By Michael Hunter Schwartz from Washburn University School of Law
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, 6Widener Law Symposium Journal 49 (2000) [Read fulltext (4.7 MB PDF)] (Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Widener Law Symposium Journal, © 2000; reprint courtesy HeinOnline.org)
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.