Best Practices for Legal Education

Michael Hunter Schwartz from Washburn University School of Law has a recent article in the Elon Law Review entitled Improving Legal Education by Improving Casebooks: Fourteen Things Casebooks Can Do to Produce Better and More Learning. The article points to a fundamental problem with casebooks – they are written by scholars, not teachers.  In order to fulfill the ideas of Carnegie, casebooks have to be designed to incorporate best practices so that law professors can model/remodel their classes.  Here is a taste of the article from the abstract:

The distinctive features [of the article] fall into five categories. First, the article describes innovations aimed at increasing the likelihood that we produce practice-ready lawyers. Second, it articulates what casebooks can take from the field of instructional design. Third, it addresses what was, perhaps, the most challenging aspect of the design, creating learning experiences that assist students in synthesizing their existing value systems with the value systems implicitly and explicitly taught in law school. Fourth, the article describes the ways in which series books assist law teachers in being more effective as day-to-day classroom teachers. Finally, it explains what the books in the series do to assist law professors in providing students meaningful opportunities for practice and feedback, and to make it easier for law teachers to conduct multiple and varied summative assessments.

Give the article a read and let us know what you think!

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum |