Upcoming Conferences
Institute
- Teaching Law for Engaged Learning (ILTL and Center for Engaged Learning in the Law), April 10, 2010
- Teaching Law Practice Across the Curriculum (presentation proposals due 2/19/2010), June 16-18, 2010
Other
- Vulnerable Populations and Economic Realities:: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Law Teaching (Golden Gate University School of Law / Society of American Law Teachers (SALT)), March 19-20, 2010
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Idea For February 2010
Get Real!
While instructional design experts, generational differences gurus, and learning styles authorities may disagree to varying degrees on some matters relating to education, they all agree that students learn better when they get a sense of the real-world, practical implications of the skills and knowledge they are learning. In fact, recent studies show that, when students read cases with such problems in mind, they understand the cases better.
Article For January 2010
Alice M. Thomas, Laying the Foundation for Better Student Learning in the Twenty-First Century: Incorporating an Integrated Theory of Legal Education into Doctrinal Pedagogy, 6 Widener Law Symposium Journal 49 (2000).
Why do you teach the way you teach? In this provocative and extremely useful article, Professor Alice M. Thomas of Howard University School of Law carefully explains a wide variety of learning and teaching theories, calls upon all law professors to develop their own teaching and learning theories, and offers her own theories for our consideration. She argues that, as professionals in our field (education), we should not only be familiar with the literature she so effectively describes but also have developed our own understandings of how our students learn and what constitutes effective teaching. Her article asks a lot of us, but her articulation of existing and her own theories is worth the effort.
[Read fulltext (4.7 MB PDF)]
(Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Widener Law Symposium Journal, © 2000; reprint courtesy HeinOnline.org)
