedagogy, particularly when supplemented with a separate sheet that solicits their views on
how a particular class might have been better.]
3. Why did you decide to attend law school? What are your goals for law school and after graduation?
[Entry #3 may prompt me to cover material relevant to student interests and goals, but I include this
question mainly to remind students to keep their hopes, dreams, and goals alive during the exceptionally intense
academic experience of the first year. I often return the questionnaires to students a few weeks before
they graduate so that they can have a nostalgic look back to their first week of law school and perhaps gauge
how their plans and expectations have changed over the course of three years of legal education. Their answers
to the questions in entry #3 are often the ones that inspire the most reflection when revisited at the
end of their journey through law school.]
4. What schedule for faculty office hours would work best for you?
[Entry #4 helps me to hold office hours that are more than perfunctory. This question also conveys to
the students that I really am interested in being accessible to them. Frankly, however, the new generation of
plugged-in students reaches me even more effectively through email contact or through questions or comments
in a discussion forum on our Internet course site.]
Active-Learning Overview in Contracts
Charles Calleros, Arizona State University College of Law
Learning theory tells us that many students benefit from having an overview of a course. The overview provides
an outline into which students can integrate particular topics within the course. A common way of providing
such an overview is in the syllabus. Most syllabuses provide a guide to the terminology in the course and
some idea of the overall structure and hierarchy of ideas in the course. Unfortunately, the words of the syllabus
often do not succeed in conveying to the students the real-life situations underlying the legal rules and the conflicts
in principle that the rules resolve.
One way to convey to students a real sense of the issues involved in a course is to provide a problem that encompasses
many of the issues in the course. Contracts professors (and their students) are especially fortunate in
this regard. First, contracts is a course with relatively few themes, so it is comparatively easy to imagine examples
that cover a broad range of the concerns of the course. Second, contracts is an accessible subject on which students
will often have ideas that are surprisingly accurate as to general issues, although much less accurate at identifying
particular rules. (Because all I’m interested in at this point, in contracts or another subject, is illuminating
issues, these general intuitions are enough.)
To provide a more meaningful overview of course material, I often devote the first few days of a course to an
overview based on problems. The overview increases comprehension and may speed up learning in the long run.
I invite you to draft your own problems, but here’s an example of mine — which you are welcome to use if
you like — to get you started.
On a piece of standard paper, I type up the following: